Italian writer Italo Calvino says about the Post-war literary movement of Italian Neorealism: "The literary explosion of those years was, in Italy, a physiological, existential, collective fact. [...] Our coming out from an experience - the war, the civil war - which did not save anybody, established an immediate communication between  writers and their public: we stood face to face, equal, loaded with stories to be told, each one had their own, each one had lived irregular, dramatic, adventurous lives, we were finishing each other sentences[...], we were moving in a multicolored universe of stories." After 22 years of silence under a dictatorship, a world war and a civil war, Neorealism was that universe of stories told in a new way, both in cinema and literature. We will explore that season of ruptures and continuities in literary Neorealism - with readings from Calvino, Pavese, and Fenoglio - and in the great Neorealist Italian cinema with films by Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti,  De Sanctis, and Antonioni. The course will be taught in English.