Neorealism was a sweeping and complex cultural movement, which burgeoned immediately in the post-war period, characterized by a shared underlying anti-fascist sentiment, aimed at depicting the moral and economic situation of post-war civil society from a civil ethical perspective. The broad spectrum of living conditions and mood of the country's population, poverty, the abuses of war, despair, work, hope, redemption, were at the center of the neo-realist poetics, whose epic was expressed in a variety of artistic languages ​​whose common minimum denominator was the choice of art forms of immediate narrative communication designed to convey contemporary topical contents: ranging from photography by Nino Migliori, Mario Giacomelli, Paolo Monti and Enrico Pasquali, to films by Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Cesare Zavattini, to literature by Carlo Levi, Salvatore Quasimodo, Cesare Pavese and Pier Paolo Pasolini, to painting by Renato Guttuso, Bruno Cassinari, Ernesto Treccani, Armando Pizzinato and Aldo Borgonzoni.

After half a century, telling the stories of the Bologna Travelling Theatre Group (Gruppo Teatrale Viaggiante), theatrical expression of neo-realism that gave voice to the ideas and reality of the proletariat of the time, the director Vincenzo Fattorusso chose a few paintings byBorgonzoni (watch an excerpt of the film).