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The film’s frame, its formal opening and ending, is made up of the ti-tle sequence with the opening credits and the final shot and cast cred-its. Film credits are like the printed front and end matter in books, and these two sequences are, respectively, the film’s title page and

end page, or its front and back cover. Both of them show panora-mas of the city’s skyline. In the Italian release print (of which two copies were restored from the original negative in 1995 and are held at the Cineteca Nazionale), after the names of the leading players and the production company, the opening title – “ROMA” in black letters with “CITT ´A APERTA” over it in white – is superimposed on a leftward pan looking out from Viale Trinit`a dei Monti, above Piazza di Spagna, west over the city center to the opposite side of the Tiber (see Fig. 13). This is followed by the writer’s and director’s credits and the conventional disclaimer that any correspondence to real people or events is coincidental even though the characters and actions de-picted in the film are inspired by “the tragic and heroic events of the nine months of Nazi occupation.” Action music is played over the ti-tles, evocative of that used in contemporary newsreels and war films, which sets the tone for the first sequence, when the Germans come looking for Manfredi, as well as later action scenes. The closing shot, at the end of which the caption “FINE” is superimposed, is almost a reverse of the first in terms of the city’s topography. It is a rightward pan from the opposite side of the river, filmed from Monte Mario, showing the boys walking down the Via Trionfale against distant buildings (see Fig. 12). It is accompanied by the lugubrious musical theme from earlier in the film that has struck up at the moment of Don Pietro’s death and continues until the final fade to black. The presence in both the opening and closing shots of the dome of St.

Peter’s allows the viewer to match the two shots as near reversals of one another.

If these two shots serve, like the first and last pages of a book, to contain the story that unfolds within them, they are also containers in a visual sense. As extreme long shots they are a pair of macroscopic views of the city and they conceal the more microscopic views that the rest of the film reveals. As the story unfolds, the spectator is taken in closer and shown particular districts, streets, interiors of houses, stairwells, rooms, cellars, pieces of furniture, clothes, and individual faces. The Rome shown in the film is a city of dwellings, not of monuments. Apart from those opening and closing shots, the only tourist site shown in the film is Piazza di Spagna, with the steps of Trinit`a dei Monti (known in English as the Spanish Steps). This appears in the first two shots after the opening credits, where it is

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SPACE, RHETORIC, AND THE DIVIDED CITY IN ROMA CITT `A APERTA 111

13. Title card, ‘‘Roma citt`a aperta,” over skyline. (Frame enlargement, Cine-teca Nazionale, Rome)

at once functional in determining the time and place of the action and rhetorically effective in showing the German invaders in the heart of the city, and again in the two photographs of Manfredi with Marina, seen respectively in Bergmann’s office and Marina’s dressing room.

There are no ancient monuments: no Coliseum (shown in the Rome episode of Rossellini’s next film, Pais`a, made and released in 1946, with American soldiers), no Forum, Arch of Constantine, Col-umn of Trajan, Baths of Caracalla. Nor does one see any of the land-marks of Fascist Rome, apart, significantly, from the E42 district in the background during the partisan attack on the convoy of trucks.⁵ The top of the Victor Emmanuel II monument, that grotesque sym-bol of modern Italian nationhood (designed by Giuseppe Sacconi in the 1880s, though finally inaugurated only in 1911) is visible in the opening panorama, but in the film there are no shots of it or Palazzo Venezia, from whose balcony Mussolini addressed the crowds; no Via dell’Impero, the vast boulevard (renamed Via dei Fori Imperiali

after the war) that he ordered to be built from Piazza Venezia to the Coliseum, burying large parts of a major archaeological site; no Foro Mussolini, the sports stadium (later renamed Foro Olimpico) in the Flaminio district to the north. By leaving out both the tourist spots and the symbols of Fascist power, the film in effect reappropri-ates Rome for its ordinary citizens and erases the traces of the Fas-cist regime, freezing the city during the occupation and Resistance at some time in the early months of 1944. In this way, what is se-lectively erased or absent from the geography of the film is just as important to its overall expression and to its rhetorical treatment of its subject as what is shown.