TIFF’s Summer In Italy offers a cinematic look at La Dolce Vita

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The Edwardian tradition of well-heeled foreigners doing the Grand Tour of Europe was revived, glamorized and popularized after the Second World War not by sun-dappled novels such as A Room with a View but by Hollywood movies such as Roman Holiday and To Catch a Thief.

Okay, fine, you like your version of Rome and the Italian Riviera to be the stuff of romantic tourist claptrap. But there is no better trip than the one when the guidebook is put aside and locals are the guide – not the most picturesque postcards, but better and authentic stories, to be sure.

Over the summer, the TIFF Bell Lightbox presents Summer in Italy, a cinematic grand tour of the real Italy with more than two dozen postwar films (many in new restorations). Each is a trip into the social, moral and economic preoccupations of the country and its various regions – a few, such as the series opener, were originally planned as documentaries but evolved into fiction films.

The first stop can be no other than the Eternal City in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), the masterpiece that heralded Italian neorealism. Set in the twilight of Nazi-occupied Rome, it stars Anna Magnani in a tour de force performance among a career of them. On a far lighter note, she more gleefully chomps the scenery for Mario Monicelli in The Passionate Thief (1960), a romp set during the Roman holidays that includes the great institution that reinvents itself from the dust of Mussolini's propaganda: the Cinecitta film studio.

Travel is the true test of any romantic pairing and moving down the boot there's Rossellini's naturalistic study of a disintegrating relationship, Voyage in Italy (1953), which follows an irritable British couple who arrive in Naples to discover that theirs is an unhappy marriage. The self-centred husband (George Sanders, all charm drained out of his usual drollery when he is out of his posh drawing-room element and in the cold light of a warm Italian day) and his dissatisfied wife (Ingrid Bergman) have only sarcasm and criticism left for one another, and their trip descends into jealousy and recriminations as they split up to explore the local attractions. Rossellini chose each tourist stop with care for its subtle meaning – at the ruins of Pompeii, the pair watch as archeologists dig up the bodies of a man and a woman, preserved in time, fossilized in the ash together.

In the more remote Etruscan countryside, a Greek tragedy of secrets and lies plays out among the aristocrats at their palazzo in Sandra (1965). In Luchino Visconti's retelling of Electra, the family's prodigal daughter returns to Volterra for her father's memorial service. The family is of dubious morality as is the small town in Sicily where the hypocrisy, gossip and machismo of honour and family play out in Seduced and Abandoned (1964), with twin themes about the postwar decay of morals and Italian aristocracy. It's a romantic comedy – and by comedy, I mean the same way that Italian game shows are – a comedy of shame, approaching cruel black farce.

The Fiances (1963) is among the most memorably moving and gorgeous of films in the TIFF series, moving from a working-class dance hall in the north to a Sicilian industrial site while jazz plays on tinny car stereos and the cascade of welding sparks dissolves into the fireworks of a local costume festival. A Milanese welder has been seconded to this southern countryside to help build a factory. As with Voyage in Italy, he and his fiancée are no longer young and now indifferent to one another. But the extreme poverty and the grasping greed that a new prosperity offers the region affect him. The juxtapositions of flashbacks and reveries offer visual commentary on the tension between traditional rural living and the emerging industrialized Italy. The combination of scenery and soundscape – of salt flats, sirens, a rutting and tattered windmill – make it a melancholy must-see.

Those unnamed factories have been in production for years by the time we reach the Fiat factory floor, with its elaborate conveyor belts, of Alberto Lattuada's seldom-screened Mafioso (1962), about a man from Sicily trying to have a legit life in Milan but with one last favour to do. That city contains more sordid stories, such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, recast in the upscale north for Michaelangelo Antonioni's elegant feature debut Story of a Love Affair (1950), which, like Mafioso, contains several shades of noir.

In Dino Risi's modern road movie Il Sorpasso (1962), meanwhile, suave Bruno and timid Roberto are new-found pals who tear north up the countryside from Rome to the beach in the film's third character, a Lancia Aurelia convertible (like Italy, it has seen better days), filmed on location on the road – no reverse or green screens. It's almost like being there.