Il passato come melodramma. «Il processo di Verona» tra cinema e storia

[Autom. eng. transl.] Between 1960 and 1962, Carlo Lizzani made films that can be read, within the filmography of the Roman director, as a real narrative lone specifically focused on the last years of fascism in Italy. These are Il gobbo (1960), L'oro di Roma (1961) and The Verona Process (1962). If the first two films remain pervaded by a basic Marxist rhetoric, which tends to interpret the historical events told on the screen through the all-encompassing lens of history as a class struggle, it is necessary to note how, especially from L'oro di Roma onwards , he began to assert himself in his! lm a widely fictionalized representation of history, of direct Hollywood inspiration, which drives Lizzani away from a large part of the Marxist criticism that until then had accompanied and supported him in his neorealist "orthodoxy". If much has been said about the first two films, The Verona Process, despite being less scoured by literature, is certainly a more functional work to reconstruct the imagery of Nazi and Salo Verona in those years. In addition to treating the last days of Galeazzo Ciano's life, from the vote in favor of the no-confidence agenda to Mussolini by Dino Grandi on the occasion of the Great Council of Fascism of 25 July 1943! No to his arrest, imprisonment and trial held in Verona that definitively condemned him to being shot, this seems to be the first lm to tell the story of the regime from the point of view of the fascists and of the management of order and power in the newly formed Republic of Salò.