Novelist Cesare Pavese once said that the greatest Italian storyteller of his time was not a writer but a filmmaker: Vittorio De Sica. To this day, the mention of De Sica transports us back to the streets of Italy after the Second World War, to characters struggling to make sense of the bleak postwar reality.

De Sica is considered to be one of the major figures in Italian neorealism, a trend of the immediate postwar era which sought to scrub off the sheen and sparkle synonymous with the Hollywood style of filmmaking, and make contact with people on the ground.

Want to find out more? Here's Pasquale Iannone's look at where to begin with Vittorio De Sica.