Journey to Italy

Journey to Italy, also known as Voyage to Italy, is a 1954 drama film directed by Roberto Rossellini. Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders play Katherine and Alex Joyce, a childless English married couple on a trip to Italy whose marriage is on the point of collapse until they are miraculously reconciled. The film was written by Rossellini and Vitaliano Brancati, but is loosely based on the 1934 novel Duo by Colette. Although the film was an Italian production, its dialogue was in English. The first theatrical release was in Italy under the title Viaggio in Italia; the dialogue had been dubbed into Italian. Journey to Italy is considered by many to be Rossellini's masterpiece, as well as a seminal work of modernist cinema due to its loose storytelling. In 2012, it was listed by Sight & Sound magazine as one of the fifty greatest films ever made. Plot Alex and Katherine Joyce (Sanders and Bergman) are a couple from England who have traveled by car to Italy to sell a villa near Naples that they have recently inherited from "Uncle Homer". The trip is intended as a vacation for Alex, who is a workaholic businessman given to brusqueness and sarcasm. Katherine is more sensitive, and the journey has evoked poignant memories of a poet friend, Charles Lewington, now deceased. Much of the film's running time is uneventful. The opening scene shows Katherine and Alex Joyce simply conversing as they drive through the Italian countryside. The only incident is momentary, when they stop for a herd of cattle crossing the road. Shortly afterward, they arrive in Naples. The film follows them as they are given a lengthy room-by-room tour of Uncle Homer's villa by its caretakers, Tony and Natalia Burton. He is a former British soldier, she is the Italian wife he married after the war.