Miracle in Milan

Miracle in Milan (1951)

Miracolo a Milano

An impudent, riotous laugh on the lives and morals of our day!

Once upon a time a wise and kind old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Totò, enters an orphanage. Totò leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He ends up with the homeless and organizes them to build a shanty town in a vacant lot. But when greedy developers threaten the community’s land, Totò will need all the help he can get in order to find an impossible way out.

Date of release
1951-02-08
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (276)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Comedy, Fantasy, Drama
Director
Vittorio De Sica

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Milan

Miracle in Milan is a 1951 Italian fantasy comedy film directed by Vittorio De Sica. The screenplay was co-written by Cesare Zavattini and De Sica, based on Zavattini's 1943 novel Totò il Buono. Told as a neo-realist fable, the film depicts the lives of a poverty-stricken group in post-WWII Milan, Italy, led by Totò, a kind and cheerful orphan. The film stars Francesco Golisano as Totò, alongside an ensemble cast that includes Emma Gramatica, Paolo Stoppa, Guglielmo Barnabò, and Brunella Bovo.

Production

De Sica wrote that he made the film in order to show how the "common man" can exist, given the realities of life: "It is true that my people have already attained happiness after their own fashion; precisely because they are destitute, these people still feel – as the majority of ordinary men perhaps no longer do – the living warmth of a ray of winter sunshine, the simple poetry of the wind.

The film's principal location was a wasteland near Milan's Lambrate railway station. The Milan Cathedral serves as the location of the finale, and can be viewed as symbolic of the miracle to which the film's title refers.

American special effects specialist Ned Mann was hired to work on the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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