Film

Journey to Italy

Name: Journey to Italy
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 1954
Cast: Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders, Maria Mauban, Anna Proclemer, Paul Müller

Katherine and Alex Joyce drive to Naples to sell an inherited villa and discover, alone together for the first time in years, that they are strangers. Rossellini shoots the crumbling city and the dead lovers of Pompeii as mirrors for a marriage nobody is actively saving. Nothing much happens, deliberately — this is for patient viewers who want cinema that watches people think, not act.

TMDb rating

7.2

If you liked this

Scenes from a Marriage2021

Bergman's other Bergman spends five hours doing exactly what Rossellini does in eighty-five minutes: watching two people talk their marriage into pieces, in unbearable close-up.

But It's long, talky, and Swedish-miserable — no scenery, no relief, just two faces arguing across decades.

Certified Copy2010

Kiarostami sends Juliette Binoche wandering Tuscany with a stranger who may or may not be her husband, and the ambiguity does exactly what Rossellini's ruins do to Katherine and Alex.

But The central puzzle never resolves, and some viewers will find the game cleverer than it is moving.

Before Midnight2013no page yet

Jesse and Celine, nine years married, walk and fight their way across a Greek holiday in real time — the warmest, cruellest marriage film of its decade.

But You need the first two Before films to feel the full weight of what's cracking here.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Trip to Italy2014

Winterbottom built the whole itinerary as a deliberate homage, literally following Katherine and Alex's journey and discussing this film on camera — same geography, same ruins, opposite register.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon retrace this exact route past Pompeii and up the coast, quoting Rossellini and Bergman between extraordinary meals — a comic mirror held up to this precise film.

But It's a loose, improvised comedy about lunch and impressions, not a drama — the marriage material is background noise to the jokes.

L'Avventura1960

Antonioni sends bored Italians drifting among ruins and empty islands, alienation rendered as landscape — the same trick Rossellini plays with Pompeii and Naples.

But Even slower than Journey to Italy, and the plot, such as it is, simply stops.

Marriage Story2019

The contemporary answer: a marriage ending in lawyers' offices and shared custody, played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson at their most devastating.

But Loud, litigious, and American where Rossellini stays hushed — a very different temperature of heartbreak.

45 Years2015

Charlotte Rampling's face, over one week, as a decades-long marriage is quietly undone by a letter from the past — devastating minimalism.

But Almost nothing happens on screen; the entire film lives in one woman's expression.

A Bigger Splash2015no page yet

Swap Naples for a Sicilian island and watch old lovers reopen a marriage's fault lines under the same merciless southern sun.

But Glossier and more melodramatic than Rossellini ever gets — this one wants to be a thriller too.

The Souvenir2019

Joanna Hogg's autobiographical study of a young woman losing herself inside a bad relationship, told with the same watchful, unglamorous patience.

But Deliberately opaque and emotionally withholding — it asks you to read silences, not dialogue.

Roman Holiday1953

The other Italy of the era: sunlit, funny, and in love, with Audrey Hepburn discovering Rome the way Katherine never lets herself discover Naples.

But It's pure escapist romance — the tonal opposite of everything Rossellini is doing here.

Force Majeure2014

Östlund uses a holiday and a landscape — snow instead of ruins — to strip a marriage down to what it actually is once the performance stops, running the same experiment as psychological thriller instead of tragedy.

A family holiday in the French Alps turns into a forensic examination of a marriage after one moment of cowardice — the same clinical patience as Rossellini, dialed into something closer to comic horror.

But It's colder and crueller, with a streak of dark humour Rossellini never allows himself.

Brief Encounter1945

Both films are about marriages tested not by melodrama but by sudden, unbearable self-knowledge — Lean simply got there nine years earlier, in black-and-white English rain instead of Neapolitan light.

A decade earlier, David Lean found the same ache in a station tearoom instead of a Roman villa — two people discovering desire and its cost through English restraint rather than Italian sun.

But Stiff-upper-lip 1940s Britain plays very differently to Rossellini's loose, modern camera — some will find it stagey.