Tribute to Naples, where director De Sica spent his first years, this is a collection of six Napolitean episodes: a clown exploited by a gangster; an inconstant pizza seller (Sofia) losing her husband’s ring; the funeral of a dead child; the gambler Count Prospero B. defeated by a kid; the unexpected and unusual wedding of Teresa, a prostitute; the “professor” Ersilio Micci, a “wisdom seller”.

Rod Steiger is ferocious as a scheming land developer in Francesco Rosi’s Hands over the City, a blistering work of social realism and the winner of the 1963 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion. This expose of the politically driven real-estate speculation that has devastated Naples’s civilian landscape moves breathlessly from a cataclysmic building collapse to the backroom negotiations of civic leaders vying for power in a city council election, laying bare the inner workings of corruption with passion and outrage.