ABSTRACT
The Road to Hope (1950) is one of the most beautiful postwar Italian films on the eminently epic, and hence cinematic, theme of the journey to the Promised Land. Some Sicilians, who have been reduced to unemploy ment by the closing down of the sulfur mines, leave with their families for France, where a crooked labor recruiter has promised them they will find work. The road is long, from the snows of Mount Etna to those of the Saint Gothard Pass.1 Abandoned by their guide, hunted down by the police, chased by the farm workers whose strike they have unwittingly broken to earn a few lire, the survivors of this illegal emigration finally get to see the Promised Land from the top of a pass in the Alps, which an officer of the Alpine police will compassionately allow them to descend.
