Rossellini’s follow-up to Rome, Open City is a compendium of six episodes that focus on a series of cross-cultural encounters during the Battle of Italy (1943–45)—all unified by the director’s neorealist strategies (location shooting, use of nonactors) and his search for signs of humanity in even the most brutal of circumstances. Among the film’s most poignant sequences are a story set at night on the coast of Sicily as an American G.I. and a local girl attempt to elude a group of German soldiers; a vignette in which a black G.I. on leave in Naples tries to recover his stolen boots, only to be shocked by the miserable conditions in which the homeless young thief and his compatriots live; and the concluding episode, set in the Po Valley, in which the partisans fight in a losing cause alongside Allied paratroopers.