Trivia / Rome, Open City

• Banned in China: The film was not allowed to be shown in theaters in Germany until 1960. The lengthy scene depicting the torture of a Communist activist was truncated.
• Cast the Expert: Roberto Rossellini used real German POWs as extras for added realism.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The project began life as two short documentaries, one about the Catholic priest-turned-partisan Don Pieto Morosini, and another about Roman children who fought the Nazi occupation. Federico Fellini suggested it would be easier to make a single narrative film about both topics instead.
  • This didn't stop the original distributor from refusing to release it, arguing that it was too much of a documentary to be marketable.

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