We are made of the same stuff as dreams, and our brief life is enclosed in the space of a dream. Thus Shakespeare, through the words of Prospero in The Tempest, gave the world a disturbing vision of reality, which the Spanish playwright Calderón de la Barca then reworked into his own poetics, in which the Dream (the Fairy Tale) took on an ontological connotation: La Vida es Sueño. Vittorio De Sica, a sensitive artist of his time, reworked this disturbing 17th-century lesson from the two great men of theater, infusing his film Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951) with a dreamlike yet firmly neorealist character, admirably managing to blend the two semantic planes into a single, fascinating, and controversial work. It is a gesture of brazen audacity: after mapping the desolation of post-war Italy with almost documentary precision in masterpieces such as Sciuscià and Ladri di biciclette, De Sica dares to ask: what remains for man when reality is so unbearable? His answer is as simple as it is revolutionary: fantasy.

And indeed, every fiber, every frame of this film seems permeated with this dualistic spirit that divides the world into Dream and Matter, suspended between Fairy Tale and Reality. What De Sica and his brilliant screenwriter Cesare Zavattini create is a new genre, Magical Neorealism, an oxymoron that becomes an aesthetic and political program. De Sica accomplishes this with disarming naturalness, managing to tell a story that incorporates fantastical fragments with magical disenchantment, as if seeing the two protagonists hovering on a broomstick suspended above a Milan of Stone and Flesh were the natural epilogue to the story. His approach is reminiscent of the grace of René Clair's French poetic realism, but it is above all the great silent cinema that he looks to. His protagonist, Totò il Buono, is not a character, he is an archetype, a direct descendant of Charlie Chaplin's Charlot. Like Chaplin's tramp, Totò is a “holy idiot,” a pure and optimistic soul whose innocence clashes with the cynical brutality of the modern world. But while Chaplin's comedy was often veiled with a deep melancholy, De Sica's is pervaded by an almost anarchic cheerfulness and an unshakeable faith in human solidarity, a trait that brings him closer to the populist fairy tales of Frank Capra.

Totò is literally born under a cabbage in a vegetable garden on the outskirts of Milan and is adopted by an adorable old woman, Lolotta, who raises him, teaching him kindness and wonder. Soon, however, the woman dies and, flying to heaven, leaves him behind, effectively throwing him to the mercy of the world and its ferocious mechanisms. But the boy's disenchantment, tenderness, and spontaneity accompany him at every moment of his life, and soon, having left the orphanage behind, he runs free through the streets of a gray and indifferent Milan, no longer burdened by legal guardians. He finds refuge in a shantytown of desperate people on the outskirts of the city and begins his work of reconstruction in this community, organizing his fellow citizens into a sort of miniature socialist utopia, a republic of the poor based on mutual aid and the joy of small things. Soon, however, this City of Outcasts is threatened by a rich and shady character, the capitalist Mobbi, who, after accidentally discovering an oil field right under the shantytown, sees the possibility of immense profit in the area. Thus begins a comical yet tragic battle between Riccastro's henchmen, armed with batons and tear gas, and the army of the Ultimi, led by Totò. Just when everything seems to be falling apart and the violence of power is about to prevail, the intervention of the boy's Madrina, the ghost of his adoptive mother, proves decisive. Totò receives a gift from the woman's spirit, a magical dove that grants every wish. A halo of magic will pierce the leaden cloak of degradation, giving Totò and his small army a path to victory and redemption, even if only temporary. The dove is not a deus ex machina that resolves the class conflict; it is an instrument of resistance, a weapon of imagination that allows the poor to respond to the violence of power with surreal and joyful miracles.

Miracle in Milan is a fundamental work in Italian cinema that introduces a new, revolutionary language. De Sica does not reject the lessons of Neorealism; his view of poverty, the suburbs, and the underprivileged is still there, intact. But he enriches it, completes it, shakes it up with the simple power of imagination, suggesting that in order to fully understand reality, and above all to endure it, it is sometimes necessary to look at it through the lens of fairy tales. This was a great revolution that would soon bear fruit, but at the time it caused an uproar. Although the film triumphed at Cannes, it was fiercely attacked in Italy by opposing sides. The Christian Democratic right and the Church accused it of being a subversive, almost communist work that offered a degraded and unflattering image of Italy during the economic boom. On the other hand, more orthodox Marxist critics accused De Sica and Zavattini of betraying Neorealism, of fleeing from rigorous social analysis to take refuge in fairy-tale “childishness.” The magic dove was seen as a shortcut, a divine intervention that replaced the need for political struggle. On closer inspection, both criticisms missed the point. The fantasy in Miracolo a Milano is not an escape from reality, but its most radical critique. It is a film that, with its lightness, tells us that in such an unjust and unequal world, only a miracle could guarantee the poor a ray of sunshine or a hot meal, thus revealing the absurdity of that world itself.

The ending is one of the most iconic and liberating images in the history of Italian cinema. Defeated and driven out once again, the poor gather in Piazza del Duomo, the beating heart of bourgeois Milan. Surrounded by police, their fate seems sealed. But Totò, with one last wish granted by the dove, brings the street sweepers' brooms to life. And so, in a sequence of anarchic and unforgettable joy, the entire community of the dispossessed takes flight on their brooms, flying over the cathedral and escaping to an unknown destination. “Where are we going?” someone asks. “To a kingdom where ‘good morning’ really means ‘good morning,’” replies Totò. It is an ending of powerful beauty and ambiguity. It is an escape, not a victory. But it is the victory of imagination, the celebration of man's ability to dream of a different world, even when the real one seems to offer no way out. For its courage to be unclassifiable—a political film with the soul of a fairy tale, a neorealist work that dares to dream—Miracolo a Milano remains a unique and unrepeatable masterpiece, a reminder that cinema, at times, does not serve to show us the world as it is, but to show us how it could be.