A staircase is never just a staircase. In cinema, less than ever. It can be the setting for Norman Bates' descent into an Oedipal nightmare, the battlefield between gangsters and accountants for De Palma, or the cradle of a proletarian revolution for Eisenstein. In Rome, 11:00., the staircase of an Umbertine building on Via Savoia becomes something more: it is the physical and metaphysical keystone of the film, a vertical axis on which the hopes of an entire generation climb and from which, in a cascade of lime and screams, the illusions of an Italy that does not yet know it is on the eve of a miracle fall.

The film opens like a narrative black hole: the collapse has already taken place. De Santis, with an intuition that betrays his deep understanding of American cinema and noir, chooses to start from the end, from the disaster. The news story—a real event that took place on January 15, 1951—is transfigured into a prologue from a Greek tragedy. From this epicenter of rubble, the narrative expands backwards, like a temporal shock wave, to gather the fragments of life that led two hundred women to that cursed staircase, all vying for a single, miserable typist job. It is a structural choice that elevates the film far above a simple neorealist document. De Santis is not content to follow reality as Zavattini would have theorized in its purest form; he dismantles it and recomposes it into a polyphonic mosaic, almost a modernist novel in images. If De Sica's neorealism is a whispered elegy on the loneliness of the individual (Bicycle Thieves), De Santis's is a choral work, a deafening symphony of female voices that overlap, fight each other, and finally merge into a single lament.

In this respect, Roma 11:00 is perhaps the film closest, in spirit and structural ambition, to certain experiments in literary modernism, from John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer to Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. As in those novels, the real protagonist is not a single individual, but the city itself, or rather, a cross-section of it, a sample of humanity caught in a moment of crisis. The stories of the aspiring typists—the pregnant maid played by a very young and extraordinary Lea Padovani, the prostitute looking for a way out (Lucia Bosè), the wife of an unemployed worker (Carla Del Poggio), the daughter of a doorman who dreams of cinema—are fragments of a single, great story: economic despair as a social leveler. Decayed nobility, impoverished bourgeoisie, and proletarians find themselves side by side, stripped of their class differences by necessity. The staircase thus becomes a moving social diagram, a Babel of hopes where each step represents an illusion and the top an unattainable salvation.

De Santis, a pupil of Luchino Visconti and a film critic before becoming a director, has a gaze that is both analytical and passionate. He is not a cold and detached entomologist of reality. He is an orchestrator, a demiurge who does not fear melodramatic hypertrophy, but rather uses it as a chemical reagent to bring out the emotional truth of his characters. His camera does not merely observe; it rummages, insinuates itself between bodies, captures glances, isolates details with the precision of a Flemish painter. The composition of the shots, especially in the crowd scenes on the staircase, has an almost baroque complexity, a horror vacui that visually translates the existential claustrophobia of the protagonists. Every face is a story, every whisper a prayer. It is physical, visceral cinema, reminiscent of the desperate carnality of another of his masterpieces, Riso Amaro, but here sensuality gives way to an ancestral weariness, a hunger that is not only for food but for dignity.

Perhaps the most daring analogy is not with contemporary cinema, but with Renaissance art. The scene of the collapse, with its tangle of falling bodies, cannot fail to evoke certain pictorial depositions, a chaos ordered by pain reminiscent of the composition of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. De Santis stages a secular deposition, where it is not a divine figure but an entire female social body that is deposed from the cross of history. And as in a medieval polyptych, each flashback panel shows us the life of a minor saint, an everyday martyr whose only fault is to desire a normal existence. This choral approach is a narrative device of disconcerting modernity. Years before Robert Altman elevated it to his trademark, De Santis demonstrated that he understood that history is not made by heroes, but by the sum of infinite, anonymous biographies. The film becomes a seismograph of the collective soul, recording the telluric shocks that run through the subsoil of a nation projected towards reconstruction but still mired in its miseries.

The meta-discourse that the film weaves is also interesting. One of the girls, played by debutante Elena Varzi, dreams of becoming an actress and shows up for the interview reciting a scene. It is a dizzying short circuit: an actress (non-professional, in line with the dictates of the movement) playing an aspiring actress, in a film that in turn uses professional and non-professional actors to tell a “true” story. De Santis seems to reflect on the very nature of neorealism, on its ability to absorb and rework reality, on the fine line that separates testimony from staging. It is no coincidence that the cast includes names such as Massimo Girotti and Raf Vallone, icons of a more structured cinema, alongside faces taken from the street. This fusion is the director's stylistic signature, his personal overcoming of the dichotomy between “reality” and “spectacle.”

In De Santis's hands, the tragedy of Via Savoia becomes more than just a news story. It becomes the symptom of a national pathology, an accident that tears through the veil of forced post-war optimism to reveal the fragility of the foundations on which the future was being built. The collapse of the staircase is the collapse of a system of values, the failure of a promise. And the ending, with shoes scattered among the rubble—a powerful synecdoche for broken lives—is an image that sticks in the memory with the force of a Robert Capa photograph. Roma 11:00 is not only a masterpiece of neorealism; it is its crisis, its expansion, its feverish and magnificent contamination. It is a film that, like its staircase, bears an enormous weight – historical, social, human – and manages not to collapse, transforming the noise of current events into the universal and heart-rending song of the human condition.