Director Roberto Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman and Mario Vitale

When I first used to visit the Mani in the southern Peloponnese – before it was underwent cosmetic surgery – I read Peter Greenhalgh’s book and went in search of the churches and mosaics and the entrance to Hades(!). I loved doing that, but even then I felt that living amongst those hostile towers and prickly pears in a traditional way would have been unbearable – perhaps even for those born there. You’d have to be Patrick Leigh Fermor to make it work. The Italian island of Stromboli looked very similar, but with the added horror of no roads to carry you away.

And so to the film: my engagement with it wavered, but it was always interesting. Italian neo-realism again: non-professional actors (which showed), real locations and real lives, quasi-documentary elements, characters formed by particular circumstances. The initial circumstance was an Italian camp for displaced persons, which the Bergman character – a Lithuanian (which gave a real sense of how the war had shaken up the whole of the continent as if it were no more than a snow globe) – was desperately trying to leave. Her first choice was via a visa to Argentina, for which she was rejected; her second was via marriage to Antonio, a very young soldier from Stromboli whom she barely knew.

Reader, she married him. And regretted it as soon as she saw Stromboli: poor, rocky, barren and in the shadow of an active volcano. The island women disapproved of her (trousers!) and she found it primitive; anyone who had the chance emigrated. She tries to adapt, she fails, she tries to escape by walking across the island, passing the volcano, to the small port on the other side. En route she loses everything, calls on God to help her, and the film leaves her on the volcano ready to face . . . what? The sudden introduction of a mystical element felt odd, but in other ways it was powerful film-making. The scene of the volcano erupting, when everyone runs to the sea to spend the night in boats to wait for it to settle down again. The scene of the mattanza – a tuna massacre, which lends credence to the theory that early human beings were largely responsible for the disappearance of mega fauna on the continents they colonised.

I compared it to The Edge of the World, which was less agonised (less Roman Catholic?) and more elegiac, as I recall.