The places of the film story: Red Garofano

It wasn't supposed to be Red carnation My identity card. Elio Vittorini, of course. But a film based on The women of Messina. In the double structure of that book there was a story that still touched us closely. That of veterans and uprooted people who, when the war was over, returned to their countries, with makeshift means, crossing mountains, crossing Italy in length, from north to south, dreaming of a more ethical than material regeneration. Wrecks full of uncertainties and resentments that the hope of a "new world" illuminated in the future. It was half of that book that interested me. It was that truck carrying its desperately vital load of humanity that interested me. On the Apennines, just before dark, the truck exhaled its last breath. His castaways, among whom glances, sufferings, expectations had just met, sought refuge among the dilapidated houses of an abandoned village, where settled. A dream took shape. Rebuild, plow, cultivate, reap, be reborn. A community took shape. That dream vanished in a few months, when the wheat was already earing in the hilly fields. The legitimate owners demanded the return of "their". A lanky messenger, wearing a long light trench coat, glasses well on his hooked nose, serpentine lips from which sharp words escaped, ordered the evacuation. The one hundred and one hundred diversities, even grim, sometimes cowardly guilty, which had come together and lent their face to the future, were dispersed ...
Did Vittorini intend that man in the trench coat too much like De Gasperi? Had the dream of radical renewal been shattered in our country? The directors of Italnoleggio Cinematografico told me that Vittorini was a welcome author, but that The women of Messina it was a "still too hot, too political" story. It was a preventive censorship, a mandatory barrier. It was then that my choice fell on The red carnation. Historically dated, but not unrelated to my historiographical interests. I couldn't love that book by my favorite writer. It was the echoes of Flaubert and Alain Fournier that attracted me. In the script I put the "betrayals" that were asked of me by a mysterious 'Vittorini Committee'. It was a tremendous experience. Pursuing a transference to kill it continuously. It was the Vittorini of Conversation in Sicily to help me. That going south of the protagonist, himself, "in the throes of abstract fury". And the railway sounds of the journey: Maratea, Amantea, Gioia Tauro. Eyes drowned in blue. And the immense summer of the large estates, between Caltagirone and Piazza Armerina. And the murderous gold of the most parched Sicily ...

text from: http://www.pipernofaccini.it/garofanorosso.htm