Filmed in 1960, at a peculiar moment in Italian history: the miracolo economico, the economic miracle that reshaped the country’s postwar foundations, transforming a largely agrarian nation into an urban and industrial society. What Visconti stages here isn’t just a family drama — it’s a moral anatomy of a people torn between past and future, between soil and cement, south and north — literally.

The Parondi family, leaving rural Lucania in search of a better life in Milan, embodies the…