Robert Rossen’s film is set in Venice in the 1950s, a mixture of perdition and hope. It tells the story of a ballerina who returns to Venice after a tour and falls in love unexpectedly. The film contains some interesting details on how to reach the city, the fact that its ‘isolation’ has to be shattered, even dramatically and at the cost of pain. A ‘lesser’ Venice is the backdrop, thanks to the input of Francesco Pasinetti, a great documentary maker and historian of cinema who explored Venice thoroughly in the 1940s.