Vanina and Pietro meet when her father, to save his mistress from an embarrassing situation, agrees to hide the wounded Pietro in his house.Vanina, after nursing Pietro back to health, follows her lover to the north of Italy and, with no immediate thought of the consequences, plots to free Pietro of the political obligations that are interfering with her happiness. It's the story of the love affair of a bored, spoiled young Roman princess, Vanina Vanini (Sandra Milo), and a dedicated young patriot, Pietro Missirilli (Laurent Terzieff), who has come to Rome to assassinate a traitor to his brotherhood of Free Masons, here identified with the fight against papal oppression and the campaign for a united Italy.Vanina hasn't much feeling, one way or the other, about revolutionary politics, though her father, like so many Roman aristocrats, allows himself to become an accessory to revolution simply by refusing to stand against it.
Rossellini put great store by historical facts but remained skeptical of the way they could be manipulated to substantiate fashions in contemporary thought and politics."Vanina Vanini" opens in 1823, during the conclave of the College of Cardinals in Rome to pick a successor to Pope Pius VII. Its characters are neither idealized nor familiar, and if the ending appears to be tragic, it's as open-ended as that of a continuing serial. ROBERTO ROSSELLINI'S "Vanina Vanini," which opens today at the Little Theater in Joseph Papp's Public Theater, is one of the last more or less conventional theatrical films that Rossellini made before he began that extraordinary series of "teaching films" ("The Rise of Louis XIV," "The Age of the Medici," "Socrates," among others) on which he was still working at the time of his death in 1976.I emphasize "more or less conventional" because although "Vanina Vanini," based on a Stendhal short story, seems to be a highly romantic melodrama set against the background of Italy's Risorgimento, it's not to be so easily categorized.
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