In the midst of Neorealism, when the films of De Sica, Visconti and Rossellini were showing at the cinema, this classic of “literature by images” was born from the encounter between a great photographer and a great writer and screenwriter, made unique by the beauty of the photographs of the modernist master Paul Strand and by Zavattini’s ingenious approach to the accompanying texts, which half a century later continue to fascinate the reader and immerse them without rhetoric in a peasant world at its twilight.