Bread, Love and Dreams generated the Italian cinema's highest box-office to that date, and spawned a whole series of spicy “Bread and Love” comedies. Director Luigi Comencini was a former documentarist with firm roots in realism whose career soared when he found the perfect formula: high comedy set in a “realistic” framework. But in this peasant village near Abruzzi, realism gives way to a more entertaining fantasy of poverty and the local peasants, who are painted in broad strokes and played tongue-in-cheek by Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio De Sica, and company. De Sica, the town official, desires to end his bachelorhood in the arms of the village midwife (Marisa Merlini), and when this fails he goes after Lollobrigida, who in turn is in love with Roberto Risso. Lollobrigida was the quintessential maggiorata: bread, love, and dream all rolled into one. But this village gamine, whose rags can't quite cover her almost animal “femininity,” is not the ne'er-do-well people take her to be, and, as Mira Liehm wrote, “(she) ends up living happily ever after because she is modest, goes to church, never complains about her misery, and believes in good and evil, just as the priest has always taught her.”