In Nights of Cabiria, the prostitute who first comforted the hapless husband in Fellini's early film, The White Sheik (1952), comes into her own, and holds her own though she is continually exploited, robbed and physically abused by the very men she loves. Giulietta Masina here gives one of her finest performances, turning a film about prostitutes, pimps and johns into an ironically radiant statement about the indestructability of the human spirit.
Pasolini contributed dialogue for, in his words, “all the low-life parts” in Nights of Cabiria. “As there were these kinds of characters in Ragazzi di Vita (Pasolini's novel) Fellini thought I knew that world, as indeed I did because I had lived out at Ponte Mammolo, where lots of pimps and petty thieves and whores live; all the setting, and Cabiria's relations with the other whores, and especially the episode about Divine Love, are all done by me.... My main contribution was in the dialogue, which has been a bit lost because Fellini's use of dialect is fairly different from mine.” (in Oswald Stack's Pasolini on Pasolini)