Teresa Venerdi was produced during the last few years of that obscure period of Italian film history, the Mussolini era... Although its aspirations are more modest (RKO programmer, say, rather than Paramount roadshow), Teresa Venerdi inspires the same constant sensation of deja vu as the "white telephone" extravaganzas of the period. Its main story thread, a fable of a dewy-eyed adolescent orphan who coyly pursues and ultimately reforms an amoral playboy-physician, is of course a variation on Cinderella...The characterizations are all seemingly based on contemporary Hollywood prototypes. The wistful ingenue heroine (Adriana Benetti),...De Sica resembl(ing) Cary Grant at his most antic, (and) Magnani's Other Woman, a coarse and pretentious golddigger...Teresa Venerdi consistently displays a certain genial charm, due in great part to the transcendental canniness of the film's three principal performances. Although Loletta ("la Regina di Jazz") is really only a bit role, Magnani infuses the character with an inimitable raffish vitality which anticipates her tour-de-force a decade later in Renoir's The Golden Coach...(In his third film, director) De Sica's...sensitive and witty handling of the children in Teresa's orphanage strikingly prefigures his humane depiction of youth in the subsequent The Children Are Watching Us and, of course, in The Bicycle Thief. Stephen Harvey, The Museum of Modern Art