Based on a story by Stendhal, Rossellini's last commercial feature is set during the Risorgimento, in 1824. Vanina Vanini (Sandra Milo, who won Best Actress at Venice with this performance), the daughter of a Roman aristocrat, falls in love with a wounded patriot hiding out in her father's house. Nursing him back to health, she follows her lover to northern Italy and naively attempts to free him of the political commitments that separate them in spirit, and are bound to separate them in fact. ”Vanina Vanini does not set out only to record a love story but to disclose the precise social and political factors that dominate the characters, whose destiny is connected with that of Italy. . . . (The film aims) to rediscover a historical past as spontaneously and accurately as possible, in all its complexity” (José Luis Guarnier).