Based on a story by Stendhal, Rossellini's last commercial feature is set in Risorgimento Italy in 1824. Vanina Vanini, 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 which separate them in spirit, and are bound to separate them in fact. In his book, “Roberto Rossellini,” José Luis Guarner discusses Rossellini's approach to the historical drama:
“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.... (Rossellini's) carefully realistic account of the external world satisfies more than the demands of pure reportage. It makes clear the effect this world has on the love of Pietro and Vanina, which is never looked at in an introspective way.... (It) is useful to compare Vanina Vanini with Luchino Visconti's Senso (1954) which... superficially resembles it.... But Senso would clearly like to bring history into line with the recent past.... Vanina Vanini, however, lays no claim to comparing ancient history with modern... but only to rediscover a historical past as spontaneously and accurately as possible, in all its complexity....”