Two Women: Sophia Loren, and the Ciociaria the Film Came From

La Ciociara, released in English as Two Women, is Vittorio De Sica's 1960 film with Sophia Loren, taken from Alberto Moravia's 1957 novel of the same name. It won Loren the Academy Award for Best Actress, the first Oscar ever given for a performance in a language other than English. The title is not a woman's name. It means a woman from Ciociaria, a region of southern Lazio that most Americans have never heard of and that is an hour and a half from Rome.

What does "la ciociara" mean?

A ciociara is a woman from Ciociaria, the hill country between Rome and Naples. The name of the region comes from the ciocia, a rustic leather shoe once worn by farmers and shepherds, laced up the calf over a white cloth wrapping. Our guide to Ciociaria covers what the name means and where the region begins and ends, since it has never had official borders.

In 1960 the word carried something else with it: poverty, the countryside, the south, women who worked. De Sica's film fixed that image in the world's mind, and in Italy the phrase still arrives with the film attached.

Is Two Women based on a true story?

The characters are invented. What happens to them is not.

Cesira, a widowed shopkeeper in Rome, takes her twelve-year-old daughter Rosetta out of the bombed city in 1943 and back to the mountain village she came from. They survive the winter there. On the way home, after the front has moved north, mother and daughter are raped inside a church by colonial soldiers of the French expeditionary corps.

That last part refers to a documented episode. In May 1944, after the Allied breakthrough at Monte Cassino, colonial troops of the French corps committed mass rapes across the towns and countryside of southern Lazio. In Italian the episode is known as le marocchinate. The number of victims has never been settled: an Italian Defense Ministry estimate from 1997 put it in the range of two to three thousand, while associations of victims have claimed figures several times higher, and in 1947 France authorized compensation for 1,488 recognized cases. Moravia was living in the area at the time, and he began the novel out of what he saw and heard there.

It is a hard subject and this is a travel article, so that is all it says about it. If you want the history properly, go to the historical literature rather than to a guide.

The film, and the Oscar

Two Women came out on December 23, 1960, with Loren as Cesira, Eleonora Brown as Rosetta and Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michele, the bookish young man in the village. Cesare Zavattini wrote the screenplay, as he had for De Sica's earlier films.

Loren was 26. She won Best Actress at Cannes in 1961, then the Academy Award at the 1962 ceremony, along with a BAFTA and a David di Donatello. No performance in a foreign language had won an acting Oscar before. She was not in Los Angeles for the ceremony, which is part of the story Americans of a certain age remember.

If you are looking for the answer to which Sophia Loren film to watch first, this is the one people who know her work name, and it is the one that explains why an Italian region has a film attached to it.

Where the story is set, and where it was shot

The novel sends Cesira to a village Moravia calls Sant'Eufemia, modeled on Sant'Agata, in the hills above Fondi, where he and his wife, the writer Elsa Morante, spent the months from September 1943 to May 1944 in hiding. That is the southern edge of the area people call Ciociaria, where the hills come down toward the sea.

The film was shot in the summer of 1960 around Fondi, in its mountains and on its plain, with the Sant'Eufemia scenes filmed at Saracinesco, a small village in the Ruffi mountains east of Rome, and at least one sequence in the medieval town of Sermoneta.

None of these places has made an industry out of it. There is no film trail, no signposted location tour, no plaque in most of them. What there is instead is the landscape the film used, which has changed less than the towns have: terraced olives, stone villages on ridges, mountains that turn blue in the late afternoon, and valleys that empty out completely between one town and the next.

The places in the book, if you want to see them

Four places carry the story, and all four can be visited, none of them as an attraction.

Fondi is a working town on the plain between Rome and Naples, with a castle, a walled medieval quarter and, on its edge, a wholesale fruit and vegetable market that covers more than 300 hectares and sees about three thousand people pass through it in a day. The mountains behind it, where Moravia hid and where the novel puts Cesira, are reached by narrow roads that end in villages of a few hundred people.

Sant'Agata, the hamlet above Fondi that became Sant'Eufemia in the book, is a scatter of houses on a slope. There is nothing to do there, which is the correct experience.

Saracinesco, where the mountain scenes were filmed, sits at 908 meters in the Ruffi mountains, about an hour east of Rome. It is the highest village in that range and the least populated comune in all of Lazio, with 182 residents.

Sermoneta, used for at least one sequence, is the most conventionally beautiful of the four: a medieval hill town under a castle begun by the Annibaldi in the thirteenth century and enlarged by the Caetani, the family of Boniface VIII, who turn up all over this part of Lazio. It is easy to reach from Rome and busy on weekends.

What is there now

The Ciociaria in the film is the poorest version of this region, the one people left. What is there now is quieter and better fed, and it is one of the few parts of central Italy where an American can spend a week without meeting a tour group.

The towns to see are in our guide to Lazio beyond Rome: Anagni, where four popes were born, Alatri and Arpino with their prehistoric walls, Fiuggi and its springs. The war the novel is about is still legible around Cassino, and our guides to Monte Cassino and to the Gustav Line cover what you can visit.

If you want to watch the film before you come, the version to look for is the Italian one with subtitles: the English dub flattens Loren's Roman and southern registers, which are half the performance.

Seeing the region the title points to

Our journey in Ciociaria is eight days in the valleys the film came from, with a cheesemaker, a waterfall in the middle of a town, the abbey of Montecassino and a day that is nothing but walking and eating. Details and dates are on the page. If you would rather build something around the places in the book, Design your trip starts with a conversation, and our founder reads every request herself.