I am researching a historical transitional moment of Italian cinema: the shift from Fascist to postwar Neorealist cinema (1933–52). In Rome I plan to focus on the relationship between documentary and fiction in the late Fascist era and in the early phases of Neorealism, examining the role that documentary aesthetics played in the formation of a realist cinema focusing on Roberto Rossellini’s early works. While it is widely acknowledged that Neorealism shows strong documentary qualities, the exact nature of this relationship has never been fully explored. My project aims to establish the importance of documentary genre and techniques for Neorealist cinema, thus renegotiating this nexus fiction/nonfiction in the works of Rossellini in light of the larger body of archival findings that document the cinematic culture of Italy of the 1930s and 1940s.