In the first of the three tales that make up Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), Sophia Loren plays Adelina, who supports her husband Carmine (Marcello Mastroianni) by selling cigarettes on the black market. The scene is Naples, the year 1954. The film opens as a green bailiff’s truck creeps up a narrow street to repossess the furniture, and a man in a hat informs Carmine, who is leaning against the front door smoking, that it’s the result of an unpaid fine. The repossession is stalled, though, by helpful neighbours who hide the furniture. It is a temporary solution, of course. Knowing that the bailiffs will be back, and that it is Adelina who risks prison because both fine and furniture are in her name, the couple go to see a local lawyer, pushing past his housekeeper to find him polishing his shoes. Adelina begs for help. The lawyer replies that there is none, until he leaps to his feet and shouts, “Aspetta! Ten ’a panz!” (“Wait! She has the belly!”) and uses two hands to mime Adelina’s huge bump.
What follows is the most glorious scene in Vittorio De Sica’s film, as the news passes though the neighbourhood, along with the camera, and women shout from windows, and men from bridges, and children march, all shouting “Ten ’a panz!” “Ten ’a panz!”. The camera then catches up with Adelina, walking defiantly through the streets with a box under her arm, her brown dress blowing and saying hello to everyone, because the law at the time stipulated that no woman could be imprisoned when pregnant. A jubilant Carmine picks up fried pizza and fish from a street stall on the way home, rushes through the door and places the white paper bundle in the middle of the table, and the family eat and celebrate the great fortune of the bump.
While not wanting to give too much away about the rest of the film, I will say that Adelina manages to stay pregnant for the next eight years. And this is just the first episode in De Sica’s neo-realist masterpiece about love, sex and class, which won the 1970 Academy Award for best foreign language film. In the second film of the trilogy, Loren and Mastroianni drive around Milan in a Rolls-Royce. And in the third and final one, there is striptease and wolf-howls of delight for your movie night.
Fried fish from Ieri, oggi, domani
Serves 4
200g plain flour
1 tbsp rice flour
Salt
1kg small fish, such as anchovies, or whitebait, whole but with the guts pulled out
Oil for frying, sunflower, peanut or olive
Put both flours in a large bowl, add a pinch of salt, then drop in the fish. Shake the bowl gently or sift them through with your hands, until the fish are completely coated with flour. Lift the fish, in batches, into a sieve and shake this over the bowl so any excess flour is shaken off.
Prepare a plate lined with kitchen towel for blotting. In a medium-sized pan with high sides, or a wok, heat the oil to frying temperature and then, working in batches, fry the fish until cooked through and crisp. Use a slotted spoon or spider to lift them on to the kitchen towel to drain.
Sprinkle with salt and serve immediately with wedges of lemon.
