Sun in Her Eyes?

Pietrangeli's first film, Il sole negli occhi (1953), was originally entitled Celestina, a name that corresponded to that of the young protagonist, a country girl who comes to Rome to work as a maid. This epochal change in the postwar period between domestic servants who do the work and housewives who consume and command has been discussed by scholars such as Linda McDowell and Raffaela Sarti. As Fullwood explains in her chapter on kitchens and domestic space in Comedy, Italian Style, “The figure of the maid highlights the presence of work in domestic space and troubles any neat, binary associations of work with the public real and home with the private.” The maid or domestic servant, for these theorists, subverts the gendered division of labor and space, exposing the burden of domestic work and revealing the home as an economy in and of itself.

From a marketing standpoint, however, Pietrangeli admits in an interview with Lino Dal Frà, in Cinema Nuovo, that maids don't draw an audience. Allowing the production to change the title “was a grave error,” Pietrangeli states, “because the work was presented and publicized without specifying the tone and the characteristics of the film. The definitive title is simply all wrong […] Celestina seems to me still today the title that most fits the story, simple and modest.”