Italian neo-realism, though notoriously difficult to define, does present a recognisable set of features of which any individual work may provide its own sub-set. It was part of the atmosphere of the time, rather than a school or a programme. Calvino, in his well-known preface to the 1964 edition of his novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (‘The Path to the Nests of Spiders’), stressed the compulsive storytelling of the Resistance and the uncoordinated, unprofessional spontaneity of the new writers who emerged from the war-time experience. Most outstanding ‘neo-realist’ works in fact present non-neo-realist features, while works which were not realist at all in technique, such as the highly experimental novels of Vittorini, appeared deceptively at home within the cultural ambience of neo-realism thanks to their contemporary relevance.

All neo-realist works directly engage with history, with the present moment seen as one in which individuals participate in collective destinies. The experience by many of Resistance, civil war or internment explains both the sense of individual responsibility in the making of history and the countervailing sense of the individual's impotence in the grand historical process, the sheer struggle to survive amid the cataclysm. This often problematical public engagement impelled writers to escape from the ivory tower of self-centred or aesthetic contemplation in which they had sought refuge from the impositions of Fascism, and tempted them in the direction of popular epic. Typically, these works take the form of memoirs or more or less fictionalised documentaries or chronicles of the recent past, from the rise of Fascism in the early 1920s to the Resistance and right up to the present.