Having long since lost its original negatives, the movie underwent an initial analog restoration in 1996, working with the surviving materials, all of which were in very poor condition. That copy, which was presented with great expectations at that year's Venice Film Festival, however,
retained many flaws, including poor quality images and an often incomprehensible soundtrack that effectively limited its circulation. Thanks to Cast - Catholicism and Audiovisual Studies di UniNettuno, the movie has now been given a new lease on life through a wide-ranging technical and cultural operation involving various subjects. The movie was first reworked with digital technology by the Cineteca Nazionale, at the Cinecittà laboratory, in order to get as close as possible to the original version by making the images sharper and the dialogues more comprehensible. To add cultural value to the project, the documentary Argento Puro was finally made, through which the history of the movie is retraced, and the restoration operation is recounted. The documentary, through an omniscient narrator sitting in an old provincial cinema, takes us through the lives of the people working on the restoration of the movie today. We alternate between film history scholars, archivists, the restorers themselves, and the testimony of Christian De Sica, who recounts what was told about the movie in his family. Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini grappled with this movie they did not want to make but which opened the door to another fundamental journey in Italian and world cinematography, that of Neorealism.