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Saturday Night Cinema: Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women

Tonight’s feature, Two Women (La Ciociara,) starring Sophia Loren, is a 1960 Italian film that tells the story of a woman trying to protect her devout young daughter from the horrors of war and the vicious Muslim soldiers terrorizing the countryside. The story is fictional, but based on actual events of July 1943 in Rome and rural Lazio and during what the Italians call the Marocchinate. Marocchinate, Italian for “those [feminine plural] given the Moroccan [Muslim] treatment” meaning “women/girls raped by Moroccans”) is a term applied to women who were victims of the mass rape and killings committed during World War II after the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy.

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