Discussing the interrelationships between film and literature, Italo Calvino once wrote: “There remains the fact that the cinema is continually being drawn toward literature. In spite of having such power of its own, the cinema has always been afflicted by jealousy of the written text: it wants to 'write'.” There are strands to the respective histories of the twentieth-century Italian novel and the Italian cinema that at times come together to form a kind of Gordian knot, so to speak, so tightly harnessed are they. At such times as these historical strands cross over, literature and cinema can be said to enter into a form of dialogue with one another. This dialogue between the Italian cinema and literature is amongst the most complex, fluid, and multifaceted to be found in any culture. To appreciate its full scope one has to acknowledge it at a number of interrelated levels. First, there is the most immediate and most commonly discussed question of adapting Italian novels to film form.