Roma has no need of maps to orient us around the city.
The only two maps in the film are details in a memory. That each occupies the same place in the frame allows us to read them together, even if the similarity is only a coincidence (about eight minutes separate them in the film). Blasetti's advocacy of Mussolini's rural regeneration campaign takes the form of a crude opposition of decadent city and vital countryside. The Duke ('il Duce') plans to sell his property to a speculator, abandoning his ancestral connection to the land. Consequently the peasants who work that land are anxious for their homes and livelihood.
Two consecutive shot-sequences express the rural-urban opposition in cartographic terms. First, a group of peasants around a table discuss what will happen through an impromptu map, made from symbolic elements: bread, bowl and wineglass. This is followed by the speculator and his agent discussing the same territory and what will happen to it, over an actual map: Angelo Restivo, ‘Neorealism and the Stain’, in The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 29-30:
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