On a summer day in the northern Italian city of Ferrara, a band of youths, dressed in immaculate white, arrive at the walled gates of a garden, open to the public for the first time in a decade. They are there at the invitation of the young lady of the manor for a tennis tournament. But this hospitality has been prompted by something ugly.

As one attendee remarks, “We can thank our fascist for the privilege.” It is 1938, and Mussolini’s government has restricted Jews from the local tennis club. It is the first indication of the trouble to come. In Vittorio De Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” playing January 26 and 27 as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival, the director who made his best films in the readymade rubble of postwar Italy captures the vibrant life that preceded his neorealist subjects.