"8 Decades of Italian Cinema" will launch in New York City on April 19th at Dan Talbot's Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. Dan Talbot is the legendary founder of New Yorker Films and champion of Italian films in the United States. The series will begin with Roberto Rossellini's OPEN CITY made in 1945.

How appropriate is that, considering this film had its first big break in New York? Open City was one of the first postwar European films to gain a significant audience in the US. Its 1946 review in The New York Times gave it stature as one of the most important films of its time and labeled it as the start of a new artistic movement, one of the most influential in film history- Neorealism.

"It may seem peculiarly ironic that the first film yet seen hereabouts to dramatize the nature and the spirit of underground resistance in German-held Europe in a superior way-with candid, over-powering realism and with a passionate sense of human fortitude-should be a film made in Italy. Yet such is the extraordinary case. "Open City" ("Citta Aperta"), which arrived at the World last night, is unquestionably one of the strongest dramatic films yet made about the recent war." - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, February 26, 1946

"8 Decades of Italian Cinema," brought to the US by the Istituto Luce Cinecittå, as a celebration of the Year of Italian Culture, will run from April to November 2013 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and will showcase over 10 of Italy's greatest films including the work of Oscar-winning directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci and Federico Fellini as well as the profound work of contemporary artists such as Marco Bellocchio and Paolo Sorrentino. Here is a complete list of the films being shown:

Bitter Rice (1949), Terra Trema (1948), Umberto D (1952), Before the Revolution (1964), Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), Night of the Shooting Stars (1982), And the Ship Sails On (1983), Lamerica (1994), The Consequences of Love (2004), and Dormant Beauty (2012)