Characters in classic Italian films are often informed by partisan or class struggles and Catholicism, oppressed by war and poverty, and haunted by relics of the recent and ancient past.  This is particularly true in Roberto Rossellini films.  Rossellini's Germania Anno Zero (Germany Year Zero, 1946) was shot in the rubble of postwar Berlin; it opens with a long shot of bombed out buildings with a voice over telling the audience that the film is "intended to be simply an objective, true to life picture of this enormous, half-destroyed city...."[here in Spanish]

In Rossellini's 1960 film, Era Notte a Roma (1960), Esperia (played by Giovanna Ralli), a blackmarket dealer in German-occupied Rome, gives refuge to escaped war prisoners in her apartment attic.  Esperia's attic, which provides a view of Rome and St. Peter's Cathedral, is filled with an old large wooden horse, religious sculpture, copies of ancient sculpture, and miscellany to precious to discard.

Germania Anno Zero and Era Notte Roma contrast with Rossellini's first feature film, La Nave Bianca (1942), a propaganda film glorifying war machines:

In Rossellini's Viaggo in Italia (Voyage to Italy, 1953), Ingrid Bergman plays Katherine Joyce, a depressed wife who visits lava fields, Pompei excavations, and the ancient site of Cumaean Sibyl. Here, Katherine encounters bodies in the form of ancient sculpture at the Museo Archelogico Nazional di Napoli:

An ancient Roman aqueduct was featured in two films by Pier Paolo Pasolini -- Mamma Roma (1962) and Accattone (1961).  (Pasolini, also a poet, wrote of Germans retreating into the Roman ruins in his poem "1945"). Here, in Mamma Roma, Ettore (played by Ettore Garofolo) and other teenagers hang out and flirt at an ancient aqueduct at the outskirts of Rome:

The ancient, Christian and modern converge in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1959) when a helicopter carrying a religious scuplture flies over an ancient Roman aqueduct.  Here, in a scene from Federico Fellini's Roma (1971), ancient Rome is discovered in underground Rome ... and then disappears into dust: