Taking into account the formal imperatives of post-war necessity, which forced innovative circumvention of financial and technical shortcomings, Vitti nevertheless sees the
nonspectacular scope of neorealism as reflecting ah ideological method--an engagement with Marxist social utility that avoided the Fascistic reduction of realism to microcosm or polemical allegory.
She first found it in the autobiographical writings of Therese of Lisieux, the late-19th-century mystic known as the "Little Flower." In its original setting, that is, within the life of an enclosed Carmelite nun, the "little way" embraced mostly the
nonspectacular, routine living of 20 isolated religious sisters.