The Children’s Train

In 1946, Antonietta, an impoverished single mother, arranges for her son Amerigo to travel from Naples to northern Italy to live with a host family as part of the treni della felicità (trains of happiness) initiative organized by the Italian Communist Party to transport poor southern Italian children to northern families who could support them in the years after World War II. Amerigo refuses to go, but relents when he is caught by Antonietta's boyfriend fraudulently selling white-painted rats for furs. At the station, an elderly woman scares the children and their parents from sending the children up north, claiming that they would be deported to Siberia and eaten by cannibals, but the PCI cadres harangue the crowd with the dire state of their children following the war, overcoming resistance to the trip.