One of the gay Marxist aristocrat Luchino Visconti’s greatest films, this highly emotional, elegantly staged and gorgeous-looking 1954 world cinema romantic masterpiece tells the story of the tragedy of an Italian woman who betrays her entire country for a self-destructive love affair with an Austrian man.

It is an adaptation of the Italian novella Senso by Camillo Boito, a famous Italian author and architect, written around 1882. The novella, typical of Scapigliatura literature, which was at its peak at the time, develops a disturbing account of indiscriminate indulgence in selfish sensuality. The word senso is Italian for sense, feeling or sentiment.

Franco Zeffirelli and Francesco Rosi, later accomplished film and theatre directors, worked as Visconti’s assistants on t...