La città del sole (1973) takes as its central figure Tommaso Campanella, the Calabrian monk whose utopian vision of an egalitarian community in the seventeenth century anticipated many of the ideals of modern socialism. Amelio’s sympathy with Campanella’s revolutionary version of Christianity, accused of heresy by the Church, is plain. Collision with the feudal order preserved by Spanish rule in Southern Italy was preordained, and the film shows the increasing spiral of violence that resulted. Viewers are invited to reflect on the roots of cultural and economic oppression in the South. This was an extraordinarily bold departure for Italian television at the time, and Amelio was unable to make any more features for some years, teaching instead at the Centro sperimentale—the state film school—in Rome.