Rossellini put great store by historical facts but remained skeptical of the way they could be manipulated to substantiate fashions in contemporary thought and politics.'Vanina Vanini' opens in 1823, during the conclave of the College of Cardinals in Rome to pick a successor to Pope Pius VII. Its characters are neither idealized nor familiar, and if the ending appears to be tragic, it's as open-ended as that of a continuing serial.

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI'S 'Vanina Vanini,' which opens today at the Little Theater in Joseph Papp's Public Theater, is one of the last more or less conventional theatrical films that Rossellini made before he began that extraordinary series of 'teaching films' ('The Rise of Louis XIV,' 'The Age of the Medici,' 'Socrates,' among others) on which he was still working at the time of his death in 1976.I emphasize 'more or less conventional' because although 'Vanina Vanini,' based on a Stendhal short story, seems to be a highly romantic melodrama set against the background of Italy's Risorgimento, it's not to be so easily categorized.

Vanina Vanini by Stendhal