The Night of the Shooting Stars (UK: The Night of San Lorenzo, Italian: La Notte di San Lorenzo) is a 1982 Italian fantasy war drama film directed by Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani.

She proceeds to tell the story of the Italian town where she once lived at the end of World War II, in the summer of 1944.

After their marriage, the family of the bride quickly celebrate, indicating some trepidation at being caught by the Germans or their allies.

The groom, first seen in the beginning of the movie, joins the retreating group while his wife and her mother stay in the church.

The group had learned on the road that the partisans can help transport people safely to a city away from the Fascists.

The film was given a rapturous review in The New Yorker by the critic Pauline Kael, who wrote, "The Night of the Shooting Stars is so good it's thrilling.

Comedy, tragedy, vaudeville, melodrama - they're all here, and inseparable...In its feeling and completeness, Shooting Stars may be close to the rank of Jean Renoir's bafflingly beautiful Grande Illusion...unreality doesn't seem divorced from experience (as it does with Fellini) - it's experience made more intense...For the Tavianis, as for Cecilia, the search for the American liberators is the time of their lives.

For an American audience, the film stirs warm but tormenting memories of a time when we were beloved and were a hopeful people.

[8] In 1954, the 10th anniversary of the massacre, the Taviani brothers had directed the documentary San Miniato luglio '44, which attributed the bombing that happened in their home town to the withdrawing German troops.

[9][10] However, at the same time the documentary came out there were already opinions and reconstructions of the events, coming from witnesses of the bombing, that the massacre had not been caused by German troops, but were the result of collateral damage from American artillery.

[11] Subsequently, several investigations of the Massacre of San Miniato [it] established that American artillery collateral damage was the real cause.