Vulcano has been seen by some as a vehicle of revenge by Anna Magnani against her estranged lover at the time, Italian film director Roberto Rossellini, who had chosen Ingrid Bergman to star in his film series about marriage, instead of her.

Both films were shot simultaneously in similar locales in the Aeolian Islands, only 40 km apart; both actresses played independent-minded roles in a neorealist fashion.

Life magazine wrote, "... in an atmosphere crackling with rivalry... Reporters were accredited, like war correspondents, to one or the other of the embattled camps.... Partisanship infected the Via Veneto (boulevard in Rome), where Magnaniacs and Bergmaniacs clashed frequently."

[1][2] The film plot involves a former prostitute, Maddalena Natoli (played by Magnani), who was exiled to the island of her birth by the police.

There, she suffers ostracism by the islanders, and she tries to defend the virtue of her younger sister from the advances of a deep-sea diver.