sophia loren's remarks about the film

I remember reading in Loren's memoirs that Anna Magnani was first asked to play the mother, with Loren as the daughater. Magnani refused, saying she wasn't old enough. (That was hardly true, she was 26 years older than Loren.)
Loren then was cast as the mother.
In the scene where she is begging for food, she said she actually witnessed such a scene with her own mother begging for food for them during World War II.
She said she brought forth the emotion in the rape scene by remembering when she saw children being blown up in the street by a bomb during the war.
She said the night of the Oscars, she was in Italy, wathcing on TV. When she saw she had won best actress, for the first foreign film to be so honored, she lay down on the bed, filled with emotion. Congratulatory calls began coming in from friends around the world, but she asked someone else to take them. All she could think of was how she felt this film told the story of what her mother, sister, and she had endured in her childhood, and all she could do was weep in happiness that it had been recognized in this way.