When Martin Scorsese was growing up at 253 Elizabeth Street in New York’s Little Italy in the early 1950s, he led an appealingly schizoid movie-watching life. During the day, he’d venture to popular American flicks, like Roy Rogers shoot-’em-ups. At night, watching a 16-inch RCA black-and-white TV with his Italian-American parents and his Palermo-born grandparents, he’d take in recent Italian art films, with subtitles. Post-war Italian cinema was shown regularly on New York TV, to the delight of the Scorsese clan. That’s what’s celebrated — sometimes eloquently, sometimes laboriously — in Scorsese’s 246-minute, 35mm epic Il mio viaggio in Italia ("My Voyage to Italy") this weekend, May 17 and 19, at the Harvard Film Archive.

Scorsese, on camera and in voiceover, takes us on a highly subjective journey through favorite Italian films that were made between 1945 and 1963 by a handful of masters: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni. At the top of his director list is Rossellini, who with Roma, città aperta (1945), which he filmed raw in the streets as the Nazis fled, founded the neo-realist movement. Scorsese calls it, "For me, the most precious moment of film history."

Starting with multiple scenes from this Anna Magnani–starring classic, Scorsese indulges us with sequences he adores from other Rossellini works, sometimes half a dozen from the same film. The excerpts are inevitably splendid, but there are too many, and they run on too long! It gets frustrating: show less, or show the whole movie! It’s particularly annoying to be bombarded with clips when the picture has been as thoroughly studied as Roma, città aperta. Il mio viaggio wakes up when Scorsese concentrates on less-known Italian films: De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli ("The Gold of Naples"; 1954), a cheeky tribute to the title city with Silvana Mangano and Sophia Loren; Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954), a splendidly decadent Venice-in-1866 love story starring Alida Valli and a dubbed Farley Granger (the bad guy in Strangers on a Train); Rossellini’s Stromboli (1949), with an enticing Ingrid Bergman as a Lithuanian war refugee trapped in marriage to a sexist Italian peasant on a volcanic island.

As for Scorsese’s commentary, too often it nothing more than hyperbole about how "powerful" or how "emotionally powerful" a favorite scene is. It’s great that he loves these movies so much, but that’s not enough. His heart-on-sleeve narration works only once, when he confesses about Fellini’s I vitelloni (1953) that this delicate, poetic story of friendship among five young Italian men trapped in their trivial lives was his seminal influence when he formulated Mean Streets. He was as smitten as much by Fellini’s form as by the content: "I vitelloni is a series of cuts and camera moves that have affected me all my life."

Scorsese is at his best when he gets pedantic, or analytical. "If you are young, film history can be a chore," he acknowledges, but he makes it less so by being such a helpful, enthralling teacher. He’s especially impressive explaining Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1953), a movie that’s been championed by such auteurist film critics as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard but still leaves most audiences cold and confused. Who cares about the crumbling, middle-years marriage of Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders? Scorsese makes you care by smartly guiding you through the couple’s Italian road trip from connubial boredom to alienation to estrangement to almost divorce to reinvigorating their love.

Some of the movies that Scorsese raves about will be shown at the Harvard Film Archive as part of the series "Martin Scorsese’s Voyage to Italy," including I vitelloni on May 18 and 21 and Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1947) on May 23. I especially recommend Roberto Rossellini’s tender, delightful The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), May 18 and 22. Scorsese: "I’ve never seen the life of a saint treated with so little solemnity, so much warmth."

RIP: NISH SARAN, who while a Harvard film-production teaching assistant under Ross McElwee made the excellent 1998 personal documentary Summer in My Veins, in which a road trip across America with his mother and two bouncy aunts climaxed with his coming out, on camera, to his drama-queen mom. Saran then moved home to India, where his April 23 death (a truck hit the car carrying him and four friends) was a front-page story in the New Delhi Times under the headline "Gay Activist Among 5 Killed in Accident." He was just 26. During the MFA’s current Boston Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival, a memorial was held by MASALA (Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association), of which Nish was a member.