Gallery owner Keith de Lellis made repeated visits to Italy between 1980 and 1984, each time buying 30 to 40 photographs until he had an archive of more than 1,000 images. Since then, he has periodically culled his collection and presented themed exhibitions such as “Paesaggio: Italian Landscape Photography,” which was reviewed in these pages three years ago. Now the Keith de Lellis Gallery has “La Strada: Vintage Italian Street Photography,” a show of 44 black-and-white pictures taken between 1948 and 1972, although the majority were taken before 1960. A considerably larger selection has been published in a book with the same name, and an introduction by my role model, photography critic and historian Vicki Goldberg.

At the end of her essay in “La Strada,” Ms. Goldberg summarizes the work by saying, “What we have here is a threefold picture: an image of Italy going about normal life in an effort to recover from tragedy and devastation; the air of dislocation that lingers, scarcely acknowledged but persistent, in the background; and the attempts of a cadre of curious and determined men to bring photography into the precincts of contemporary art through an honest, emotionally charged report on the theater of the street.” Most of the photographers in the show are represented by one or two pictures, but Nino Migliori has nine, the most of any individual, and they exemplify Ms. Goldberg’s characterization.

What could better serve as “an image of Italy going about normal life” than Mr. Migliori’s series of four pictures, “Le mani parlano” (1956)? Three elderly women dressed all in black, their gray hair pulled back in buns, sit side by side on an ancient flight of stone stairs and gossip. In the first picture, the woman on the left speaks with her palms turned up; in the second, the woman on the other side makes an emphatic gesture with her right hand; in the third, the woman in the middle holds her hands apart to illustrate the point she is making; and in the last, two of the three women acknowledge the intrusive presence of the camera by staring at it, and all of them have their hands folded together as a gesture of silence. The pictures represent an eternal Italy, one that preceded Mussolini and World War II, one that endured the events of mid-century, and one that, on the evidence of Mr. Migliori’s pictures, survived them.

The photography in “Le mani parlano” is straightforward, but in three other pictures, Mr. Migliori demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the modernist photography that developed in France, Germany, and Russia in the period between the wars. “Albino” (1956), “Notturno dall’Asinelli” (1958), and “Bologna” (1958) are all pictures of the street, but taken from so far above as to put the viewer at a considerable remove from the life of the street. “Bologna” is an overhead shot of a straight, wide thoroughfare; the buildings on either side have tile roofs that speak of an earlier period. It is so late in the day that the sparse traffic on the street casts long, exaggerated shadows, and the few pedestrians would hardly be noticeable except for their shadows.

“Notturno dall’Asinelli” looks down at night from a greater height on one of the medieval towers of Bologna. There is a café in the square below with little round tables and a few barely perceptible patrons. The unaccustomed perspective and the dramatic street lighting give the image a surreal, film-noir cast. “Albino” looks down on a flood of umbrellas so tightly pressed together they overlap, all of them black or gray with the exception of one white one to the far left. The picture seemingly parodies the Fascist pictures of tightly packed crowds raptly beaming at Il Duce; here, those in the crowd shelter together from the rain, but are hidden and separated from each other by their umbrellas. These pictures, with their emphasis on the abstract, hint “at the air of dislocation that lingers, scarcely acknowledged but persistent, in the background” that Ms. Goldberg detected in the “La Strada” collection.

Umbrellas are a reoccurring prop in this exhibition. In Piero Vistali’s “Sorella neve” (1958), four white-robed nuns march single file along a slushy sidewalk protected, but separated, by their umbrellas. In Mario Carrieri’s “Milano” (1958), the line of people waiting in the rain for a trolley are isolated by their umbrellas. In Augusto Cantamessa’s very abstract “Untitled” (1972), the diminutive figures crossing a distant bridge walk under umbrellas. Luciano de Stasio’s “La zebra” (1959) is an overhead shot of a man with an umbrella on a striped crosswalk. In Mr. de Stasio’s “Ciao, ciao…bambina” (c. 1960), a man with an umbrella walks alone in front of a wall covered with an advertisement in which a family carrying umbrellas walks in the same direction. In Vittorio Ronconi’s “Neve sui ponte” (1965), two women carrying umbrellas on a snow-covered bridge pass each other with indifference. In Eugenio de Luigi’s “Untitled” (1951), a figure in a bridal gown is interposed with people carrying umbrellas in a rainy square. All this may just indicate a lot of inclement weather, or it may be another aspect of the existential climate that produced “L’Avventura,” “La Dolce Vita,” “The Leopard,” and the other great postwar Italian films.

But there is more to “La Strada” than drizzle. There are wonderful faces, and street performers, and children racing along, and serendipitous juxtapositions — Ms. Goldberg’s “theater of the street” — all rendered with the high artistry and sense of craft we expect in anything imported from Italy.

Until June 14 (1045 Madison Ave., No. 3, between 79th and 80th streets, 212-327-1482).