Key words: Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci, Il conformista, The Conformist, Plato’s cave, fascism 

Why Bernardo Bertolucci, when adapting as a film Alberto Moravia’s novel Il conformista, introduced into its homonymous The Conformist the Platonic image of the cave? The article is to give an answer to this question by analysing Moravia’s work in search of “cave images”, which would justify Bertolucci’s decisión.