Vittorio De Sica's neo-realist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves has been restored and put into digital format, the Italian movie great's son Manuel said Monday.
The clean-up of the 1948 work - frequently on critics' lists of the best films ever made - was funded by Venice Casino where the director was a regular.
''Restoring Bicycle Thieves is a way of paying De Sica back for all the money he left on our tables,'' quipped Casino President Mauro Pizzigati.
Manuel De Sica said his father saw gambling as ''a world apart, where he could escape''.
He recalled one episode, when the director was making the Oscar-winning Garden of the Finzi Continis (1970) in Ferrara, 80km (50 miles) south of Venice.
''He came up one evening and spent the whole night at the tables,'' he said.
The new version of the film will be presented on the opening night of this year's Venice Film Festival on Wednesday.
