To create the special effects for this Italian production, producer/director Vittorio De Sica imported American special effects specialist Ned Mann. This would be Mann's final project.
The film featured a mix of professional and non-professional actors. Some of these included down-and-out alcoholics who had to be awakened for work by having bucketsful of cold water thrown over them.
Vittorio De Sica wanted to make a film that showed a more positive side to life rather than the more downbeat films he had been making. Vittorio De Sica wrote that he made Miracolo a Milano (1951) in order to show how the "common man" can exist given the realities of life: "It is true that my people have already attained happiness after their own fashion; precisely because they are destitute, these people still feel - as the majority of ordinary men perhaps no longer do - the living warmth of a ray of winter sunshine, the simple poetry of the wind. They greet water with the same pure joy as Saint Francis did."
Actor/director Danny DeVito has watched this movie more than any other--more times than he can count.