Peddlin' in Society

Unemployed Antonio is elated when he finally finds work hanging posters around war-torn Rome. However on his first day, his bicycle—essential to his work—gets stolen. His job is doomed unless he can find the thief. With the help of his son, Antonio combs the city, becoming desperate for justice.

Three partisans bound by a strong friendship return home after the war, but the clash with everyday reality puts a strain on their bond.

An English nurse and an American soldier on the Italian front during World War I fall in love, but the horrors surrounding them test their romance to the limit.

During the Nazi occupation of 1944 Rome, Resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is pursued by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a means of escape.

A young widow flees from Rome during WWII and takes her lonely twelve-year-old-daughter to her rural hometown but the horrors of war soon catch up with them.

After World War II, a woman refuses to believe her husband, missing on the Russian front, is dead. Flashbacks reveal their brief courtship and marriage. Years later, she travels to Russia with his photo, determined to find him. What will she discover?

Mastro Geppetto is a poor carpenter with no wife and no children. The man is very lonely, and after trading a piece of wood with his colleague Mastro Ciliegia, decides to build himself a puppet to keep him company.

An anthology of four comic moral tales about the hypocrisies surrounding sex in 1960s Italy: frothy young love and office politics in the big city; milk advertisements that begin to haunt an aging prude; a trophy wife enduring her husband's very public affairs; a lucky ticket-holder at a small town fair.

During World War II, Italian villagers hide their wine from the German army.

A virtually plotless, gaudy, impressionistic portrait of Rome through the eyes of one of its most famous citizens.

Val Xavier, a drifter of obscure origins, arrives at a small town and gets a job in a store run by Lady Torrence. Her husband, Jabe M. Torrance, is dying of cancer. Val is pursued by Carol Cutere, the enigmatic local tramp-of-good-family.

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

A grieving widow embarks on a new romance when she discovers her late husband had been cheating on her.

A lecherous governor of Naples in 1680 lusts after the wives of several peasants, particularly after the miller's wife Carmela. The miller himself plans to avenge his honor by seducing the wife of the governor.

Among others, Ernesto returns to Turin after the war from a German POW camp; his household destroyed and family deceased, he tries making an honest living.

The relationships between a veteran marshal, his bride-to-be, a rookie and his fiancée are severely tested when the young carabiniere is temporarily sent to a distant town.

When a veteran marshal is sent to a small town, he quickly falls for two women: a midwife and an earthy young woman nicknamed "Frisky".

A naive clerk finds himself involved in the theft of a ring containing a dangerous liquid.

A day at an Italian trial court, where a magistrate judges a full array of peculiar petty crimes and characters.

Once upon a time a wise and kind old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Totò, enters an orphanage. Totò leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He ends up with the homeless and organizes them to build a shanty town in a vacant lot. But when greedy developers threaten the community’s land, Totò will need all the help he can get in order to find an impossible way out.

A widowed Nevada rancher goes to Italy and marries the sister of his deceased wife and brings her back to the ranch, but his haunting memories of his lost love and her tendency to drift away to other men cause the two to have a tough time at keeping a marriage together.

Agnese has many men who woo her and live with her cousin Cesira, who has the opposite problem with men and wishes she would also have men woo her.

A viceroy, a nobleman and a bullfighter court a comedy-troupe actress in 18th-century Peru.

A former prostitute and a little Polish girl are survivors of a train crash. The woman wishes to adopt the child, but her past makes that difficult.

Back to his hometown, a former marshal finds his house occupied by a young woman working as a fishwife.

Six episodes (adapted from as many short stories: Gozzano, D'Annunzio, Guido Rocca, Marino Moretti, Alba de Céspedes and Oreste Biancoli), six love stories set in different moments in italian recent history.

The life and loves of great composer Giuseppe Verdi are played against a background of the great operas of the 19th Century. A tender love story of his successful and turbulent life, with more than 20 excerpts from his acclaimed operas.

Two twin brothers grew up and never met (due to the fact that the father with the couple would have had 13 children and therefore for superstition he closed one in an orphanage), the one goalkeeper of Juventus and the other employee at the state lottery.

A peasant leader under the enlightened despotism of Empress Catherine the Great, and a love story.

Antonio is the humble servant of a rich family governed by the Marquis Gastone. He is a young man madly in love with Lulu, but she betrays him, and he desperately enlist in the foreign legion.

Guido and Cristina fall in love, but she is betrothed to a solider. When he is reported killed they hope to marry, but his reappearance without his limbs makes matters difficult for all concerned.

In the village of Viggiù, the firemen organize various skits and performances in their theater, inviting all the celebrities known at that time.

Ernesto is the teacher of the village, he is married and he is dominated by his wife. He has the passion of the theatre and he has written a drama in verse named "Il ratto delle Sabine". Unfortunately he has only an admirer and she is their servant Rosina. When the touring company of Prof. Tromboni arrives in the village, Ernesto decides to let them perform his play, though anonymously. So the day arrives and the theatre is sadly empty. But when the news that the author is the teacher spreads far and wide...

Wrongly accused of his wife's death, a marine officer is forced to resign and sees his life fall apart.

In 1948, a fan letter arrived for director Roberto Rossellini from Ingrid Bergman, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars; after a meeting in New York, Rossellini invited Bergman to Italy to work on a project. Meanwhile, Anna Magnani, one of Italy’s biggest stars and Rossellini’s longtime lover, was furious. When the Rossellini/Bergman project was announced as a tale set on Stromboli, one of the volcanic Aeolian Islands, Magnani quickly set up her own Aeolian project, financed by Hollywood, to be called Volcano. Italy’s tabloids simply went wild: the prospect of these two great divas battling it out with rival productions was breathlessly followed, especially as it became clear that the Rossellini/Bergman relationship was more than professional. Francesco Patierno has created an engrossing, revealing and highly entertaining chronicle of this cinematic battle royal.

A famous painting by Antonello da Messina, "the man with a gray glove", has been entrusted to an old restorer. When, subsequently, the painting is withdrawn from the restorer's studio and exposed, the art critic Drago discovers that it is not the original, but a copy.