Anna Teresa Rossini

Phaethon asks to ride the sun chariot for a day. Helios tries to dissuade his son – but in vain. When the night ends, Phaethon mounts his father's precious sun chariot. The four horses race off but soon, control of the chariot is lost. Phaethon leaves the daily route between Heaven and Earth, triggering a catastrophe of universal proportions.

Four tales unfold in the Eternal City: While vacationing in Rome, architect John encounters a young man whose romantic woes remind him of a painful incident from his own youth; retired opera director Jerry discovers a mortician with an amazing voice, and he seizes the opportunity to rejuvenate his own flagging career; a young couple have separate romantic interludes; a spotlight shines on an ordinary man.

The film chronicles the melancholy journey of two celebrity look-alikes chasing their dream of la dolce vita in Italy. Romanian Marilyn Monroe impersonator Ileana and Bulgarian Elvis double Nicolaj win a look-alike contest in Bucharest in which the prize is a summer engagement in a nightclub on Italy's Adriatic coast. The two strangers take off together, communicating in the broken Italian they picked up from TV. When a bureaucratic hitch with Ileana's passport cuts them off at the airport, they cross the border illegally by car, travelling through a part of Yugoslavia devastated by war. They accept hospitality at a military outpost, but the suicide of a colonel there casts suspicion on Ileana. Beaten and afraid, they continue their odyssey across the harsh sunless no-man's-land gradually scarring them both and clouding their hopes. They finally reach Italy, but all is not as promised.

The complicated travails of several generations of Italian women provide the basis for this drama that is based on a novel by Susanna Tamaro. It begins with the peaceful death of Olga, the elderly family matriarch. Marta, her granddaughter returns from the US to attend the funeral and once in Olga's villa in Trieste, begins reading her grandmother's diary. Olga's story unfolds via flashback. As a young woman, Oldga had to marry Antonio a man she didn't love. Later she became passionately involved with a handsome doctor at the local spa. He impregnates her and shortly thereafter dies in a terrible car wreck. The result of their love is Illaria, who grows up to be terribly neurotic. She bears Marta and then she too dies in an automobile accident, leaving Marta to be raised by Olga.

The complicated travails of several generations of Italian women provide the basis for this drama that is based on a novel by Susanna Tamaro. It begins with the peaceful death of Olga, the elderly family matriarch. Marta, her granddaughter returns from the US to attend the funeral and once in Olga's villa in Trieste, begins reading her grandmother's diary. Olga's story unfolds via flashback. As a young woman, Oldga had to marry Antonio a man she didn't love. Later she became passionately involved with a handsome doctor at the local spa. He impregnates her and shortly thereafter dies in a terrible car wreck. The result of their love is Illaria, who grows up to be terribly neurotic. She bears Marta and then she too dies in an automobile accident, leaving Marta to be raised by Olga.

Tommaso goes incredible lengths to win back the love of his former girlfriend Cecilia, but sometimes things change in the most unexpected way.

The lives of three generations of peasant farmers in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy are the focus of this unexciting, flat-footed saga by Florestano Vancini. When the grandfather (Marne Maitland) first decides to leave his job of canal-building and move to northern Italy, he takes up work as a peasant on the land of a local priest, while his oldest son Venancio (Massimo Ghini) starts driving a carriage. More of a visionary than a chauffeur, Venancio first gets involved in organizing the peasants into a kind of farmer's union, and when that movement goes under, he devotes himself to educating the farmers instead. Along the way, his mother dies, he marries Mariena (Anna Teresa Rossini), and they have children. Much to Venancio's sorrow, his own sons do not want to stay in farming, and as they grow older, only one remains at home to till the soil. In the meantime, the specter of fascism is growing stronger by the day and the clouds of war being to darken the horizon.

Pasquale Bellachioma, the unfortunate Police Commissioner, creates a "master stroke" that can finally put it to light before their superiors, but the results is continuous failure.