Young swain Toto Esposito tries to abduct his beloved to marry her, but he makes a mistake: he kidnaps an ugly woman named Carmela, who loves him--and chases him when he escapes.

In the year 180 A.D. Germanic tribes are about to invade the Roman empire from the north. In the midst of this crisis ailing emperor Marcus Aurelius has to make a decision about his successor between his son Commodus, who is obsessed by power, and the loyal general Gaius Livius.

During the bombing of Naples in World War II, a cynical businessman helps a naive prostitute, who spends the next two decades desperate to have him reciprocate her feelings.

Two neighbours — a persecuted journalist and a resigned housewife — forge a strong bond on the day of Adolf Hitler's historic 1938 visit to Rome.

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?

In seaside Italy, a Holocaust survivor with a daycare business takes in a 12-year-old street kid who recently robbed her.

Tongue-in-cheek look at the French Riviera, especially in summer when it overflows with tourists. Reviews its history and famous visitors; displays its faux-exotic buildings, its crowded beaches, its trees and monuments; and, pokes fun at the colors women wear and the vagaries of fashion. The film celebrates the use of "Eden" as a place name, suggesting that paradise comes to the coast after all are gone, perhaps only on a remote island beach.

After fierce Roman commander Marcus Vinicius becomes infatuated with beautiful Christian hostage Lygia, he begins to question the tyrannical leadership of the despotic emperor Nero.

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.

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.

In the 16th century, poet, playwright and part-time actor Miguel de Cervantes has been arrested, together with his manservant, by the Spanish Inquisition. They're accused of presenting an entertainment offensive to the Inquisition. Inside the huge dungeon into which they have been cast, the other inmates gang up on Cervantes and his manservant, staging a mock trial, with the intention of stealing or burning his possessions. Cervantes wishes to desperately save a manuscript he carries with him and stages, with costumes, makeup, and the participation of the other prisoners, an unusual defense—the story of Don Quixote.