Adriano Pantaleo
Mario Martone brings Eduardo De Filippo’s play Il Sindaco del Rione Sanità to the big screen, a story the director sets in the present day, using the text as an opportunity to continue to investigate reality. The protagonist, Antonio Barracano, is a “man of honour” who distinguishes between “decent people and scoundrels”; around him flourishes a fierce, ambiguous and pained humanity, where good and evil confront each other in every character, where the two cities people always speak about in Naples (the legal and the criminal) clash in an encounter neither can win.
Art and nature are the touchstones of this gloriously theatrical, gorgeously scenic spin on "The Tempest." A shipwreck makes for strange stage-fellows when a group of convicted Camorra criminals and a ragtag company of actors wash up together on the Mediterranean prison island where warden Don Vincenzo (Carpentieri) lives with his restless daughter Miranda. When the gangsters infiltrate the theatrical troupe, Don Vincenzo commands them to put on a performance of "The Tempest" in order to separate the thugs from the thespians. Writer-director Cabiddu draws inspiration from both Shakespeare and Eduardo de Filippo, the great Neapolitan playwright whose influence is seen in the film’s enchanting mixture of the earthy and the fanciful. Veteran actor Rubini excels as the hangdog leader of the troupe, but the real star of the film is the unspoiled island of Asinara off the northwest tip of Sardinia.
Milanese and Naples people go to Cortina d'Ampezzo on Christmas holidays
On his death bed in the 1820s, King Ferdinando I of Naples tries to escape the ghosts of his bloody kingship by remembering his younger days, when he was allowed to go hunting and have fun, and inventing love games. Then he was obliged to marry Mary Caroline of Austria, daughter of Empress Mary Theresa, in a political marriage: unexpectedly, they became happy lovers, until court power games divided them, and a different historical season arrived.
A bureaucratic snafu sends Marco Tullio Sperelli, a portly, middle-aged northern Italian, to teach third grade in a poor town outside Naples
