A satire of modern society or perhaps just a funny tale for children, depending on your age, mood or liking. Recounting the adventures of the last in a line of Supermen, the film pokes fun at the processes that lie behind advertising, politics and our consumer society.
The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.
Nobleman Rainiero, Sidonia's duke son, comes back home with his friend Renzo. Soon after arrival, Renzo will get in a big trouble and he will be forced to choose between going to church for marriage or going to prison.
The baron of Santafusca, descended from a noble family, leads a dissipated life. To pay debts he is forced to sell his house. He tries to steal from the house of a very rich priest and, surprised during the theft, he kills the priest, and then throws the body in an abandoned well. He continues his life of revelries and luxury, until the remorse for the crime trigger a process of self-destruction. The nightmares of the baron, tormented by the only evidence left of the murder, the hat of the priest ,drags him into a daring and hallucinated series of ups and downs to the brink of insanity and jail.
In Italy, in 1736, Pergolese is in love with Maria. But Maria's brother, Count Raniero, forbids his sister to marry a modest composer. Pergolese kidnaps the young girl, but they are caught. Maria is locked up in her castle while Pergolese dies in the convent that takes him in.