Guido, an acclaimed author, leads an idyllic life with his beautiful wife and teenage daughter. But despite his seemingly perfect existence, Guido's restless search for inspiration leads him into the arms of Giulia, a charming and mysterious swim instructor, who is hiding a secret from her past.
A relationship develops between seasoned actor Stefano and his young, ambitious co-star Laura when they are cast as the two leads in a film. Stefano must deal with his growing jealousy when Laura's career begins to take off.
After a rough divorce, Frances, a 35-year-old professor and writer from San Francisco takes a tour of Tuscany at the urgings of her friends. On a whim she buys Bramasole, a run down villa in the Tuscan countryside and begins to piece her life together starting with the villa and finds that life sometimes has unexpected ways of giving her everything she wanted.
In autumn of 1526, the Emperor, Charles V, sends his German landsknechts led by Georg von Frundsberg to march towards Rome. The inferior papal armies, commanded by Giovanni de'Medici, try to chase them in the midst of a harsh winter. Nevertheless, the Imperial armies manage to cross the rivers along their march and get cannons thanks to the maneuvers of its Lords. In a skirmish, Giovanni de'Medici is wounded in the leg by a falconet shot. The attempts to cure him fail and he dies. The Imperial armies assault Rome. The film is beautifully but unassumingly set, and shows the hard conditions in which war is waged and its lack of glory. It ends straightforwardly with the declaration made after the death of Giovanni de'Medici by the commanders of the armies in Europe of not using again fire weapons because of their cruelty.
A young man enters the Rome Metro with a friend, where they notice a woman who has just left the restroom with her dress accidentally tucked into her panties. They tell her about her inadvertent exposure, after which one of the boys boards a train, leaving his besotted friend standing on the platform - totally smitten with the lovely young lady. The two are waiting on opposite platforms, where they await the last train. The young man proclaims his love at first sight - telling her she's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. Obviously flattered, the woman reciprocates in a way the young man will never forget...
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.