As soon as he graduated from the Naples Conservatory, Vincenzo Bellini meets Maddalena Fumaroli and immediately falls in love with her.

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.

A story, set in Rome of 44 A.D., concerning the amorous and political intrigues of the evil Empress Messalina, the wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and her eventual hounding to death.

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.

France, 1860. A young widow is wrongly accused of murder and, after serving many years in prison, she escapes to find the real culprit.

A taxi driver, with singing ambitions, finds an abandoned baby in his cab and begins to look for his mother. He doesn't find her but succeeds in finding two people who want to adopt the child.

Film version of the Verdi opera about lovers on the run after the accidental death of the girl's father.

A hypnotist uses his powers for revenge against King Louis XV's court.

Azucena, daughter of a Gypsy burnt at the stake, to take her revenge kidnaps one of the children of Count de Luna and raises him in secret as her own.

A pair of Poles deported to Siberia are taken to the army formed by General Anders and along the battle trail.

An opera singer hides an American soldier in his house in Nazi-occupied Rome.

Eugenia is a daughter of a wealthy but miserly man living a simple life in the provincial town of Saumur. Eugenia's inexperience leads her to fall in love with an unworthy man.

This tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigoletto, and Rigoletto's beautiful daughter Gilda. The opera's original title, La maledizione (The Curse), refers to the curse placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter had been seduced by the Duke with Rigoletto's encouragement. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda likewise falls in love with the Duke and eventually sacrifices her life to save him from the assassins hired by her father.

Emma, who is married to lawyer Giulio Scarli, is secretly in love with Fabrizio Arcieri, who works with her husband.

The occupation of Bessarabia by the Russians in 1940 separates an opera singer from her family, leaving her under Bolshevik rule until Romanian troops enter Odessa.

An Italian emigrant, who found fame and success in America, comes back to his hometown after over twenty years.

A young woman teaches commercial writing and makes her students practice by writing letters addressed to an imaginary recipient from Vienna. One day, the love letter the woman writes to this non-existent man is accidentally sent by one of her students –and falls into the hands of a real person.

The life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Venice Film Festival 1940