The best Attilio Dottesio’s romance movies

Since her husband pronounced her frigid on her wedding night, Antonia DeAngelis has been an invalid. When he disappears, she believes him dead: she leaves her bed and takes over his business, traveling to see clients. She discovers her husband's passions, his political writing, mistresses, and his indifference to the peasants on her family's land. She improves their lot, begins an affair with a young foreign doctor, and publishes her husband's writings. All this time, he's hiding from a murder charge in a house across the square. Amazed, he watches her become his sexual and social equal. After the police drop the murder charge, will he disappear, end his life, or rejoin her on new terms?

This slight skewering of the mindset of the Fascist era when Italy’s “White Telephone” films (conservative minded sophisticated comedy-dramas revolving around the bourgeoisie) were in vogue gives Agostina Belli her best role – an ambitious Venetian girl that goes from chambermaid to prostitute to singer to film-star to mistress of ‘Il Duce’! – for which she received a special David Di Donatello award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar.

This adaptation of Stendhal's timeless masterpiece of French literature tells the tale of Fabrice Del Dongo (Grard Philipe) a young archibishop who gives his heart and soul to romance rather than to the Church creating upheaval in the lives of evergone around him the Countess of Sanseverine (Maria Casares) is but one of the may women who love him. In turn she incurs jealous retributions from those in high places who desire her. For his crimes Fabrice is thrown in Prison where from Crimes Fabrice is thrown in prison where form his lonely window he falls in love with his jailer s daughter and plans a daring escape she however calls his plan insane and takes a vow to the Virgin Mary to never see him again ever if his escape succeeds the Charterhouse of Parma explodes with conflicting desires man s desire form God vs. his desire for romance.