The best Gisella Marengo’s drama movies

A rookie cop is assigned to the 118 Precinct in the same district where he grew up. The Precinct Captain starts receiving letters about two unsolved murders that happened many years ago in the housing projects when the rookie cop was just a kid. These letters bring back bad memories and old secrets that begin to threaten his career and break up his family.

Giuseppe Tornatore traces three generations of a Sicilian family in in the Sicilian town of Bagheria (known as Baarìa in the local Sicilian dialect), from the 1930s to the 1980s, to tell the story of the loves, dreams and delusions of an unusual community.

Bologna 1938 - Michele Casali is living a desperate situation: Giovanna, his only child, a teenager, has killed out of jealousy his classmate and best friend. Within the middle-class environment in which the crime has ocurred, the story provokes strong emotion and disbelief. Avoiding jail, she is determined to be mentally disturbed and therefore locked up in a psychiatric hospital in Reggio Emilia where she remains until the age of 24 years (1945). During this period of almost total isolation, the only person who takes care of her is the father who moves from Bologna specifically, where he taught art in high school Galvani, to Reggio.

Bologna, 1954. Taddeo, a young man of 18 whom everyone calls Kid, dreams of becoming one of the regulars of the mythical Margherita Café, located under the portico across from his family's home. Through a ploy, he manages to get work as the chauffeur for Al, the neighborhood's most glamorous and mysterious resident. Having been taken under Al's wing, Taddeo gets to witness the adventures of Bep, who is in love with Marcella the entraineuse; the trials and tribulations of Gian, an aspiring singer and the victim of a horrible practical joke; the crazy behavior of Manuelo, a small-time robber with a sex phobia; the meanness of Zanchi, inventor of the elastic necktie; and the bizarre manias of Sarti, a ballroom dancing champion who wears his tux day and night. And Taddeo's home life is no less out of the ordinary, considering his mother is being led on by the family physician while his grandfather has fallen head over heels for a well-built piano teacher.

The Pope's tailor sends his son, a virgin at 35, to Bologna hoping he will find a woman. Nello, a classicist moved by the romantic poetry of Ovid, proves to be a good teacher and also falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful Angela Gardini. Angela, herself recently blind and then spurned by her fiancé, uses Nello: she hopes her former lover will become jealous and return to her. Nello obliges, his head full of poetry and in love at last; he's happy to be near her, knowing that she, before her disability, wouldn't have looked twice at him. Bologna or Rome, teaching or stitching, love or solitude - will Nello make choices?