The best Marisa Traversi’s drama movies

Three directors each adapt a Poe short story to the screen: "Toby Dammit" features a disheveled drugged and drunk English movie star who nods acceptance in the Italian press and his producers fawn over him. "Metzengerstein" features a Mediveal countess who has a love-hate relationship with a black stallion - who it turns out is really her dead lover. "William Wilson" tells the story of a sadistic Austrian student with an exact double whom he later kills.

At the end of World War II, Giovanna, a war bride living near Milan refuses to accept that her husband, Antonio, missing on the Russian front, is dead. There's a flashback to their brief courtship near her hometown of Naples, his 12-day leave to marry her, ruses to keep from deployment, and the ultimate farewell. Some years after the war, still with no word from Antonio, Giovanna goes to Russia to find him, starting in the town near the winter battle when he disappeared. Armed with his photograph, what will she find?

After being raped by her father, Ingrid moves to Rome and ends up becoming a prostitute. She finds a friend in Claudia, but Claudia's protector is a sadistic thug by the name of Renato who will show her the worst of the what life in the city has to offer.

Around the year 1500, the Italian priest Don Filippo Neri helps street kids and orphans in his poor little chapel. He is no clergyman by the book, but a true believer in terms good and bad and he teaches this to his children. Neri is not very well-seen by the church and his only "friend" is the dry, humorless Ignatius De Loyola. But Neris real counterpart is the devil himself, working in endless incarnations in Neris direct neighborhood, trying to seduce his kids. His newest kid is the young thief Cirifischio, making a lot of problems. When Cirifischio has an argument with a young boy of a local aristocrat, the boy turns out to be a girl, the young Leonetta, some kind of a sex slave for her owner. Neri adopts her too, and the young people fall in love. 15 Years later, the devil is back and leads Cirifiscio onto a murder. Now lawless, the thief must flee Neri and leave Leonetta back...

In the city of Ostuni in Puglia, the mute seminarian Ercole is designated to be the driver and nurse of Parsifal, the paraplegic son in a rich and sanctimonious family of landowners. Ercole soon becomes the lover of his master's wife, the beautiful Baroness Clotilde. In a familial and social context where only money, sex and power count, everyone tries to take advantage of everyone, but the real saprophyte turns out to be Ercole.