Società Italiana Cines

Six episodes (adapted from as many short stories: Gozzano, D'Annunzio, Guido Rocca, Marino Moretti, Alba de Céspedes and Oreste Biancoli), six love stories set in different moments in italian recent history.

Bruno, a chauffeur having some problem in keeping a job, meets one morning Mariuccia, a taxi driver’s daughter working as a perfumery’s shop assistant, and trying to impress her, pretending to be rich, uses his employer’s car to took her on a trip to the lakes, but things don’t work as planned and to conquer Mariuccia’s hearth won’t be so easy…

Giovanni peddles useless pens in the streets of Rome with his sidekick Francesco, but his college-student daughter thinks he is a rich industrialist. She falls in love with a rich guy and when her father tells her the trust about their financial situation she drops her fiance and refuses food. Luckily, the guy's parents give their consent to the marriage anyway.

Mario and the new kid Franco gradually become the best of friends, but their friendship is tested when one of them wins a competition.

Sold as slaves to a wealthy Roman, Lea and Esther, two Carthaginian sisters, are offered as gifts to the ambitious daughter of a proconsul and end up involved in spite of themselves in a dangerous game of power.

Maria is a housmaid and she is being engaged to Berto for fifteen years. Berto has not a lasting job so he is waiting for the death of his uncle Matteo to come into an inheritance. In the meantime Maria goes on with her work, first in the house of an unfaithful wife; then for an actor and his wife on the verge of leaving each other and last for Raffaele who wants to marry her. At last uncle Matteo dies...

A number of different segments taken from 19th century Italian stories.

The owner of a lottery store refuses to pay a large sum won by one of his workers that he hates, because that man received the winning numbers in a dream.

In the military academy of the Nisida Air Force a new course begins which sees among the new recruits called "chicks": Giorgio, forced by his father after he squandered millions at the gaming table; De Montel son of a general, Mario who wants to follow in the footsteps of his father who died in combat; Antonio who declares himself Neapolitan while coming from the province and Ugo who comes from the north.

In 19th century southern Italy (near Melfi, Basilicata), a small force of soldiers fight in the hills against the bandits who are holding their country to ransom.

During the latter years of the reign of the tyrannical Roman emperor Nero, Marcus Vinicius, one of Nero's officers, falls in love with a young Christian named Lygia, attempting to enslave her. Lygia's protector, the noble and burly Ursus, works to save her from Vinicius' clutches. Pursuing Lygia, Vinicius finds himself at a catacomb prayer meeting led by the apostle Peter and finds his conscience stirring-- just as Nero orders Rome burned. A landmark in epic film, Enrico Guazzoni’s grand-scale masterpiece laid the foundations for what colossal Italian spectacles would become. The film had tremendous influence on Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) and D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

The film follows men from all walks of life, seeking to give meaning to their lives and rediscover their inner peace during a retreat in the “House of Silence”. For three days, they meditate on their lives.

After being hurt in the face, Count de Roger Tinchebraye is forced to hide his disfigured face behind a leather mask. Dispirited for a while, he decides to become a Casanova-like seductor. When he meets true love, cynical Roger does not believe in it and lets pure Judith marry an old marquis. But once Judith's husband dies, he sees Judith again, shows her his disfigured face, which does not discourage the young woman from loving him. Nevertheless, he distances himself from her forever

Based on Théophile Gautier's novel of the same name, the film tells of the tragic love affair of Ottavio de Saville. He falls madly in love with Madame Prascovie Labinska, a woman very faithful to her husband, the Polish count Olaf Labinski. Alarmed by the growing physical and mental weariness of the desperate young man, his relatives and friends decide to turn to Doctor Balthazar, who has just returned from a trip to the Indies where he was initiated into the secrets of Brahman.

An Italian comedy from 1943.

Nine episodes about life in Italy in the period just before its economic boom.

A family man travelling for work, Paolo Bianchi, meets on a train a lonely girl, Maria. He sees her again on a bus and she reveals him that she's in troubles: she's pregnant, her baby's father has left her and she doesn't know how to tell to her parents that she's not married. She asks Paolo to play the role of her husband and he accepts....

Four criminals commit a robbery at a soccer stadium, and then split up to try to hide separately from the police.

A Faustian tale about an old woman who makes a pact with Mephisto to regain her youth, but in return she must stay away from love. After making the deal, she meets two brothers who fall in love with her.

The story is the harried attempt of a Sicilian partisan, as part of the risorgimento, to reach Garibaldi's headquarters in Northern Italy, and to petition the revered revolutionary to rescue part of his besieged land. Along the way, the peasant hero encounters many colorful Italians, differing in class and age, and holding political opinions of every type. There is a key train scene, and the film ends on the battlefield, Italian unification a success, despite brutal losses.