Pane e tulipani

It was really a fairly innocent affair, the kind of story you tell at family parties as a nice anecdote: `Remember, when the bus left and we hadn’t realised that Mum wasn’t on board?’ But when that really happens to Roselba and the excursion bus drives off without her, it forms a turning point in her life. Suddenly Roselba, a respectable and dedicated housewife and mother, realises that the door is open to a different and more adventurous life. She decides to hitch a ride to Venice, to spend the day there. That day soon becomes a couple of days and then a couple of weeks. She finds a job with an anarchist florist, lives with a man from Iceland with a poetic turn of phrase (Bruno Ganz) and reawakens the old passion for accordion music. When her husband thinks that Roselba has been on holiday long enough, he hires a shy plumber friend with a passion for detective novels to find her. But Roselba, who has finally found happiness and friendship in a fairytale Venice, is not planning to give up her new life. This is the starting point for a series of comic and romantic events, visualised in a charming and familiar way by Silvio Soldini, whose neorealistic Un’anima divisa in due was previously screened in Rotterdam. Pane e tulipani won no less than nine Italian Academy Awards in Italy.