Bread and Tulips – (2000, Italian/subtitles) A romantic comedy in the manner of Chocolat, released  the same year. Rosalba Baretta (Licia Maglietta), a klutzy housewife of the owner of a plumbing-and-fixtures business, hitchhikes to Venice after her husband and two teenage boys leave her behind at a bus stop during a vacation when she drops her earring into the toilet and has to take extra time to fish it out.

Her first ride is with a liberated divorcee who left her husband to open a bakery; a young German takes her the rest of the way. In Venice, a city she’s never before seen, she meets Fernando Girasoli (Bruno Ganz), a suicidal waiter originally from Iceland who lets apartments, and rediscovers her ability to play the accordion. After her first day in Venice, she misses the train back to her family in Pescara but then decides to take a job with an elderly florist, Fermo, who says he’s descended from a long line of anarchists.

Corpulent Constantino Caponangeli (Giuseppe Battiston) applies for a position as a plumber with Rosalba’s husband who hires him to find Rosalba because the young man has included on his résumé that he reads detective fiction. With some pluck and luck Constantino finds Rosalba as well as her neighbor Grazia, a professional masseuse, who falls in love with him after he repairs her plumbing. In Rosalba’s presence Fernando feels the phoenix rising from his ashes as she applies her own sleuthing to his fascinating past.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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