Mario Martone

Alberto Angela takes us on a new journey, this time to discover Italy's "Wonders," those that make us a true "peninsula of treasures." Four episodes, twelve stops on an itinerary of art and natural beauty in UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Rome. The 1980s. After the magnum opus The Art of Joy she has been working on for a decade is rejected by the Italian publishing world, writer Goliarda Sapienza commits a desperate theft that costs her her reputation and social position. Incarcerated in Italy’s largest female prison, she finds herself living alongside thieves, junkies, sex workers and revolutionaries. After her release, she continues to meet with these women and over the course of a sweltering summer, a life-changing relationship flowers – a relationship that will reawaken her the desire to live and to write.

Felice returns to his native Rione Sanità in Naples to look after his dying mother, having lived abroad for the last forty years. Here he discovers that his old friend Oreste has become a notorious crimeboss.

When her elderly mother is found dead under sordid circumstances, Delia returns to her native Naples for the first time in years to attend the funeral. Trying to piece together her estranged parent's secret life, she'll face the hidden memories that shaped her family history.

Antonio Barracano is a respected figure among the Neapolitan underworld, keeping order and administering justice according to his own criteria, beyond the law. One day he's faced with a dilemma after a youth asks him permission to kill his father.

The life of a dying young man at the short age of only forty-one after playing the lead in Il postino. He was a brilliant stage actor before becoming an astonishing film director.

A couple of bourgeois intellectuals, Carlo and Silvia, have been married for twenty years. While she lives in their flat in Rome, he spends most of his time in the country house where he writes his books, openly living with his younger lover, Lù. In return, Carlo has long accepted that her wife may have lovers, but her volatile relationship with a young neo-fascist suddenly rekindles his jealousy.

1828. After witnessing the brutal repression of revolutions in monarchist South, three young friends join Giuseppe Mazzini's patriotic cause, seeking to finally unify Italy under a republican government. Their idealism will clash with the inevitable disillusionment as they grow apart over the following decades.

In 1914, with Italy on the cusp of joining World War I, a group of foreign artists establishes a commune on the rural island of Capri, catching the attention of young Lucia, a local illiterate shepherdess who soon falls under their spell.

In early 20th-century Naples, a theatrical parody lands beloved thespian and playwright Eduardo Scarpetta in court, facing a malicious lawsuit that could compromise his freedom of expression and the economic security of his extended family—including his son's, young Eduardo De Filippo.

In 19th-century Italy, Giacomo Leopardi channels his debilitating illness and isolation into poetry.

A group of actors meet with little money in a unofficial theatre in Naples' Spanish Boroughs. Director's plan is to travel to Sarajevo, still under siege, to stage a classic Eschilus' play about civil war in Tebe. While they rehearse in the theatre cast members come and go and another kind of war goes on every day in nearby streets of old Naples.

Naples, 1959. Pure Mathematics professor Renato Caccioppoli, Bakunin's grandson, is a tortured soul. Recently discharged from the psychiatric hospital, left by his wife, and increasingly disillusioned with academia and the Communist Party, he lives his last days with painful detachment.

Five Neapolitan directors depict life in the city under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius for this anthology film of comedy, drama, surrealism, and political commentary.

1965: Paris, London and Milan all move at the same fast pace, fueled by a fresh creative and rebellious impetus. Guido Crepax picks up on this energy and transfers it to a comic strip in which art, music, design, film and fashion all blend together, breaking with traditional narrative structure. The dreamy photographer Valentina becomes Crepax' alter ego: as lovely as Louise Brooks, as disturbing as one of Lucio Fontana's slashed canvases, as knowing as Bob Dylan's lyrics, and as freewheeling as Charlie Parker's compositions.

The plot takes place in the Bay of Naples in the 18th century. Deeply convinced of women's infidelity, the cynical Don Alfonso provokes his young friends Ferrando and Guglielmo by impugning the constancy of their fiancées, sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi.

Sergio Citti talks about a video he shot in 1975 after Pier Paolo Pasolini's death.

Hillary Clinton, Roberto Saviano, Jonathan Franzen and others weigh-in on the Elena Ferrante "craze" and what makes her work - and her mysterious persona - so uniquely captivating.

Rome, Esquilino, summer. Rossella returns to Rome after years of absence and returns to her home, rented to her friend Salvatore, the set designer. The woman is gripped by an evident depression and wanders around the city that she does not recognize and that no longer recognizes her. People have changed and Rossella finds no one capable of answering the obsessive question that has plagued her for some time: "How can I disappear?"

Falstaff is Verdi’s masterpiece of comic opera, in which the behaviour of the ageing Sir John Falstaff, a devious freeloader and would-be ladykiller, causes uproar in the petty-bourgeois household of the Windsor’s. In this performance stage and film director Mario Martone updates the action to the present day and shows Falstaff as ageing rebel in dodgy sideburns and leather jacket.