In 1999, exactly 20 years ago, Silvio Soldini shot his romantic comedy Bread and Tulips starring Licia Maglietta and the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, who died earlier this year, in February.
The film, awarded 9 David di Donatello and 5 Nastri d’Argento prizes, is a love letter to the city of Venice which the main character Rosalba (Licia Maglietta) looks on with infinite wonder. Having been left behind at a motorway cafe by her family and their compatriots from Pescara, with whom they were on a short trip, she decides to take a break from her daily life in the lagoon city. When she gets to Piazzale Roma, the main road leading to the centre of the capital of the Veneto region, Rosalba has decided that she will stay just the one night, enough time to see Piazza San Marco. However, a series of events will lead to her extending her “holiday” to the extent that she even finds herself a job in a (fictional) flower shop in Campiello dei Miracoli. Her husband, in disagreement with this choice, commissions a goofy investigator-plumber (Giuseppe Battiston) to look for her who eventually finds her in Campo do Pozzi, a large square with a well at its centre, but only after several days of searching, during which time he criss-crosses the centre of the city back and forth, from Campi and Canali to Ponti and Fondamenta.