In Piazza San Domenico

In Piazza San Domenico, is a comedy of errors that takes place in a bustling neighbourhood of 1952 Naples. It recounts the story of how one broken engagement ripples through friends and family, affecting all of their respective lives in different ways. The young and beautifully earthy Carmelina faints in the arms of the town philanderer, Tonino, setting off a wave of malicious gossip that seems to infect everyone in town with second thoughts about their current partners--and inexplicable desires for new ones--as often as not consummated on that shadowed spot of carpet behind the statue of San Francesco in the church on the town square. Finally, as if the very gods are angry with these salacious goings-on, an earthquake hits the town, sending the characters into the piazza and keeping them there for the night with a series of ominous aftershocks. As the sun rises, misunderstandings are resolved; the truth will out; and hardened hearts yield to the eternally verdant desires for life. In a world hovering between traditional values and emancipated new thinking, Italian theatrical archetypes with their roots in Roman comedies and the Commedia dell'arte evolve into the recognizable stereotypes of mid-twentieth-century society that were to become hallmarks of the whimsical Sophia Loren/Marcello Mastroianni films of the early 1960s.