Andrea Buscemi

Elba island, 1814. Martino is a young teacher, idealist and strongly anti Napoleon, in love with the beautiful and noble Baroness Emily. The young man finds himself serving as librarian to the Great Emperor in exile, whom he deeply hates, yet soon begins recording Napoleon's memoirs, getting to know and learning to value the man behind the myth. Among seductions and affairs, expectations and fears, he will craft a precise portrait that nevertheless will not manage to hide a final, inevitable, disappointment.

The film is set in mid-16th century, at a time when the entire eastern Mediterranean is dominated by two great empires, the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice, with the small but wealthy maritime republic of Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) managing to maintain its independence through diplomatic agreements.

Jacopo, Duccio, Cecco, Manfredo and Filippo are five friends who live in Florence of the fifteenth century, during a plague epidemic.

Five friends forge their resumes and enroll to Oxford in orders to help one of them end up with the girl he's in love with.

Five searches for love unfold in interconnected stories in which fathers, daughters and male suitors try to perfect love matches based on astrology.