Diana di San Marino

Based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol written in 1842. A lowly office worker's new overcoat transforms his bleak and invisible existence. Unfortunately, this new lease of life is short-lived.

Foreign spies steal the formula for a revolutionary explosive created by an Italian scientist and to decrypt the secret code they kidnap his secretary who knows about it.

Anna, a rich lady, decides to finance in great secrecy a singular enterprise: the founding of a real center for the creation of ideas, directed by Mario Morelli, a poet and songwriter perpetually waiting for great success, and a painter, Enrico Bovio, who cannot find the inspiration or the model for a portrait of a woman he wants to finish. Both are short of money and, convinced of the brilliance of their ideas, wish to open that bizarre business, called precisely the "Bazaar of Ideas".