Pane e tulipani (Bread and tulips) 2000 Italy (116 minutes) directed and cowritten by Silvio Soldini
An Italian housewife on a tour bus holiday with her boisterous extended family and friends comes out of a highway rest area bathroom just in time to see the bus depart without her. 
Rosalba Maresanto Barletta (Licia Maglietta) is the perfect housewife. She prepares the meals. She cleans the house. She does the laundry and irons the shirts. She is a sympathetic listener.
She has done these things so well for so long that her quiet, uncomplaining efficiency is automatic to paterfamilias Mimmo (Antonio Catania), owner of a bathroom supply company in Pescara, to her two teenage sons Nicola (Tiziano Cucchiarelli) and Salvo (Matteo Febo), to her own family and in-laws.
Sitting on the steps waiting for the bus to come back, Rosalba thinks of all the household things she could be doing at home. A bohemian woman (Daniela Piperno) passing her on the steps offers her a ride. Rather than hold up the tour, Rosalba decides to get herself home from outside Salerno (the tour’s last stop had been the classical site Paestum) to Pescara on the Adriatic coast, roughly 350 kilometers away. This way, she could have a little quiet time to herself.
But it is summer vacation, after all. If quiet time is what she wants, and she is on the road, she has never been to Venice. When she mentions this to a subsequent driver headed north, he tells her that Venice is not far out of his way and offers to take her there. Then he asks her to drive while he sleeps.
As Rosalba nears her home exit behind the wheel, she sees a boy in the back seat of a passing car hold a hand-drawn sign against the window, with a cartoon bubble pointing to his mouth in which he wrote ‘Cercasi nuovi genitori’—seeking new parents. She passes the Pescara exit and keeps heading north.
The story that takes shape is like something Pedro Almodóvar cooked up in his early films, complete with the lollipop colors. It has some of Almodóvar’s effervescence, many of the same kind of characters, and a lot of the fun.
In Venice, Rosalba meets there is Fernando Girasole (Bruno Ganz), a waiter at the Marco Polo Chinese Restaurant. Fernando, originally from Iceland, speaks a formally correct and floridly polite Italian. The deeply depressive Fernando offers to put her up at his apartment when she misses her train home. Fernando’s neighbor Grazia Reginella (Marina Massironi) is holistic beautician and masseuse with man problems. 
Rosalba is in touch with her husband by telephone, but keeps missing her train home by minutes. Fernando invites her to stay. Fermo (Felice Andreasi) an old anarchist florist who eats garlic like candy, tells Rosalba through narrowed eyes that she looks like the 19th century Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich and hires her as his assistant.
Rosalba's life begins to assume the contours and colors of a contemporary Cindarella story. The only problem is, of course: no one is preparing food, cleaning the house, and ironing shirts back in Pescara. Italian menfolk are constitutionally unable to do these things at home and Mimmo’s mistress of five years, Aunt Ketty (Vitalba Andrea)—Rosalba’s sister—makes it clear to Mimmo right away that she don’t do no stinkin’ ironing.
The story rounds the zany bend when Mimmo hires a private detective to get to the bottom of the matter.
Costantino Caponangeli (Giuseppe Battiston), a mother-ridden plumber and amateur detective whose main qualification is that he has read 285-and-a-half detective novels, is an Italian John Candy. 
He is also about as inconspicuous as John Candy would have been in Venice in summer in a trench coat, floppy hat, and flip-up shades.
An effective device Soldini uses to share Rosalba’s thoughts and give us her backstory is to animate these in waking visions, with figures such as her mother-in-law, the bohemian woman who gave her the first ride, and Mimmo and her sons appearing from nowhere to speak to her from the back of her mind.
This is a fun comic ensemble piece that tells a serious story in an entertaining way. Enjoy the ride!
Fatih Akin’s In July, a hip take on A Midsummer’s Night Dream, is another fun summer European vacation road trip romantic comedy by a skilled auteur.
Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr7WImqnKBM
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