Based in part on his autobiography, director Franco Zeffirelli's Tea with Mussolini is a story about a group of British and American travelers on an indefinite visit to Italy in 1935. Luca is a boy living in Florence whose family situation is precarious at best; his mother has run off and his father has little time for him. Fortunately, he's a welcome guest with Mary, a English woman visiting Italy to soak up European culture. Mary and her friends...

At the end of World War II, a mysterious, horribly burned man who claims not to remember his name, known only as the "English patient," lies near death in an Italian villa. He is cared for by a quietly desperate young nurse, Hana, herself a victim of the war. With her at the villa are Kip, a young Sikh bomb-disposal expert, and a shadowy thief with bandaged hands named Caravaggio. The key to the burned man's past may lie in his commonplace book,...