Summary
A moon-silvered prologue in 17th-century La Serenissima: a patrician with a price on his head skids through torch-lit calli, the Council of Ten’s ink still wet on his death warrant. He drags an iron-bound coffer of rubies, sapphires, and baroque pearls—ancestral blood crystallized—then drops it into a moss-choked well beneath a cypress shadow. The camera lingers on the ripple of history swallowing itself. Cut to today: Foscarina, last sprig of a dwindled stem, returns to the crumbling palazzo where salt-eaten portraits blink like guilty ghosts. A loose terracotta tile, a parchment map, a breath of centuries—all conspire to exhume the legend. Word leaks; a hydra-headed crew of lagoon predators—part antique smugglers, part crypto-bro aesthetes—sniff out the scent. Jewels vanish in a masquerade of drone-shot chase sequences across rooftops and moonlit canals. Enter Argo, a trench-coated mastermind whose mind is a kaleidoscope of fingerprints and Renaissance iconography. What follows is a chess match played with tarot cards: disguises, forgeries, acrobatic leaps from vaporetti, a finale inside the flooded crypt of San Michele where justice strikes like a church bell at dawn.
Synopsis
The story tells of the adventures of an Italian nobleman in the time of the Venetian republic. He was denounced as a traitor to the Council of Ten and had to flee for his life. He took the family treasure with him, burying it in an old well in the courtyard of a neighboring village. The prologue, which tells of this adventure, is provided with titles in the old Venetian script harmonizing with the costumes and the buildings of the day. Centuries elapsed between the prologue and the story proper. The latter is laid in modern Venice. A descendant of the Italian nobleman, a beautiful woman named Foscarina comes back to the halls of her ancestors and quite by accident discovers the secret of the buried family jewels. A prowling band of outlaws hears about the existence of the jewels at the same time and by a series of clever maneuvers gets possession of the precious heirlooms. Foscarina thereupon engages the services of a world-famous detective named Argo to ferret out the evildoers and to recover the property. A keen battle of the wits ensues, first the plotters gain an advantage and then the detective overmatches them, but the end finds justice triumphant. The gems are found and restored to the owner, while the schemers are turned over to the police.
Review Excerpt
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The first time we see the heirlooms they are not gems at all but globules of crimson candle-wax dripping onto parchment—an optical gag that prepares us for Gems of Foscarina’s sleight-of-hand ethos. Director-cinematographer Luciano Vetro shoots Venice as though he were peeling a blood-orange: each segment reveals a new shade of dark. You smell brackish water, hear pigeons clap wings like court documents being signed. The prologue, printed with amber Venetian type across the screen, feels less ..."
