A Thousand Miles For A Tear

Italy, spring 1955: Corrado Lanza, a Neapolitan ex-factory test driver four years into a six-year stretch for a getaway job, is bought out of Poggioreale prison by Don Ignazio Ruffo to drive the Don's red barchetta in the Mille Miglia — sixteen hundred kilometres of open road, Brescia to Rome and back in one day, while every policeman in Italy stands on the route as a crowd marshal. While the country's cops watch the race, the Don's crew will empty a Rome jeweller's vault of the Varano emerald 'La Lacrima', and Corrado's car has to carry it north through the mountain passes. If it doesn't reach Brescia, his kid brother Gennaro, riding locked in the boot of the Don's killer's Aurelia, goes into Lake Garda.