Italy Revealed [HD]

A look at the lives of some interesting Italians
Do not buy this video if you wish to be shown the Colesseum, etc. etc. - all of the tourist attractions, it is not that type of video. It is more about capturing the mood of the country, some of its background, and the prospects for the future.
You will meet a man purusing his dream of becoming a gondolier in Venice; a volunteer rescue worker in the Italian Alps; we follow a member of the Missoni family preparing for their new collection; a horse jockey who hopes to participate in Siena's palio (a 90 second horserace which brings the neighbourhoods of Siena to a fever-pitch); a young Roman girl who hopes to be the country's first femae race car driver; and a young Sicilian man who is a free diver, hoping to become professional. Along the way we are told about the state of the Catholic church in modern Italy, and other vignettes of information about the country that we learn while we look in on these people's lives. And of course, Isabella Rosselini's voice is wonderful, I love...

Beautiful photography
This is worth watching in HD for the stunning photography alone.

Contrary to some reviews, there is nothing wrong with the disc. Certain HD-DVD players have firmware bugs which have been fixed in newer versions, that keep them from showing several titles including this one. Connect your HD-DVD player to the internet and run the update utility under Settings.

Human Stories of Italy
This documentary covers a number of sites in Italy by picking a human subject in each of the locations, and telling us the story of a slice of life in that individual and its bonding with local culture and history. These narratives run in parallel, we are taken back and forth between the heroes, as their character story lines progress.

The main feature on this Blu-Ray disk is compressed more than what I've seen on Blu-Ray titles from other studios. The picture is a little washed out, especially where fast movement is shown. The quality of the camera work is exceptional for the most part; but some of less than stellar footage, with bad lighting and color fringing, was also mixed in.

This DVD has extras. But, when I started watching the first one, I immediately noticed that there were some mastering problems, showing bad digital artifacting, most noticeable at scene changes. Fortunately, the main feature does not suffer from this.

Overall this is a very...

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