Avanti! is a 1972 American/Italian comedy film produced and directed by Billy Wilder. For the past ten years, Baltimore industrialist Wendell Armbruster, Sr. has been spending a month at the Grand Hotel Excelsior in the Island of Ischia on the Bay of Naples, in Italy allegedly to soak in the therapeutic mud baths for which the resort island is known. When he is killed in an automobile accident, his straitlaced son Wendell Armbruster, Jr. journeys to Italy to claim his father’s body.