Rome, Trastevere, 1920–2003. “Dear Father… I will be a great actor”: the promise of a Roman boy who would go on to embody an entire nation.

Alberto Sordi did not perform his characters he inhabited them. Cunning, cowardly, wily, ironic, brave only when cornered: ordinary Italians looked at the screen and recognised themselves, laughing at their own reflection. From the Trastevere neighbourhood to stages around the world, Sordi built his career year by year, with a determination that was rooted in the boy who had been expelled from Milan’s Accademia dei Filodrammatici for his “dreadful” Roman accent.

It was radio that consecrated him: I compagnucci della parrocchietta, the nasal “Mario Pio” that drove Italy wild. Then Federico Fellini cast him in The White Sheik (1952) and I Vitelloni (1953) the rest is cinema history. More than 150 films, many of which he directed himself. An American in Rome, Il vigile, The Great War, Il medico della mutua, A Small-Minded Bourgeois, Il marchese del Grillo: titles that have entered the everyday vocabulary of Italians.

This documentary brings together the testimonies of those who knew him, loved him, and directed him: Mario Monicelli, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, Franca Valeri, Paolo Villaggio, and many others. Voices that reassemble the mosaic of a man who never married, lived quietly in his villa on the Appian Way, and on his eightieth birthday was appointed mayor of Rome for a day. Because Alberto Sordi was not merely an actor: he was Rome itself.