Success Quote by Alberto Sordi

Sordi’s sting lands because it weaponizes the most mundane setting in Italian life: the condominio staircase, that cramped social theater where you can’t avoid your fellow citizens and yet still pretend you don’t owe them anything. He’s not talking about “Italians” as an abstract national character; he’s talking about the ones close enough to make your skin crawl, the ones you refuse to acknowledge with a simple buongiorno. The line is a trap: it begins like the familiar, lazy stereotype (“Italians, full of failings”) and then flips it back onto the listener. Not me, not you - them. The neighbor.

That “take care” is doing a lot of work. It’s mock-warning and moral warning at once: beware the comfort of scapegoating, because the target isn’t safely distant. Sordi’s comic persona often thrived on the petty hypocrisies of everyday respectability, and this quote has that same x-ray vision. He exposes how prejudice can be intimate, not ideological - less about grand political hatred than about small daily refusals: eye contact, courtesy, recognition. The staircase becomes a metaphor for civic life. You share walls, air, noise, and fate, but still practice social quarantine.

Contextually, it fits postwar Italy’s obsession with appearances and its talent for turning collective problems into private resentments. Sordi is needling the audience into admitting that the “failings” they complain about are reproduced in the micro-choices of ordinary coexistence. The joke isn’t that Italians are flawed; it’s that everyone wants the flaw to belong to someone else they see every day.