"First of all, as a blue-chip comedian, Troisi possesses a singular personage, he doesn't deign to do knockabouts (unlike his contemporary Roberto Benigni), and his humor is not droll, which extracts bona fide affinity and comedic response out of banal and ordinary scenarios with his almost child-like earnestness. In the film, he plays Gaetano, a young man from provincial Naples, who decides not to "start from scratch" but "start from three", just because, in Florence.

Through Gaetano's shyness, Troisi inhabits him comfortably and swimmingly as a simple-minded, sympathetic, doe-eyed guy, who has yet found what is the purpose of his life and tends to float adrift by the transition from provinciality to cosmopolitan independence, especially by the relationship with his new girlfriend Marta (Marchegiani), who is a nurse in a mental hospital and a writer-to-be, whose modernized ideology Gaetano cannot really wrap his head around."

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