Una vita difficile becomes something of a chronicle of recent Italian history in following one “man on the street” through twenty years of social change. Alberto Sordi is the man in question, a middle-class conformist who finds himself aligned with the left and likes it: first as a partisan, then as a leftist journalist, he shuns success in favor of his brand of idealism. Slowly, however, he falls in step with the wave of economic self-interest of the 1950s, winding up “a frightened citizen integrated into the neocapitalist system” (Mira Liehm).