"If you marry her, we'll kill her instead!"

Do you remember the Italian comedy , that of the sixties of the last century with Alberto Sordi, Ugo Tognazzi, Monica Vitti and Silvana Mangano? Do you remember films like "The Widower" or "The monsters" in which, laughing, the (bad) customs and pettiness of us Italians were punished? If you loved actors, actresses and films from that lucky season of Italian cinema, you can't help but like the crazy brigade of protagonists created by Valentina Giuliani for her funny and intelligent "An ice cream, a kiss, a gun" (Porto Seguro, 2022, pp. 144). But perhaps it is better to explain better starting from the beginning, that is, from the presentations of the main performers of what is in effect a comic comedy , with some surreal and noir splashes.

First of all we must meet Filippo Barzini , the only scion of a prestigious Florentine family. Filippo is the classic “mum and dad's coconut”, a chard forced to undertake a university career by his father, a well-known academic. However, the family has not come to terms with Cupid's arrows because Filippo, after decades as a so-called "good boy who never gives thoughts", falls in love with a southern ice cream maker and revolutionizes his life: he leaves his studies, intends to helping the beautiful Marina in the ice cream parlor, until he decides, after a few months of engagement, to marry her.

At this point, you can imagine the reaction of Filippo's parents, the dapper professor Glauco Barzini and the impeccable woman Enrica, queen of Florentine volunteers. The two will try in every way to hinder this relationship, which is dangerous for their finances, for their good name and absolutely incompatible with the ambitions placed on their son. But how far will the Barzini spouses be willing to go to "get rid of" the girl?

We can anticipate you, without however taking away the taste for a book that lets itself be devoured in one breath, that Glauco and Enrica will leave no stone unturned, ending up getting entangled in paradoxical and embarrassing situations , striving to find solutions to the limit of ridicule even though to erase from the mind and heart of the beloved Filippo even the image of the perfidious Marina. Rea. This alleged Circe transvested as an ice cream maker, however, has only one fault: that of exposing the hypocrisies, embarrassments, prejudices of an upper class apparently so open and ready to take an interest in the problems of the world, but in reality closed to hedgehog in their beliefs and conventions. Beliefs and conventions on which it is beautiful and liberating to laugh, knowing however that none of us are alien to the vices that afflict the Barzini spouses. After all, let's be honest, as much as we like Marina, who doesn't dream of a son or daughter in the chair rather than behind the ice cream counter?