In their similarity, diversity, sources, and borrowings, I vitelloni e La spiaggia together established the genre par excellence of the Italian cinema of the 1950s and 60s, the comedy all’italiana. (…) Filippo Sacchi writes that no one like Albertocchi exists. So clumsy, predictable, dickheaded. It is true, this is cinema. But in terms of unpredictable dickheads, then neither does there exist a character like that of Il vedovo. What matters, in Albertocchi as in Roberto the writer, as in the two journalists who want to get fat one day and thin the next (Marco Ferreri and Nico Pepe), is the “apparition” of a new social personage: the Neurotic. True, the film veers between fable and documentary, as Moravia says, but the documentary imagined by Sonego and Lattuada is so exact as to become prophecy. It is not a case where the clergy, who almost always attack, see in the film “the advent of a society no longer based on Christian principles”. Animal, pagan, consumerist. Sun-bathing, adultery, the week-end … (…) La spiaggia is not just documentary and prophecy, but becomes reportage, in the manner of Epoca [a picture magazine of the period], on the holidays of those Italians who have money to take holidays. And it becomes the publicity trailer for this new world, as Aristarco involuntarily wrote in his review.

Tatti Sanguineti, La Spiaggia (Le Mani, 2001)