The structure of Scopone scientifico (t.n. an Italian card game) is even more decidedly symbolic. While putting this story together, it didn’t even cross my mind to write something about Roman shanty dwellers and power, but instead the relationship between the people and power, the emotionality of the people and the great rationality of power. All that is said there, with much pessimism, scientific skepticism, is that this card game with power will never be won. He who has power and plays that way, upping the ante, will always get the better of he who does not have power and will never be able to up the ante. All of this lies within the fact that, within that framework, I relate that all of these thoughts have value. The idea for the story was taken from real life. I saw it with my own eyes. In a hotel  near Naples, two poverty stricken Neapolitans waited for an American woman, who arrived in a Rolls Royce, to play a game of cards. It had been going on for years. She would loan them the money, and then she would win it back from them, but they kept hoping…

Rodolfo Sonego in Franca Faldini e Goffredo Fofi , L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano, Mondadori, 1984