AllMovie

In this comedy/thriller, starring writer/director Alberto Sordi, Pietro (Sordi) and his wife (Anna Longhi) are Romans through-and-through. In their whole lives, they have never traveled far from their beloved city, though once they traveled to Bologna. Somehow, their son, the apple of their eye, has enrolled in New York University, in Manhattan. In this film, they decide to visit him there, and when Pietro witnesses a mafia killing, the police set him up in his own taxi and give him a phony identity. Since he doesn't know the city at all and doesn't speak English, this probably puts him an equal footing with a lot of other taxi drivers, so he fits right in. Eventually, in order to flush out the killers, the police use him as bait in a sting operation set in Miami. Meanwhile, the hapless fellow must cope with the peculiar culture he finds in America, (a country where everyone evidently speaks fluent Italian, as that is the language the film is shot in).