La dolce vita - cinematic masterpiece

Commentary on decadence of 1950s Rome saw Fellini hailed as a genius

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in the
most famous scene from Fellini's classic

La dolce vita, a film still regarded as one of the greatest in cinema history, was screened in front of a paying audience for the first time on this day in 1960.

After a preview before invited guests and media at the Fiamma cinema in Rome, the Capitol Cinema in Milan was chosen for its public premiere. The movie went on general release in Italy the day afterwards and made its London debut on 8 February.  It was shown in America for the first time in April of the following year.

Directed by Federico Fellini, the film won the Palme d'Or, the highest award presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director for Fellini, although ultimately the production team had to be content with the Oscar for Best Costumes.

It won numerous awards in Italy, while the brilliant Nino Rota’s soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy.  In America, the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle made it their best foreign film of 1961.

Federico Fellini is remembered by many as
the greatest of all Italian film-makers

The film is episodic rather than having a conventional plot, following the life of Marcello Rubini, a somewhat jaded magazine gossip columnist portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni, over seven days and nights in the Rome of the late 1950s.

It is a decade in which the city, desperate to forget the shame of Fascism and the devastation inflicted on the country by World War Two, revels in everything modern and exciting about what feels like a reborn Italy.  The stars created by the country’s renascent movie industry, now joined by an influx of Americans and others, are the new gods and goddesses. Rubini, accompanied by his photographer friend Paparazzo, follows their every move.

Immersing himself in the glitzy nightlife around the capitol’s fashionable Via Veneto, the handsome, sharply-dressed Rubini himself indulges in the hedonistic pleasures on offer with only occasional restraint, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend, Emma.

But in Fellini’s story he is struggling with an inner conflict, at once chastising himself for the shallowness of his profession and his failure to make the most of his writing talent, but unable to resist the temptations of alcohol, easy sex and opportunities to behave outrageously that seem to present themselves each day.

Mastroianni became one
of Italy's biggest stars

Fellini conveys this, and delivers a critique on the state of an Italian society he is willing to see as in moral decline, through what is essentially a series of parables, in which the characters are sharply drawn and the scenes resonantly symbolic.

The episode in which Anita Ekberg, cast as a visiting Swedish starlet, lures Mastroianni to follow her, fully clothed, into the Trevi Fountain, is the one for which the film is most remembered, while the name of Paparazzo has entered the language to describe any photographer who pursues the rich and famous.

Yet it has a complexity that continues to intrigue, its near three-hour duration demanding that viewers return again and again to appreciate it in all its subtlety. Fellini’s fellow director Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote that "La dolce vita is too important to be discussed as one would normally discuss a film.”

More than 13.5 million Italians paid to watch the film, attracted not least by its controversial nature.  Its opening sequence, in which a gathering of bikini-clad girls interrupt their sunbathing to wave as a helicopter towing a statue of Jesus passes overhead, was condemned by the Catholic church as a parody of a second coming of Christ. In countries including Spain and Portugal it was banned for several years.

Fellini once said that the original germ of the idea for La dolce vita came from the fashion in the 50s for the so-called sack dress, a waistless garment that was tapered at the hemline but billowed out in the middle, which he imagined to represent a way in which a physically beautiful woman might conceal her moral shortcomings from view.

Others have speculated that he might have been influenced by the Montesi scandal that had reached its conclusion only two years before he began shooting.  The film ends when Rubini and others are partying on a beach at dawn when fishermen haul ashore a huge, ray-like fish that had become caught in their net and died.  The Montesi scandal, which linked Rome society figures to drug-fuelled orgies at a luxurious beachside villa, began when the body of Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old woman who had gone missing in Rome the day before, was discovered lying face down at the water’s edge on a beach near the capital.

Nicola Salvi's Trevi Fountain, with the statue of
Oceanus by Pietro Bracci in the centre

Travel tip:

The Trevi Fountain, which was symbolically turned off and draped in black after Marcello Mastroianni died, was officially opened by Pope Clement XIII in 1762. Standing at more than 26m (85 feet) high and 49m (161 feet) wide, it is the largest Baroque fountain in Rome and probably the most famous fountain in the world. It was designed by a Roman architect, Nicola Salvi, but he died when it was only half finished. Made from Travertine stone quarried in Tivoli near Rome, the fountain was completed by Giuseppe Pannini, with Oceanus (god of all water), designed by Pietro Bracci, set in the central niche. Coins are traditionally thrown into the fountain by visitors, using the right hand over the left shoulder. It was once estimated about 3000 euros were thrown into the fountain each day, money that helped feed the city’s poorest citizens.

A picture postcard from Milan showing the
Capitol Cinema building 

Travel tip:

Milan’s former Capitol Cinema was located on the corner of Via Croce Rossa and Via dei Giardini, not far from Via Manzoni and Via Monte Napoleone.  Designed in the late 1930s, it was part of an imposing building that combined shops, offices and apartments. With seats for 1,350 people, it screened its first film in September 1949 and hosted many premieres, often attended by the directors and stars. The debut of La dolce vita attracted such a large crowd that windows were reportedly broken in the crush.  The film was so successful it continued to be shown at the Capitol for several months. Other famous Italian films to make their public debut there included Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli) and Vittorio De Sica’s La ciociara, released outside Italy as Two Women, which featured an Oscar-winning performance by Sophia Loren.  Sadly, the Capitol’s popularity declined in the 1980s and it was closed permanently in 1984. Today the building houses a large clothes shop. 

Also on this day:

1578: The death of portrait painter Giovanni Battista Moroni

1932: The birth of football coach Cesare Maldini

1964: The birth of football coach Carolina Morace

The Festival of Saint Agatha of Sicily

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4 February

Eugenio Corti - soldier and writer

Author drew on his experiences on the front line

Eugenio Corti, the writer most famous for his epic 1983 novel The Red Horse, died on this day in 2014 at the age of 93.  He passed away at his home in Besana in Brianza in Lombardy, where he had been born in January 1921.  The Red Horse, which follows the life of the Riva family in northern Italy from Mussolini's declaration of war in the summer of 1940 through to the 1970s, covers the years of the Second World War and the evolution of Italy's new republic.  Its themes reflect Corti's own view of the world, his unease about the totalitarianism of fascism and communism, his faith in the Christian Democrats to tread a confident path through the conservative middle ground, and his regret at the decline in Christian values in Italy.  It has been likened to Alessandro Manzoni's novel I promessi sposi - The Betrothed - for its strong moral tone and for the way that Corti employs the technique favoured by Manzoni of setting fictional characters in the novel against a backcloth of actual history, with real people and events written into the plot.  The Red Horse, which took Corti more than a decade to write, became a literary phenomenon in Italy, selling so many copies it needed to be reprinted 25 times.  Read more…

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Cesare Battisti – patriot and irredentist

Campaigner for Trentino hailed as national hero

Cesare Battisti, a politician whose campaign to reclaim Trentino for Italy from Austria-Hungary was to cost him his life, was born on this day in 1875 in the region’s capital, Trento.  As a member of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Battista was elected to the assembly of South Tyrol and the Austrian Imperial Council, where he pushed for autonomy for Trentino, an area with a mainly Italian-speaking population.  When the First World War arrived and Italy decided to side with the Triple Entente and fight against Austria-Hungary, Battisti decided he could fight only on the Italian side, joining the Alpini corps.  At this time he was still a member of the Austrian Chamber of Deputies, so when he was captured wearing Italian uniform during the Battle of Asiago in 1916 he was charged with high treason and executed.  Italy now looks upon Battisti as a national hero and he is commemorated in monuments in several places in the country, as well as having numerous schools, streets and squares named after him.  At the time of his birth, the son of a merchant, also called Cesare, Trento was part of Tyrol in Austria-Hungary, even though it was a largely Italian-speaking city.  Read more…

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Giacomo Facco – composer

The forgotten talent of the musician from Padua

Giacomo Facco, a Baroque composer, was born on this day in 1676 in Marsango, a small town just north of Padova (Padua).  Highly regarded during his own lifetime, he was completely forgotten about until 1962 when his work was rediscovered by Uberto Zanolli, a musicologist.  Facco is believed to have worked as a violinist and a conductor and he is known to have been given a job in 1705 by the Viceroy of Sicily as a choirmaster, teacher and violinist in Palermo.  In 1708 he moved with the Viceroy to Messina where he composed The Fight between Mercy and Incredulity. In 1710 he presented a work dedicated to King Philip V of Spain, The Augury of Victories, in Messina Cathedral.  By 1720 it is known Facco was working in the Spanish court because his pay is mentioned in a report dating from that year. He is later named as clavichord master to the Spanish princes.  At the height of his success he was commissioned to compose an opera to celebrate the marriage of one of the princes in 1721.  He then seems to have fallen out of favour and was just employed as a violinist in the orchestra of the Royal Chapel until his death in Madrid in 1753.  Read more…

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Alessandro Magnasco - painter

Artist known for eerie scenes and lifelike figures

The painter Alessandro Magnasco, who became famous for populating eerie landscapes with exaggeratedly realistic figures to illustrate the darker sides of society in his lifetime, was born on this day in 1667 in Genoa.  He specialised in wild and gloomy landscapes and interiors, often crowded with figures such as bandits and beggars, sometimes soldiers, monks or nuns in chaotic scenes, and acquired a substantial following.  His work was especially popular with wealthy families in Milan and Florence, where he worked primarily, and regular lucrative commissions enabled him to become wealthy himself.  Magnasco’s father, Stefano, was a modestly successful painter in Genoa and it is likely Alessandro would have remained in the Ligurian city had his father not died suddenly when he was only three years old.  Instead, when he was old enough, he was sent to Milan in the hope that he would learn about commerce and forge a career as a businessman.  However, Magnasco inherited his father’s love of painting and realised there were opportunities to pursue his passion in Milan, persuading his patron to pay his expenses while he took up an apprenticeship with Filippo Abbiati.  Read more…

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Ugo Betti - playwright

Judge who combined writing with legal career

Ugo Betti, a playwright whose works exploring facets of the human condition are considered by some to be the finest plays written by an Italian after Luigi Pirandello, was born on this day in 1892 in Camerino in Le Marche.  Betti wrote 27 plays, mainly concerned with evil, guilt, justice, atonement and redemption, largely in his spare time alongside a career in the legal profession.  Although he started life in what was then a remote town in the Apennine mountains, about 75km (47 miles) inland from the Adriatic coast and a similar distance from the city of Perugia, Betti moved with his family at an early age to Parma in Emilia-Romagna.  He followed his older brother Emilio in studying law, although his progress was interrupted when he was enlisted as a volunteer in the army after Italy entered the First World War. He was captured in the disastrous Battle of Caporetto and interned in a German prisoner of war camp.  By chance, he found himself in the company of two writers, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Bonaventura Tecchi, who encouraged him in his own writing. His first collections of poems were written while he was in German captivity.  Read more…

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3 February

NEW - Wilma Montesi - murder victim

‘Body on the beach’ mystery that sparked a national scandal

Wilma Montesi, the woman whose unexplained death in 1953 precipitated a scandal that reached the highest levels of the Italian government, was born on this day in 1932 in Rome.  Raised in the Trieste-Salario neighbourhood, little more than a couple of kilometres from central Rome, she was a 21-year-old woman who dreamed of becoming an actress but whose ambitions were known to no one outside her own family and friends until she disappeared from her home in Via Tagliamento on the afternoon of April 9, 1953.  Two days afterwards, her semi-naked body was found on the beach at Torvaianica, some 40km (25 miles) south of the capital. The mystery surrounding her death sparked four years of police investigations and conspiracy theories and the resignation of a senior member of prime minister Mario Scelba’s government.  On the afternoon of her disappearance, Montesi had declined an invitation to go to the cinema with her mother and sister, saying she would go for a walk instead. After she failed to return in time for supper, her family noticed that her ID papers and some jewellery, a gift from her policeman boyfriend that she always wore, were still in her room.  Read more…

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Giulio Gatti-Casazza - impresario

Manager who transformed the New York Met

Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the impresario who as general manager transformed the Metropolitan Opera in New York into one of the world’s great houses, was born on this day in 1869 in Udine in northeast Italy.  The former general manager at La Scala in Milan, Gatti-Casazza was in charge of the Met for 27 years, from 1908 to 1935. In that time, having brought with him from Milan the brilliant conductor and musical director Arturo Toscanini, he not only attracted almost all of the great opera singers of his era but set the highest standards for the company, which have been maintained to the present day.  Gatti-Casazza also pulled off the not inconsiderable feat of rescuing the Met from the brink of bankruptcy after the stock market crash of 1929. The young Gatti-Casazza had studied engineering after leaving school, graduating from the Genoa Naval School of Engineering, yet the love of opera was in the family. His father was manager of the Teatro Comunale, the municipal theatre in Ferrara, where they had moved when Giulio was young, and he succeeded his father in that role in 1893.  He proved very effective, combining his knowledge of opera with a natural gift for management.   Read more…

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Giuseppe Moretti - sculptor

Sienese artist who became famous in the United States

The sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, who became well known in the United States as a prolific creator of public monuments, was born on this day in 1857 in Siena.  Moretti's favourite medium was marble and he considered his Head of Christ, which he carved from a block of Alabama marble in 1903, to be his greatest work.  The creation which earned him most fame, however, was the 56-foot (17.07m) statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking, which he made for the 1904 World's Fair in St Louis, Missouri on behalf of the city of Birmingham, Alabama as a symbol of its heritage in the iron and steel industry.  Moretti made the statue in clay in New Jersey before overseeing its casting in iron in Birmingham.  Vulcan, the largest cast iron statue in the world, was relocated to Alabama State Fairgrounds after the St Louis Exposition before being moved again to the top of Red Mountain, the ridge overlooking Birmingham, which it shares with a number of radio and television transmission towers.  Although he spent much of his life away from Italy, it was in his homeland that Moretti developed his love for art and sculpture.  Read more…

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Giuseppe Forlenza – eye surgeon

Napoleon recognised brilliance of ocular specialist

Giuseppe Forlenza, an important 18th century ophthalmologist and surgeon, was born on this day in 1757 in Picerno in the province of Potenza. He became famous for performing successful cataract surgery and for his treatment of eye diseases. Forlenza was born in the region of Basilicata, which at that time was part of the Kingdom of Naples. His father and two uncles were all surgeons.  He went to Naples and then on to France to study surgery. He spent two years gaining experience at St George’s Hospital in London and then returned to France where he concentrated on treating eye diseases.  Forlenza carried out eye surgery at a retirement home in Paris and performed many remarkable operations on soldiers returning from fighting in Egypt who were suffering from eye problems.  He was recognised as a leading eye surgeon by Napoleon, who in a royal decree assigned him to treat eye disease throughout France.  Forlenza eventually returned to Italy where he performed many free operations in Turin and Rome.  Read more…

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Giovanni Battista Vaccarini - architect

Sicilian Baroque designs shaped the look of Catania

Giovanni Battista Vaccarini, the architect who designed many of the important buildings in Sicily’s second city of Catania, was born on this day in 1702 in Palermo. He was responsible for several palaces, including the Palazzo del Municipio, the Palazzo San Giuliano and the Palazzo dell’Università.  He completed the rebuilding of a number of churches, including the Chiesa della Badia di Sant’Agata, and designed the Baroque façade of the city’s Duomo – the Cattedrale di Sant’Agata – which had been a ruin.  Perhaps his most famous work, though, is the Fontana dell’Elefante, which he placed at the centre of the reconstructed Piazza Duomo, consisting of a marble pedestal and fountains, supporting an ancient Roman statue of an elephant made from lava stone, which in turn has an obelisk mounted on its back, supposedly inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Obelisk of Minerva in Rome, which is also borne by an elephant.  The monument's nickname in the Sicilian language is "Liotru," a reference to Elidoros, an eighth century wizard who sought, through magic, to make the elephant walk. The statue came to be adopted as the symbol of the city.  Read more…

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Wilma Montesi - murder victim

‘Body on the beach’ mystery that sparked a national scandal

Wilma Montesi was only
21 when she died

Wilma Montesi, the woman whose unexplained death in 1953 precipitated a scandal that reached the highest levels of the Italian government, was born on this day in 1932 in Rome.

Raised in the Trieste-Salario neighbourhood, little more than a couple of kilometres from central Rome, she was a 21-year-old woman who dreamed of becoming an actress but whose ambitions were known to no one outside her own family and friends until she disappeared from her home in Via Tagliamento on the afternoon of April 9, 1953.

Two days afterwards, her semi-naked body was found on the beach at Torvaianica, some 40km (25 miles) south of the capital. The mystery surrounding her death sparked four years of police investigations and conspiracy theories and the resignation of a senior member of prime minister Mario Scelba’s government.

On the afternoon of her disappearance, Montesi had declined an invitation to go to the cinema with her mother and sister, saying she would go for a walk instead. After she failed to return in time for supper, her family noticed that her ID papers and some jewellery, a gift from her policeman boyfriend that she always wore, were still in her room.

The details of what happened between her saying goodbye to her mother and sister and her body being found, face down and partially submerged, were never fully established. Although it was eventually proved that she was killed, no one was convicted.

The initial investigation suggested Montesi had taken a train from Rome to the popular seaside resort of Ostia but no witnesses reported seeing her in Torvaianica, 20km (12 miles) further down the coast. 

The musician Piero Piccioni was charged
with manslaughter but acquitted

The body was clothed only in a blouse and underwear, yet a police investigation concluded that Wilma’s death had been the result of drowning and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, was recorded as accidental. 

The theory of investigating officers was that she had stepped into the sea to relieve some soreness to her heels caused by a new pair of shoes but had fallen and passed out, probably through fainting. They suggested that her body had been moved by the currents and washed ashore.

What they could not explain was why she might have thought it necessary to remove not only her shoes and stockings but her skirt and suspender belt if her purpose was to bathe her feet. None of the missing clothing had been found.

The case was declared closed, yet the media, naturally intrigued by a mystery, would not let it drop. It turned into the beginnings of a scandal when a magazine ran a story that a young man who had handed in the missing garments at a police station was Piero Piccioni, a jazz musician and composer whose father was the Christian Democrat politician, Attilio Piccioni, the deputy prime minister and foreign minister under Scelba.

Faced with being sued by Piccioni, the author of the story eventually recanted his claim, agreeing to make a donation to charity in return for Piccioni dropping his libel action.

But six months after Wilma’s death, the story resurfaced when a reporter who had been investigating drug-trafficking along the coast near Rome claimed he had found evidence linking the young woman to an estate at Capocotta, a short distance from Torvaianica, that was owned by a wealthy Sicilian marquess, Ugo Montagna, a well-known figure in Rome society and a close friend of Piero Piccioni.

Wilma Montesi's body as it was found, face
down on the beach at Torvaianica

The reporter alleged that the Capocotta estate regularly hosted parties attended by people of power and influence that often turned into drug-fuelled orgies. Wilma Montesi, he said, after initially being recruited as a drug runner, died of an opium overdose at one of these parties, after which her body was left on the beach at Torvaianica so that it appeared she had drowned.

The journalist making this new allegation was arrested and charged with ‘spreading false and tendentious news to disturb public order’ and it was at his subsequent trial that what had been merely a series of salacious stories blew into something bigger.

One of the witnesses, an actress called Anna Maria Caglio who was a former mistress of Montagna, claimed in court that Montagna was a drug dealer and that a number of women had been murdered, casting Piccioni as the killer. She also alleged that Saverio Polito, the Rome chief of police who had closed the Montesi case, was part of a cover-up.

Piero Piccioni, Saverio Polito and Ugo Montagna
pictured during their trial in Venice in 1957

Montagna and Piccioni were arrested and Polito resigned. Piccioni’s father, mindful of the distraction his son’s arrest would cause, stepped down as a minister.

Wilma Montesi’s body was exhumed and a pathologist found that she had drowned but also concluded that she had struggled against an assailant who held her head under the water.  Piccioni was charged with manslaughter and Montagna with being complicit. Polito, Caglio and others were charged with obstruction of justice.

However, despite investigators compiling a vast volume of evidence over three years, a trial in Venice in 1957 was not able to convict anyone apart from Caglio, who was given a suspended sentence. Piccioni, Montagna and Polito were acquitted, and the ‘body on the beach’ mystery remained unsolved.

Montesi is buried at the Verano Monumental Cemetery in Rome. It is believed by some that Federico Fellini's classic film La dolce vita was in part inspired by the Montesi story. 

Gino Coppedè's Villino delle Fate, a building 
with fairytale qualities in the Coppedè district

Travel tip:

The Via Tagliamento, where Wilma Montesi was born, falls within the elegant Trieste-Salario district of Rome, book-ended by Piazza Buenos Aires, close to the Borghese gardens, and Via Chiana. The area, which developed in the 1920s, was originally known as the Quartiere Savoia. A highlight of the area is the Coppedè district, a few steps from Piazza Buenos Aires along the Via Dora. This complex of buildings described as a "pastiche" of architectural styles ​​was built between 1915 and 1927 by the architect Gino Coppedè. Fanning out from around Piazza Mincio, with its enchanting Fontana delle Rane (Fountain of the Frogs), it includes buildings such as the Palazzina del Ragno and the Villino delle Fate that resemble those imagined in fairytales. 

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Torvaianica, on the coast of Lazio south of
Rome, has a broad expanse of beach

Travel tip:

Torvaianica, a coastal town of 12,700 residents occupying an 8km (5 miles) stretch of coastline, had a place in history long before the Montesi scandal.  According to Vergil's Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas landed there, a story that was confirmed after the excavation of the ancient Roman town of Lavinium. Torvaianica takes its name from a coastal watch tower, Torre del Vajanico, built in 1580 to repel Barbary pirates. The tower, damaged during World War II, was demolished during the 1960s. The town itself had been founded in the 1940s, after the draining of the nearby Pontine Marshes. Originally a fishing village, it is now a tourist resort. 

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Also on this day:

1702: The birth of architect Giovanni Battista Vaccarini

1757: The birth of eye surgeon Giuseppe Forlenza

1857: The birth of sculptor Giuseppe Moretti

1869: The birth of opera impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza

(Picture credits: Piero Piccioni by CharlieFoxtrot66; Villino del Fate by The Doc; Torvaianica beach by RaeBo; all via Wikimedia Commons)

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