Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome by Shawn Levy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome by Shawn Levy Shannon Scott Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome Shawn Levy New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016, 424 pages, $27.95 (softcover) Levy's Dolce Vita reads like a well-researched and well-written tabloid. Fittingly, it begins with a photographer, Tazio Secchiaroli, or Il Mitragliatrice Umana ("The Human Machine Gun"), as he trolls the streets of trendy Via Veneto in Rome camera in hand, searching for movie stars in compromising positions. He finds the regulars: exiled Egyptian King Farouk gorging himself in a cafe, Ava Gardner clubbing with her new co-star and lover, Tony Franciosa, and Swedish actress Anita Ekberg and husband, Anthony Steel, who becomes so provoked by shutterbug Secchiaroli that he drunkenly charges at him. A typical night for paparazzi in 1950s Rome. Levy follows this prologue with more sobering historical background on postwar Italy, including the implementation of the Marshall Plan, which was meant to alleviate the rampant poverty and shortages throughout a country whose infrastructure had suffered significant damage and whose populace spent 95% of its income on subsistence food (3). In time, Hollywood, too, would become an important factor in Italy's economic recovery. Levy then transitions to the history of Cinecittà ("Movie City") on the outskirts of Rome, an industry which had been previously supported by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was a fan of film for both entertainment and propaganda purposes. Cinecittà was founded in 1937, and the number of films produced there increased each year until the Nazis took it over, using it "for a logistical headquarters, a storage facility, and, when they were forced to flee, a rummage sale at which everything was free" (64). But Italian cinema, and Cinecittà itself, would rise again. Levy tracks this resurrection first through filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, who illustrated the effects of the war on Italy in films like Roma: Città Aperta (Rome: Open City) (1945). Levy examines several of Rossellini's neo-realist films (a designation Rossellini did not accept) before shifting from his work to his private life, which coincided with the rise of the Roman paparazzi. These tawdry intervals of movie star gossip and celebrity culture become guilty pleasures in a text that often veers like a Vespa away from history and film to anecdotes about scandals like the one that eventually led to the marriage of Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini. In addition to Rossellini, Levy follows the careers of several Italian filmmakers: for example, Vittorio De Sica, specifically Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) (1948), which received Oscar recognition, as well as the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni from Le Amiche in 1953 and Il Grido in 1955 to his Divorzio all'Italiana (Divorce Italian Style in 1961), which became one of Antonioni's crossover successes in America. The most substantial section in Levy's text is devoted to Federico Fellini. Again, he offers highly entertaining biographical information and stories, but also some substantial analysis of Fellini's films, not simply their conception, funding, and filming—or even the scandals surrounding the stars Fellini chose to work with—but the films themselves. He examines Fellini's visual and thematic aesthetic in La Strada (The Road) (1954) in detail, and then places it into the context of other groundbreaking filmmakers of the time, such as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa. Levy's description of the performance of Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, as Gelsomina is poignant and sensitive, standing in stark contrast to the crude accounts of the insatiable paparazzi. Yet the paparazzi, and their forays into the seedy nightlife of Rome, become essential to one of Fellini's most famous films—one that Levy has selected for his own title.. In 1958, Pierluigi Praturlon captured Anita Ekberg on camera soaking her sore feet in the Trevi Fountain in Rome after a long night of dancing. This would be one of the [End Page 78] more harmless run-ins the paparazzi would have with Ekberg, one occasion caught amazingly in a photo featured in this text, when Ekberg herself came out...