La Dolce Vita Research Articles

Italy in Chiaroscuro: the dark shadows of modern Italian society

Italy's incapacity of dealing with an increasing decline should be attributed to a number of chronic problems, not only economic ones, which have never been seriously faced by Italian society and politics. Despite the frequent presence of these issues in public discourse, a lack of analytical commitment has favoured a superficial and rhetorical engagement. A common theme of incompleteness in the attempts at applying a solution unifies different problems presented in this special issue: from federal reform of the state to the lack of political reconciliation, from the troubled Italian southern regions to the policies towards families. This special issue aims to analyse some of the most critical and unsolved Italian problems, and tries to cast some light on the many ‘shadows’ that still persist in the country of la dolce vita.

The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini's Rome (review)

Reviewed by: The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome Manuela Marchesini (bio) Karen Pinkus, The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 184 pp. $27.50 (cloth). Pinkus's book is dedicated to a famous scandal and unsolved mystery of the early 1950s in italy: the murder of Wilma Montesi, an attractive young girl from a small bourgeois family. Wilma's body was found on a beach outside Rome, face down in the sand, one morning in April 1953. Her body was clothed but missing shoes, stockings, and one garter belt; her lungs were filled with water and her vagina with sand. It was a tragic and inexplicable end that prompted a series of investigations and cover-ups amounting to a puzzling tangle, a pasticcio worthy of Carlo Emilio Gadda's fictional Quer Pasticciaccio Brutto De Via Merulana—the famous novel, similarly centered on the corpse of another (fictional) beautiful woman assassinated in similarly ambiguous circumstances, which had been serialized in the journal Letteratura just a few years earlier. Whereas Gadda's fictional background was a 1927 fascist Rome supposedly cleansed of crime by Mussolinian order, the backdrop of the Montesi case is the Rome of the frenzied "reconstruction years" following World War Ii, with its contamination of the holy and the profane. This Rome—which Fellini would immortalize shortly afterwards (in 1960) in La dolce vita, with its emerging media and paparazzi [End Page 109] along with the similarly emerging Cinecittà industry—is the backdrop of the crime in question, with its compound of tender but ambiguous petit bourgeois familial ties, the arrogant black fascist aristocracy, the offspring of influential politicians, starlets and Hollywood actresses, generic sinners coming from all ways of life, plus, needless to say, drugs and sex. Author and reader find understandably appealing such an intoxicating mix of traditionally elite and pop cultures, conveniently condensed in a single event, placed at the critical juncture of the Fifties—an event that at the time no one, not even the Pope, could refrain from commenting on. Hence Pinkus's promotion of the Montesi case to more than just another episode of cronaca nera. Instead, the Montesi scandal provides the almost filmic space where fiction and the real of contemporary Italian society commingle in the everyday life of its agents. Pinkus sets her own undertaking under the aegis of Henri Lefebvre, Michel De Certeau, and the school of "everyday life" (2). she thus manages to produce a well-written, evocative book that divorces the idea of a solution to the murder of Wilma Montesi in order to eye the broader horizon of the time period in question. She does so by way of a mix of reality (historical, written and visual documents) with fiction (her own recounting and the still frames of films that she deems evocative of the facts in question). The limit of such an accomplishment, if one wants to look for one, lies not so much in Pinkus's seemingly daring exploitation and montage of spurious sources (interviews, trial transcripts, pictures, still frames, narration, etc.), but rather in its imperfect radicalism. Pinkus's disclaimer at the beginning of her book ("this is not, strictly speaking, a work of academic theory" but rather an "interstitial" "series of notes of various registers and intensities for an unrealized screenplay" [1]), should not be taken at face value. It conceals the ambition of a project that, even more than to the theorists mentioned above, seems to point towards Walter Benjamin—although not the Benjamin Pinkus briefly mentions in passing (4), but the Benjamin of the Arcades Project, his major opus. in his unfinished Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin was after an innovative, awakened mode that would allow us to grasp the truth of our past, in particular the past of the Parisian arcades, in the process of our present, i.e., as it occurs. That perception would allow us to construct the totality of a single "moment of truth" or monad in the many fragmented sources, architecture, literature, posters, etc., or "crystals of the...

The Human Sweet Tooth

Humans love the taste of sugar and the word "sweet" is used to describe not only this basic taste quality but also something that is desirable or pleasurable, e.g., la dolce vita. Although sugar or sweetened foods are generally among the most preferred choices, not everyone likes sugar, especially at high concentrations. The focus of my group's research is to understand why some people have a sweet tooth and others do not. We have used genetic and molecular techniques in humans, rats, mice, cats and primates to understand the origins of sweet taste perception. Our studies demonstrate that there are two sweet receptor genes (TAS1R2 and TAS1R3), and alleles of one of the two genes predict the avidity with which some mammals drink sweet solutions. We also find a relationship between sweet and bitter perception. Children who are genetically more sensitive to bitter compounds report that very sweet solutions are more pleasant and they prefer sweet carbonated beverages more than milk, relative to less bitter-sensitive peers. Overall, people differ in their ability to perceive the basic tastes, and particular constellations of genes and experience may drive some people, but not others, toward a caries-inducing sweet diet. Future studies will be designed to understand how a genetic preference for sweet food and drink might contribute to the development of dental caries.

Beyond the Latin lover: Marcello Mastroianni, masculinity, and Italian cinema

Preface Acknowledgements 1. In the beginning: Mastroianni, Masculinity and Italian Cinema 2. Undressing the Latin Lover: La dolce vita, Fashion and Italian Masculinity 3. Masculinity, Sicilian Style: Il bell'Antonio and Divorce - Italian Style 4. Remember, It's a Comedy: Mastroianni in the Films of Federico Fellini 5. The Inetto versus the Unruly Woman: Mastroianni and Sophia Loren 6. Remembrance of Films Past: Mastroianni and the Aging Male Body Notes Bibliography Index

Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621 by Elizabeth E. Wright (review)

1012 Reviews provincial upbringing made for an ambivalent attitude towards Rome's intellectuals; similarly,aftera frustratingspell of location filmingon a beach forLo sceicco bianco, he subsequently preferred to reinvent reality on his own terms in the studios of Cinecitta. Virginia Picchietti's study of Lo sceicco bianco explores the paradox that emerges when differentdefinitions of femininity in a particular culture are deemed to be conflictual , and Aine O'Healy pursues a related theoretical strand in a discussion of the way Fellini foregrounds the cinematic construction of women as projections of male fantasy and desire, hovering ambivalently between voyeuristic indulgence and a cri? tique of the masculine biases of cinematic practices. Dorothee Bonnigal's analysis of Amarcord focuses profitably on the film's use of characters such as Gradisca to demystifythe kitsch self-idealization of Fascism and also to highlight the movement's compatibility with the phoney glamour and artistic totalitarianism of Hollywood. While Cosetta Gaudenzi raises a valid issue in her discussion of the youths' use of Romagnol dialect as a subversive device to undermine political and scholastic authori? tarianism in the same film,the critic is on less secure ground when she draws attention to the Tuscan and Neapolitan accents of the senior Fascist characters without exploring the possibility that Fellini may have been indulging in historical revisionism by distancing his compaesani from the party's upper echelons. The volume also contains a discussion by Helen Stoddart of Fellini's use of circus imagery and the carnivalesque, and an analysis by Marguerite Waller ofthe dissonant visual language within La dolce vita, while Carlo Testa explores Fellini's interest in the works of Kafka, an affinitythat resulted in America being used as the basis for the director's fictitious film project in Intervista. In a theoretical context, the recent critical work within filmstudies regarding the viewer's cognitive and affective involvement in films,an orientation typified by Plantinga and Smith's excellent Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), constitutes uncharted territoryforthis particular volume. Nevertheless, the traditional approaches employ ed here are perfectly legitimate and largely effective in terms of shedding light on the aesthetic choices and forms of representation to be found in Fellini's work. University of Salford William Hope Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 15Q8-1621. By Elizabeth E. Wright. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Asso? ciated University Presses. 2001. 184 pp. ?3?- ISBN 0-8387-5454-6. Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was arguably the greatest and undoubtedly the most prolific of Spanish dramatists. His three hundred or so surviving plays demonstrate an unrivalled ability to entertain all levels of Golden Age society. Yet, in spite of his enormous popularity, he had great difficultyin gaining formal recognition because the public theatre in Spain was still only very gradually beginning to acquire literary respectability. So, from the late 1590s, he began to broaden the scope of his writing, turning his attention to the publication of more ambitious works than the plays and short lyrical pieces to which he had previously dedicated his attention. Quite suddenly , epic poems such as La Dragontea (Valencia, 1598) and La Jerusalen conquistada (Madrid, 1609), the adventure romance El peregrino en supatria (Seville, 1604), the prose eclogue Arcadia (Madrid, 1598), and the enormous hagiographic epic Isidro (Madrid, 1599) rolled offthe presses as part of Lope's strategy to draw attention to his personal credentials as an author. Yet, at the same time, he continued his career as a popular dramatist, while also providing plays for the new court theatre, as well as producing verse that both praised and satirized the Spanish nobility. It is this MLRy 98.4, 2003 1013 prodigiously diverse output that provides the basis forElizabeth Wright's analysis of Lope's career at the court ofPhilip III, a king whose reign coincided with a significant period of social and political transition that is most closely linked to the ascendancy of the Duke of Lerma. As such, Wright's book complements recent research on the Spanish Habsburg court in the early seventeenth century, as well as New Historicist work on the changing social identities and motivations of early modern...

Understanding Tim Parks

Described by late poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky as the best British author writing today, Tim Parks is as prolific a journalist, critic and translator as he is a novelist. In this book, Gillian Fenwick explores Parks' body of work and maintains that Parks is epitome of modern man of letters. The novels that Parks set in his English homeland - such as Loving Roger, Home Thoughts, and Family Planning - are complex texts treading between tragedy and comedy. Fenwick asserts that Parks' heroes and heroines are real people who make readers empathize with them and their indecision. Parks' writing crosses genres as well as international boundaries. Fenwick argues that Parks' sojourn brought a richness to his work. Wanting no part of saccharine treatments of la dolce vita, Parks has in Italian Neighbours and An Education described ordinary, at times frustrating, life in Italy with a touch of cynicism. Parks establishes himself as an Englishman in Verona - he sees his home country with an increased objectivity but is not quite fully assimilated into his new country. At same time, his time in Italy has allowed him a much broader, European perspective: his novels Shear and Europa, which are set on Continent and feature characters of several European nationalities, capture his enlarged European scope. From Parks's novels and nonfiction books to his translations and journalism, Fenwick reckons with Parks's full literary range and sheds light on work of a versatile English writer whose international recognition is steadily growing.

The Spleen of Rome: Modernism in Fellini's La dolce vita

The Spleen of Rome: Modernism in Fellini's La dolce vita

The Symposium at "Wasps" 1299 FF.

IN THE SECOND PART OF Wasps, Bdelykleon is attempting to instruct his incorrigible father how to enjoy la dolce vita. Part of this instruction involves the proper behaviour at an elegant symposium (cf. TCiv ~rhoWXvilw [1171], d&vspcov Ntapovrwy rOkvaOCov Kai 6E LCOv [1175], iv &vspdctiv [1185], oL crooi [1196]). Two groups of sympotai are encountered, the first an imaginary one created by Bdelykleon as an example at 1219 ff.: