The “dolce vita” years in Rome, between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, before the protests, were the exclusive salon of an unprecedented cultural and artistic ferment. One historic memory of that period was Via Veneto and its cafes, crowded every evening with the glorious celebrities of American and Italian cinema.
At the tables of venues like Harry’s bar, the Doney, the Gran Cafè Rome, the Cafè de Paris, in a stretch of road less than a kilometre long, it was easy to come across paparazzi looking for scoops ready to immortalize the famous faces of cinema and personalities seeking fame. Famous Italian magazines like Gioia, Gente, Epoca, published the scandals and stories that helped to immortalize those years.
Everyone was breathing in the international atmosphere of Via Veneto, thanks to the numerous Hollywood producers who chose that Italian street for cinema and the capital of Rome for their film sets.
But the absolute genius was Federico Fellini, who, in his masterpiece “La Dolce Vita”, perfectly immortalized the image of an Italy losing its innocence, having just come out of a war, with a strong moral involution, looking toward the American model, desiring a life of joy and excitement.
A sweet life lived to the fullest as we see in the movie’s climax when Anita Eckberg swims in the Trevi Fountain and speaks her famous line to Mastroianni, “Marcello, come here,” the line that forever consecrated the story of those years in the eyes of the world.