Two hundred photographs and magazine covers on show at an exhibit which opened this week, depicting the golden age of Italian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, as the country reveled in its Dolce Vita age.
Trajan’s Market, a large complex of ruins overlooking the Roman forum in the city center, hosts on its walls pictures of Italian icons like filmmaker Federico Fellini, sitting at the dinner table with actor Anthony Quinn and his wife Giulietta Masina, or foreign stars like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall on a runway at Rome’s airport.
"We didn’t want any staged pictures, but natural ones, of stars with their fans or during mundane events," Marco Panella, the curator of the exhibit, told AFP.
Panella believes Rome’s golden age for movies began in 1949 with the marriage in Italy of US actors Tyrone Power and Linda Christian, followed by production house MGM’s decision to shoot the epic blockbuster "Quo Vadis" in Rome’s Cinecitta’ studios.
La Dolce Vita was a "world of rites and Via Veneto, with its bars and its news-stands, was its center," Panella said, referring to the central street in Rome home to the largest luxury hotels.
Pictures in the exhibit, open until November 14, capture US actors Kirk Douglas and Joan Crawford signing autographs along the street, while Jack Palance sifts through the international newspapers on display at a kiosk.
Other moments immortalized in the pictures include Claudia Cardinale laughing with Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon at a gala, Audrey Hepburn and her dog stepping off her plane and Ingrid Bergman holding three pillows as she leaves a department store.
The Dolce Vita ends with Italian filmmaker Dino Risi’s 1962 classic "The Easy Life" starring Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant, "a movie that ends Italy’s period of collective adolescence that started after the war and was characterized by energy and the willingness to go forwrd," Panella said.
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A visitor stands by a picture of Gina Lollobrigida at the premier of the exhibition. (AFP Photo/Andreas Solaro)
