For all the people coming to Rome and wishing to follow the trail of the mythic "Dolce Vita", there is now a place recently restored that is a must: The "Dolce Vita Gallery" (41 Via Palermo), in the neighbourhood of the railway station Termini and the Opera theatre.
Carlo Ponti, Sophia Loren and Vittorio De Sica, Rome
There, you can admire and also buy hundreds of photos of one of the most famous "paparazzo" of the Dolce Vita, the golden years of Rome, between the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, Marcello Geppetti. According to some people, he is the one who inspired Fellini the character of the photograph in the film "la Dolce Vita" named Antonio Paparazzo (in Italian, means noisy mosquito)!
Marcello Mastroianni, Set Of La Dolce Vita
At that time, via Veneto where Federico Fellini had his office, was the centre of the eternal city that was itself again, for a wile, the centre of the world, the "caput mundi". All the international biggest stars of cinema, fashion, design, music etc. came often to Rome, for holidays or for work. In those years, the film studios of Cinecittà where overbooked with peplum and other movies and roman families strolled along Via Veneto just to catch a glimpse of the stars sitting on the terraces of the Doney or, in front, the Café de Paris: Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sofia Loren...all beautiful women that the Marcello Geppetti's camera has photographed and that now we can find again in the Dolce Vita Gallery.
Brigitte Bardot in Spoleto
Raquel Welch and Marcello Mastroianni at Cinecitta on the set of the movie “Shoot Loud, Louder, I do not understand ...”
Thanks to the son of Marcello, Marco, that runs the gallery, the complete archives of his father have been assembled in Via Palermo where the walls of the first room are covered by more than a hundred of his photos. Amongst them, the historical kiss between Liz Taylor and Richard Burton on a boat deck, in the summer 1962, when they fell in love playing together in the J. Mankievicz 's Cleopatra, shot on the island of Ischia and in Rome. The photo caused an enormous scandal at that time because Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were married... but not to each other!
Richard Burton and Liz Taylor kissing in Ischia,
