A book has stirred debate over the most famous scene in Italian cinema history.
Images of a flamboyantly curvaceous Anita Ekberg cavorting in the Fontana di Trevi in Rome have captivated film buffs the world over. But, according to three recent accounts, the most celebrated sequence in Federico Fellini’s 1960 La Dolce Vita was not just a product of the director’s imagination.
At the controversy’s origin is the publication of a novel first serialised by a magazine in 1956. Luigi Malerba’s Le Lettere di Ottavia tells of a young woman from the provinces coming to Rome and getting carried away by the glamour of the city’s booming movie industry.
To attract publicity, Malerba’s aspiring starlet takes a dip in the Fontana di Trevi. In a new introduction, the author writes that Fellini told him ”he had enjoyed reading my first novel, and I think he recalled it four years later”.
Not necessarily, replied journalist Giovannino Russo. Interviewed by the daily Corriere della Sera, he noted that one of the film’s screenplay writers wrote a similar episode into one of his own novels.
Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di Uccidere of 1947 contained a passage in which ”a beautiful woman, an Ethiopian girl, a ‘force of nature’ … immersed herself in water and invited in a man, an Italian officer, who had, let us say, existential problems”. This, said Russo, was closer in spirit to the Dolce Vita scene in which Sylvia tempts an angst-ridden journalist, played by Marcello Mastroianni.
But, ”with all due respect,” wrote Tullio Kezich in the following day’s paper, ”things happened rather differently”.
The true inspiration was Ekberg herself, he wrote. Her character was originally called Anita and the script so mirrored her ”joyful night-time excursions” around Rome she at first refused to take the part.
A photo taken in August 1958 and reprinted in a book three years ago showed her knee-deep in the Fontana di Trevi.
”I remember having seen this picture in January 1959 in the office in which Fellini was making preparations for La Dolce Vita,” wrote Kezich. – Guardian Unlimited Â