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Cinecittà

Gina Lollobrigida – the temptress of the Tiber

1958. Gina Lollobrigida in Solomon and Sheba. Photo by Leo Fuchs. Read more.

Gina Lollobrigida was one of the great international sex symbols of postwar cinema.

In its January 1956 issue, Modern Screen magazine reported that:

L’Italienne is downright gorgeous but you can find others just as beautiful. But she is currently the most important international star. Almost single-handed, Gina of the unpronounceable last name has lifted the Italian film industry up to glossy respectability and reasonable solvency.

The “unpronounceable last name” was regularly abbreviated to La Lollo, and a few websites suggest that the frilly red lettuce lollo rosso was named after her tousled coiffure or even her panties – seriously? 

The previous year she had played the title role in La donna più bella del mondo (literally, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World but released to English-speaking audiences as Beautiful But Dangerous). It was a sobriquet enthusiastically embraced both by the star herself and by the salivating media.

And before that, in October 1954, Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Jealousy) had been the hit of Italian Film Week in London and Gina had been presented to the Queen. It was an early triumph but also a reminder that she had competition. At the premiere she had been rather upstaged by another upwardly mobile actress, Sophia Loren, who had drawn attention with a daringly low-cut gown. Swords had been crossed and the feud continued for decades.

Until the mid-fifties Gina had been seen mostly in Italian films but she was about to star in a series of hit movies made for the US market that would transform her hitherto limited fan base – films like Trapeze (1956), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956) and Solomon and Sheba (1959).

In a career that stretched from 1946 to 2011, IMDb credits Gina with 69 appearances on screen. While the movies in which she starred vary in quality, they demonstrate her flexibility as an actress, perfectly at home in serious drama, romantic comedy and high farce. Although she was always considered more a sex symbol than a serious actress, she won more than a dozen awards including three for best actress at the David di Donatello awards (Italy’s equivalent of the Oscars).

Around 1955. Gina Lollobrigida snapped by a paparazzo. Read more.

Growing up

Gina Lollobrigida is born in 1927, one of four daughters whose father is a furniture maker. Towards the end of World War II, their home is destroyed by Allied air attacks and the family moves to Rome, where they end up living in a single room. Gina would tell the Associated Press in 1994:

I know what it is to be hungry. I know what it is to lose your home. I remember when I had fear. I know what it is to grow up never having a toy.

To get an impression of the poverty and desperation around at the time, you have only to watch Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist film Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves).

After school, Gina has lessons in singing, dancing and drawing. To help pay for these, she does sketches of American GIs and part-time work modelling for comics. And it turns out that there’s another opportunity too. In her own words as reported in La Stampa (a newspaper) in 2001:

I had two directors stop me twice outside of my school and ask if I wanted to be in movies. Curiosity led me to make appearances in two or three films. Then when I was offered the lead role in Love of a Clown [based on the opera Pagliacci] I absolutely refused.

My final strategy for getting them to leave me alone was to ask to be paid one million [lire], which was a lot compared to the 1,000 I earned for secondary roles. I thought this would be enough to discourage anyone. To my great surprise they accepted and this is how I began my cinema career.

Or perhaps not so surprising given her hourglass figure, her sultry looks and the reputation she’s built already for diligently learning her lines and taking her work seriously. Pagliacci – Amore tragico is released in 1948 and she’s on her way to stardom.

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Gina Lollobrigida at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958

Gina Lollobrigida at the Cannes Film Festival

1958. Gina Lollobrigida, surrounded by photographers, makes an entrance at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Gina Lollobrigida conversion behind the scenes as director John Sturges looks on

Gina Lollobrigida behind the scenes

1959. Gina Lollobrigida conversing behind the scenes of Never So Few. Director John Sturges (wearing glasses) looks on.

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Gina Lollobrigida with her minder

Gina Lollobrigida with her minder

Around 1960. Is that Gina Lollobrigida's minder behind her or someone else? Unfortunately the caption is missing from the back of the photo. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

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Gina Lollobrigida dining with André Maurois

Gina Lollobrigida dining with André Maurois

1965. Gina Lollobrigida dining with French author André Maurois at the Cannes Film Festival.

Gina Lollobrigida and Milko Skofic

The following year she marries a doctor from Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia) who is helping refugees temporarily being put up at Rome’s Cinecittà film studios. Throughout the fifties, the couple are more or less inseparable, their relationship reported with a mix of enthusiasm and implicit astonishment by various movie magazines such as Modern Screen. This is from an article, Gina Lollobrigida and her backstage husband, which appears in the January 1956 edition: 

For eight of her 27 years she’s been married to the same man, Dr. Milko Skofic. They say the Skofics don’t have trouble because the good doctor is so madly jealous he never leaves his glamorous wife’s side long enough for trouble to begin. Well, he’s only in Paris (where Gina’s making Trapeze with Lancaster and Curtis) on week ends but Gina just isn’t interested in anyone but Milko.

Skofic has not yet lived down the decision they both made soon after the marriage. He chose to manage his wife’s career instead of continuing his medical practice. As a foreigner and a refugee he was faced with difficulties in reestablishing himself. But Gina’s star was rising and she needed advice. She still does.

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Gina Lollobrigida being laced into a corset for a scene from Crossed Swords

Hourglass Gina

1954. Her dresser laces Gina Lollobrigida's corset to emphasize her already voluptuous curves. You can see the result in Il maestro di Don Giovanni (Crossed Swords, 1954) in which Gina stars opposite Errol Flynn. This photo is reproduced in the January 1954 issue of Screenland magazine to illustrate an article called It’s True What They Say About Gina.

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Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome)

Gina Lollobrigida in La romana

1954. Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome).

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Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome)

Gina Lollobrigida in La romana

1954. Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome).

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Gina Lollobrigida arriving at The Tivoli

Gina Lollobrigida arriving at The Tivoli

1954. Gina Lollobrigida arriving at The Tivoli. A caption on the back of the photo reads:

The Italian Film Festival opened last night at the Tivoli with the film “Neapolitan Fantasy”. Italian film stars were presented to the Queen who along with the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret attended the performance.

PS: “La Lollo” they call her in her native Italy – Gina Lollobrigida arriving at the Tivoli

But the marriage gets off to a tricky start.

1958. Gina Lollobrigida in Solomon and Sheba. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

Howard Hughes and Hollywood

And that tricky start is down to studio boss and arch-womaniser Howard Hughes. Gina catches his famously roving eye – accounts differ as to exactly how – and she’s summoned by him to Hollywood for a screen test. She asks for a pair of tickets so that Milko can go with her but she ends up setting off on her own. It’s possible that’s because he can’t get a US visa but more likely because he’d get in the way of Hughes’ seduction routine. So just the one ticket turns up. 

When she arrives Hughes sets her up in a suite at a luxurious hotel on Wilshire Boulevard and arranges an English teacher and a voice coach for her. At this point in her life she knows very little English.

And then he gets down to the real business – embarking on an affair. She’s not allowed out except in his company, of which there’s plenty on offer. Hughes arranges a series of dates, a priority being to avoid any media attention. So they end up eating at cheap diners or even, sometimes, in his car. As part of the entertainment he teaches her to swear.

She gets increasingly frustrated and desperate. After two and a half months of these goings-on and with no movie-making in sight, she agrees to sign a seven-year contract, Hughes’ condition for letting her go home. The terms of the contract all but prevent her from making a film with any other studio in the US. The get-out, such as it is, is that she can star in American films shot outside the US.

That’s handy as the Hollywood studios are beginning to take advantage of the talent and lower production costs available in Europe and particularly at Cinecittà. Beat the Devil (1953) in which she stars opposite Humphrey Bogart is shot in Italy and directed by John Huston. The following year, Gina appears on the front cover of the August 16 issue of TIME magazine

Gina Lollobrigida (pronounced low-low-bridge-id-ah) was in town to make a movie. And who is Gina? Hardly anywhere in the world today except in the U.S., could such a question be asked. In Europe she is the most famous seven syllables since “Come up and see me some time.”

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Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome)

Gina Lollobrigida in La romana

1954. Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome).

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Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome)

Gina Lollobrigida in La romana

1954. Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome).

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Gina Lollobrigida on the set of La legge

Gina Lollobrigida on the set of La legge

1958. Gina Lollobrigida in a décolleté top on the set of La legge (The Law).

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Gina Lollobrigida filming La bellezza di Ippolita

Gina Lollobrigida filming La bellezza di Ippolita

1962. Gina Lollobrigida, uncharacteristically blonde, filming La bellezza di Ippolita (She Got What She Asked For) in Rome.

Beat the Devil is the first of a string of English-language films that propel her to megastar status in the US. Indeed such a desirable property that, in an interview quoted in The Scotsman: 

When I finally returned to America to do a film with Sinatra, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had to pay $75,000 to Howard Hughes. The Hollywood contracts I had were truly a dream. They gave me everything I wanted. I had approval of the cast, the director, the producer, and I got quite a significant percentage of overall earnings. When I went to do a film, I’d take my husband, my son, my nanny, my seamstress, my hairdresser, and my ‘lady-in-waiting’, a French countess who helped me perfect languages.

During the sixties, Gina stars in one movie after another, many of them romantic comedies, opposite the likes of Ernest Borgnine, Sean Connery and Bob Hope. Most of those films are both unmemorable and lucrative.

1956. Gina Lollobrigida as Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Gina Lollobrigida – anything but “the girl next door”

The emergence of Silvana Mangano, Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren as major stars prompts a piece in the August 1957 issue of Photoplay magazine titled What has she got that Hollywood hasn’t?:

While there is a great shortage of female stars in Hollywood the dismal truth is that there hasn’t been a major American actress of star calibre to burst on the scene, outside of Kim Novak, since Grace Kelly. Part of the answer seems to be that all the girls who show up in Hollywood these days turn out to be a replica of the girl next door. And about as glamorous. Pigtails and jeans may turn a head or two on Main Street but they don’t cause a stampede at the box office. … In the impact of the foreign stars on the American public, Italy continues to play the biggest role.

Three years earlier, Gina’s arrival in the US was hotly anticipated in an article in the January 1954 edition of Screenland magazine – It’s true what they say about Gina:

Fortunately for 150 million Americans, particularly the masculine half of the population, this tantalizing Roman dish of potent anatomical force, already considered Europe’s Queen of Perfect Pulchritude, will be paying our shores a visit around the first of the year. Luscious new star of the Italian cinema, Gina is probably the most perfectly formed creature Europe has ogled since Aphrodite. Her challenge for the title of Number One International Pin-Up Girl is a formidable one. In the six years since this Roman tidbit was chosen Miss Italy, she has become one of Europe’s biggest box-office attractions. …

There is no question that her extraordinary appeal has also had a profound effect on some of filmdom’s outstanding connoisseurs of female attributes. Errol Flynn, who chose Gina as his leading lady in “Crossed Swords,” had this to say: “What a department store this lovely is! She has everything you could want on every floor, and plenty of overstock, too.” Humphrey Bogart, soon to be seen with Gina and Jennifer Jones in John Huston’s “Beat The Devil,” was overheard muttering these lava-soaked words: “This gal is molten ore. What an ingot! She burns me, burns me, burns me. Look at me, I’m a crisp!” And John Huston himself had this point to make: “In any serious discussion of Gina’s talent, you can’t ignore her bosom. That, my friend, is an extraordinary talent to have and to hold. In fact, every time I recall Gina to mind, I must confess that even her elbows seem to be bosoms.”

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gina lollobrigida guardian brief bio

1. A look back at the life and films of Gina Lollobrigida

A brief biography of Gina Lollobrigida illustrated by stills and video clips assembled by The Guardian.

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gina lollobrigida trapeze

2. Trapeze (1956)

Extracts from one of the movies that made Gina Lollobrigida a star in the US. The trapeze scenes are enough to make your fingertips tingle. Scroll forward to 9:30 if you want to get straight to the action.

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gina lollobrigida sheba

3. Solomon and Sheba (1959)

The original trailer for the biblical blockbuster, promising a vibrant melodrama with plenty of sexual tension and action.

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gina lollobrigida 10 movies

4. Top 10 Gina Lollobrigida Movies of All Time

Introductions to and extracts from ten of Gina Lollobrigida’s films assembled by Stream TV.

The piece goes on to recount how Gina’s male leads reacted to their first encounters with her:

When she first met Bogart and Flynn and John Huston, they did not understand her. They could not see how a woman who, when she was before a camera was a Latin volcano, could, when she was by herself, be so demure. They used to call her Lollofrigida or Lollofrigidaire. But once they found out that she was naturally shy with anyone not her husband, and was not a snob at all, everyone became good friends.

Indeed Humphrey Bogart revises his opinion and memorably observes that “She makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.”

The overt sexism is particularly striking given that the magazine’s readers are predominantly female. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most perceptive analysis of Gina’s appeal to her male fanbase comes from her husband:

She is every man’s ideal come to life. She is the epitome of woman, caught at that moment when her beauty and femininity are at their zenith — rich, full and ripe. Her greatest appeal is with married men. They see in her the wife incarnate, beautiful, ever-appealing, always fertile.

Gina’s second career

With the advent of the 1970s, Gina Lollobrigida’s career as a movie star is petering out and she embarks on a new life. In 1971 she and Milko divorce (they separated in 1966) and she plunges into a second career, reprising the interest in fine arts she gave up to become a star and building on what she learned during her time on sets talking to directors and cinematographers.

Perhaps her most striking achievement is to get an exclusive interview in 1972 with reclusive Cuban revolutionary and prime minister Fidel Castro. She uses this as the basis for Ritratto di Fidel, a short documentary written, directed and produced by herself.

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Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado

Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado, Madrid

1958. Gina poses in front of three Velasquez portraits of dwarfs: Juan Calabazas, Francisco Lezcano and Diego de Acedo. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

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Gina Lollobrigida at the Prado

Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado, Madrid

1958. Gina tours one of the galleries at The Prado. But who is her companion? Is he the museum director or one of the curators? Photo by Leo Fuchs.

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Gina Lollobrigida at the Prado

Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado, Madrid

1958. What would Goya have made of Gina? Here she looks admiringly at a sex symbol of a previous era, the artist's Naked Maja. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

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Gina Lollobrigida at the Prado

Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado, Madrid

1958. It looks like Gina (or someone else) has been making a copy of Titian's painting of Salome with John the Baptist's head on a plate. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

She also turns her hand to photography and sculpture. Italia Mia, published in 1973 is the first of five books of photos, while in 2003 a collection of 38 of her bronze sculptures is exhibited at a number of venues including the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

She still has time to become a voracious collector of glitzy jewellery – opulent creations of gold and precious stones. In 2013, she auctions 23 of her Bulgari gems, worn at landmark moments during her career, at Sotheby’s in Geneva, using the proceeds to donate £3.2 million to stem cell research.

1958. Gina Lollobrigida poses in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

And then there’s the gossip and scandal surrounding her liaisons, many with much younger men. Well, we won’t go down that rabbit hole except to note Gina’s disputed marriage to Spanish businessman Javier Rigau y Rafol, 34 years her junior, whom she originally met at a party in Monte Carlo in 1984.

Want to know more about Gina Lollobrigida?

Gina Lollobrigida died on 16 January 2023 and there are plenty of excellent and informative obituaries, notably in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, The Economist and The Scotsman.

For a somewhat drier account replete with sources, look no further than Wikipedia. And for a catalogue of her films, go to IMDb.

Other topics you might be interested in…

Claudia Cardinale – up for a challenge
Elsa Martinelli – Italy’s sassy Audrey Hepburn
Monica Vitti
Monica Vitti – a sad childhood, a glittering career and a bitter old age
Tazio Secchiaroli – more than a paparazzo
The paparazzi – shock horror birth of a monster

Filed Under: Films, Stars Tagged With: Cinecittà, Errol Flynn, Fidel Castro, Gina Lollobrigida, Howard Hughes, Humphrey Bogart, Javier Rigau y Rafol, John Huston, Leo Fuchs, Milko Skofic, Solomon and Sheba, Sophia Loren, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

The paparazzi – shock horror birth of a monster

Look of resignation
Around 1963. Princess Grace of Monaco endures the antics of the paparazzi.

Paparazzi. The lowest of the low. Leeches, predators, sleazebags. Intrusive, money-grubbing, shameless stalkers. No depths to which they won’t sink in pursuit of stunners, love rats and sex romps.

Yup, paparazzi get a pretty bad press. So where does this ravenous pack of hyenas come from? And why are they called paparazzi? It’s a story with plenty of tabloid appeal, set in 1950s Rome where a cluster of volatile elements fuse to create the gruesome phenomenon.

The paparazzi – humble beginnings

Like Paris after World War II, Rome and its inhabitants are in dire straits after the defeat of the fascists. There’s no better account of the poverty and desperation that are rife in the city than Vittorio de Sica’s seminal neorealist film, The Bicycle Thieves (1948). It recounts the travails of Antonio Ricci, an impoverished father who finally is lucky enough to be offered a job that could be the salvation of his young family. But to do the job he needs a bicycle, and he’s already pawned his to raise cash for food…

Ricci is typical of thousands of Romans who have to live on their wits.

In the aftermath of World War II, one option is to beg, steal or borrow a camera and offer to take pictures of visitors to the eternal city – mostly soldiers and a few tourists. Of course, there’s no such thing as instant prints, so the idea is that the customer meets the photographer later on to collect and pay for the shots. But, as often as not, the customers fail to show so the photographers (or “scattini” as they are known) find themselves shelling out money they can’t recoup on film and print, and living on the breadline. The last straw is that as cameras get cheaper and easier to afford, more and more visitors have their own equipment. Whatever market there was, begins to dry up.

The paparazzi – the movie industry to the rescue

By this time, another way of earning much-needed lire is gathering pace. In 1945, Cinecittà, the film studio set up on the outskirts of Rome by Benito Mussolini, is little more than a refugee camp. But it doesn’t take long for the Hollywood studios to begin to realise its potential.

Ava's arrival
Rome, December 1954. Ava Gardner arrives from Singapore.

As the largest film-production facility in Europe, it can offer the capacity to shoot spectacular movies such as Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, and Cleopatra, with the populace of Rome only too happy to provide a rent-a-crowd service. Besides movie extras, there’s plenty of untapped talent across the disciplines, from sets to lighting, and from costumes to hair and make-up. All available at bargain prices compared with the escalating costs of production in Hollywood.

But the real deal-clincher is a piece of Italian legislation that prevents US companies from sending back their earnings. What better to do with the funds generated by tickets sales of US movies in Italy than plough the money back into making more films there? By the time an article about the film-making in Rome appears in the June 26 1950 issue of Time magazine, the author is able to coin the phrase “Hollywood on the Tiber” – and it sticks.

The Hollywood studios don’t just provide employment opportunities, they also bring along a host of stars who might otherwise never have materialized in Rome – the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Stewart Granger, Robert Taylor, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Audrey Hepburn, Linda Christian, Anita Ekberg and Elizabeth Taylor.

According to an article in the August 16, 1954 issue of Time magazine:

Movie producers … were just as common as cats in the Forum, and just about as noisy. … As many as three pictures were being shot at once with the same cast. … Drinking orgies, studio spies and gorgeous villas with swimming pools were the rule of the day. The purple sports shirt had replaced the purple toga.

The paparazzi – photographic scandalmongers

All this talent congregates around via Veneto, until recently the haunt of Rome’s bohemian intellectuals and artists but rapidly transforming into the centre of nightlife for the elite of Roman society – the rich, the famous, the titled, the entitled, the notorious, the wannabes…

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg pestered by paparazzi in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita
1959. Marcello and Sylvia pestered by paparazzi in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Photo by Pierluigi Praturlon.

In 1957, Melton Davis in his book All Rome Trembled, writes of via Veneto:

Only in modern Italy could a single half-mile-long street contain so much grace and vulgarity, power and decadence, charm and arrogance as did this gilded alley. It was made to order for the fixers, for the dope-addled princes and dream-haunted paupers, for the whole fantastic parade that gathered there.

And the goings-on of this group generate two scandals that rock Italian society to its foundations – partly because of what they reveal about a depraved upper-class demimonde but also because of the way they are reported – in photos as well as in copy.

During the fifties, Italy’s magazine sector is booming. Alongside the traditional publications, there are more recent titles, which take their inspiration from US picture magazines LIFE and Look. And then there are the new gossip magazines. The market leaders are Le Ore and Lo Specchio. each selling upward of half a million copies a week. Newsworthy images are their meat and drink, their appetite for them is insatiable, and very few of them have staff photographers.

Which brings us right back to the scattini who have realized that there is no more mileage in tourist shots. The name of the game now is to come up with juicy pictures of newsworthy events and celebrities – the more titillating the better. The scattini have morphed into downmarket street photographers.

The beach scene at dawn that concludes La Dolce Vita
1959. Body on the beach. The last scene of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita recalls the discovery of Wilma Montesi’s body. Photo by Pierluigi Praturlon.

The paparazzi – the Wilma Montesi scandal

The first of the two scandals begins when the corpse of an unremarkable young woman is found on a beach near Rome. She’s wearing a coat, blouse and underwear but her skirt, garters, stockings, shoes and handbag are missing. The date is 11 April, 1953, and the girl’s name is Wilma Montesi. The coroner gives a verdict of accidental death, which the police are happy to accept. But is it mere coincidence that the strand where Wilma’s body was found is a just a kilometre away from Capocotta, a private wooded estate used by noblemen and their guests for hunting and parties? Rumour has it that Wilma was at an orgy of sex and drugs along with noblemen, politicians, gangsters and prostitutes. Perhaps she died of an overdose and was dumped on the shore. Or she may have been murdered because she knew too much.

It takes just a single newspaper to break cover and suggest there’s been a cover-up – that Wilma was murdered and, what’s more, some powerful politicians may be implicated. Within days, the press are all over the story. Named in conjunction with it are Ugo Montagna, a Sicilian nobleman and operator of Capocotta, and Piero Piccioni, well-known jazz musician and son of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Anna-Maria Caglio on her way to court
1953. Anna-Maria Caglio on her way to court as a key witness in the Montesi case.

In the ensuing libel case, Giuseppe Sotgiu, an ambitious Communist politician, leads the case for the defense. His plan is to make the most of this opportunity to get at the corrupt establishment and in the process to raise his own profile. The allegations and the trial itself are nothing short of sensational and draw the photographers like pigs to shit. In their determination to get the best shots, theyʼre not afraid to confront lawyers, witnesses, even the Montesi family, outside the courthouse, at their homes and offices, and when they are out shopping or relaxing at a bar or restaurant.

One of those witnesses is Anna-Maria Caglio, an attractive girl who has seen at first hand the goings-on at Capocotta and is prepared to talk about them under oath. She reveals that she has been so frightened that the alleged perpetrators would have her killed that as a precaution she left with her landlady a letter revealing her knowledge that Montagna runs a gang of drug traffickers and Piccioni is a murderer. The defining image – of Caglio, overcome with emotion – is snapped by Tazio Secchiaroli and goes everywhere.

For his next trick, Secchiaroli picks out a hiding place outside a brothel. Rumour has it that itʼs here that Sotgiu, who has assumed the moral high ground in the Montesi case, goes to watch his wife having sex with various lovers – women as well as men. Secchiaroli lies in wait and gets a shot of Sotgiu strolling into the building with an air of familiarity and later back out of it. Thanks partly to those shots, the police raid the brothel and arrest the couple for questioning together with a number of other participants. The screaming headlines that blaze across the newspapers end Sotgiu’s career.

And that’s not all. Back in court Montagna and Piccioni as part of their defense against charges in the Montesi case, claim to be strangers to each other. Tipped off by Velio Cioni, one of his gang, Secchiaroli manages to trap the pair by using his Fiat and himself to block the dead-end street down which they have driven. They make as if to run him over but he stands firm and gets half a dozen incriminating shots – another scoop.

In spite of all this, the trial comes to nothing – there’s simply not enough hard evidence to convict anyone for Wilma’s death.

The paparazzi – the strip show at Rugantino

Five years after the Montesi affair, the night of 5 November, 1958 to be precise, another scandal hits the headlines and once again Secchiaroli is in the right place at the right time. Along with four other photographers including Angelo Frontoni and Umberto Guidotti, heʼs been invited to a party thrown by Olga di Robilant, an aspiring actress looking to break into the scene in Rome with a view to furthering her career. She’s going to get a whole lot more than she bargained for.

The venue is Rugantino, a restaurant on a cobblestoned piazza in the city’s Trastevere district, and the guests include an assortment of young aristocrats together with various stars including Linda Christian, Elsa Martinelli and, most importantly, Anita Ekberg.

Anita Ekberg at Rugantino
Rome, 5 November 1958. Anita Ekberg sets a bad example at Rugantino.

In spite of the hip crowd, the drinks and the strains of the Roman New Orleans Jazz Band, the party starts off as a pretty staid affair. Then Anita Ekberg kicks off her shoes and improvises a mambo. With her platinum tresses and décolleté black-velvet gown, she’s quite a sight. She’s joined by a German actor. Then a few more couples take to the floor. Other members of the party start clapping to the music. Suddenly, the atmosphere is electric.

Anita slips and decides to take a seat while she recovers. And onto the dance floor steps a small, dark girl in a white dress. She’s gatecrashed the party and no one knows who she is. But shy she isn’t. She walks up to the drummer and whispers in his ear. He signals to the rest of the band that he is going to do a solo performance. And the girl begins to dance. Anita asks if she’s a belly dancer. Yes, but the dress she’s wearing doesn’t lend itself to belly dancing. Anita challenges her to remove her dress, promising to follow suit if she does. And so begins the girlʼs notorious striptease.

There to record it for posterity and for the next day’s press are the five photographers. The one who gets the most celebrated shots is Secchiaroli. While his comrades home in on the dancer, he draws back to take in the leering crowd of celebrities. And he has the foresight to have his rolls of film smuggled out before they’re seized by the police. Secchiaroli will recall:

What was happening before my very eyes was indescribable … the most sinful, transgressive thing that I had every photographed.

The girl, it turns out, is Aïché Nana. She’s a Lebanese actress and writer and now everybody’s heard of her.

Secchiaroli’s photos appear in the reputable L’Europeo and L’Espresso as well as in more downmarket publications such as Epoca and Lo Specchio. The accompanying articles lead with headlines such as “Rome’s Turkish Night,” “The Sins of Trastevere” and “This Is How the Upper Crust Undress.” And the scandal even makes its way into The New York Times.

Gina Lollobrigida posing for a street photographer
Early 1950s. Gina Lollobrigida happy to pose for a street photographer.

The paparazzi – what do they get up to and who are they?

For a while, there’s an unspoken pact, sometimes even collusion, between the photographers and their subjects. The former crave shots of celebrities to sell to the media. The latter are happy to appear in newspapers and magazines to build or bolster their careers or pander to their own egos. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. But as competition intensifies between both magazines and photographers, the pressure ramps up for more and more sensational images.

It’s not long before the photographers, led by Secchiaroli, become provocateurs, goading their subjects to lose their cool and provide a bit of drama for the lensmen. Why? Because there’s a market for such images. The magazines will pay 3,000 lire (roughly US $40.00 in today’s money) for a straight shot and 200,000 lire (roughly US $2,750) for one of a celeb losing their cool – so the tantrum premium amounts to over 6,000%. The turning point comes around 1958 when stories about clashes between photographers and celebrities become more and more common and more and more racy. One particular night, Umberto Guidotti snaps a shot of exiled King Farouk of Egypt trying to snatch Secchiaroli’s camera from him; and Secchiaroli himself gets an image of British actor Anthony Steel in a drunken rage.

Anthony Steel, currently married to Anita Ekberg, is, in fact, a favourite target of the photographers. Late night, he can be relied on to have had too much to drink and be ready to flare up. Anita Ekberg usually takes it in her stride but occasionally she’s riled. On one memorable occasion, she returns to give her pursuers as good (if not better) than she gets, shooting at them with a bow and arrow. And it is pretty much outright war between the paparazzi and their targets. Here’s how Tazio Secchiaroli viewed it:

Now, there’s our target, our face: who’s going to let it get away? Obviously, on these occasions, nothing will stop us, even if it means overturning tables and waiters, or raising shrieks from an old lady who doesn’t quite get what’s happening; even if it means shocking John Q Citizen – he’s always there – who protests in the name of the rights of man, or, conversely,  galvanizing the other citizen – also ubiquitous – who takes our side in the name of the freedom of the press and of the Constitution; even if the police intervene or we chase the subject all night long, we won’t let go, we’ll fight with flashes, we’ll help each other out… The increasingly ruthless competition means we can’t afford to be delicate; our duties, our responsibilities as picture-hunters, always on the lookout, and pursued ourselves on every side, make it impossible for us to behave otherwise. Of course we, too, would like to stroll through an evening, have a cup of coffee in blissful peace, and see via Veneto as a splendid international promenade, rather than one big workplace, or even a theater of war.

The paparazzi themselves are a lean, hungry, streetwise bunch who have muscled their way into the business from humble beginnings. They don’t need to watch The Bicycle Thieves to find out just how much of a struggle life is for ordinary Italians. Often they hunt in packs, and they dress respectably so they can gain access to wherever the best shots are to be had. But they come from the other side of the tracks compared with their subjects, for whose wealth, lifestyle and privilege they have little sympathy. As Tazio recalls:

We photographers were all poor starving devils and they had it all – money, fame, posh hotels. The doormen and porters in the grand hotels gave us information tips – you could call it the fellowship of the proletariat.

20 October 1960. Avenging amazon. Anita Ekberg, usually laid back about the paparazzi, loses her cool, decides enough is enough and takes matters into her own hands.

They pioneer a style of photography that’s utterly true to themselves and the situation they find themselves in, and quite unlike anything that’s gone before. It’s raw, brash and aggressive. It derives partly from their lack of training and partly from the equipment they use. To snap a saleable shot with their twin-lens Rolleiflexes, you have to get right up close to your subject and fire your flash in their face. Since the flash takes a long time to recharge, you have just one chance for a shot.

So who’s in the gang during the 1950s, the heyday of the paparazzi? Some snappers you’re likely to bump into on the via Veneto, their favourite haunt, include Adriano Bartoloni, Giancarlo Bonora, Alessandro Canetrelli, Velio Cioni, Guglielmo Coluzzi, Licio D’Aloisio, Mario Fabbi, Quinto Felice, Marcello Geppetti, Umberto Guidotti, Ivan Kroscenko, Ivo Meldolesi, Luciano Mellace, Lino Nanni, Giuseppe Palmas, Paolo Pavia, Mario Pelosi, Gilberto Petrucci, Franco Pinna, Elio Sorci, Sergio Spinelli, Bruno Tartaglia, Sandro Vespasiani and Ezio Vitale.

But the two who stand out are Tazio Secchiaroli and Pierluigi Praturlon. You’ve read already about some of the former’s exploits. Pierluigi’s nickname in the business is “Lux,” after the soap advertised as “the choice of nine stars out of ten.” While he’s certainly one of the gang, he has other claims to fame – for example, his friendship with Anita Ekberg.

Anita and I often went out together. We used to go dancing at a place near Casalpalocco. One night in August, in I958, Anita, who always danced barefoot, hurt her foot. Coming back to Rome at four in the morning, we passed the Trevi Fountain and Anita said, ‘Stop the car so I can rinse my foot.’ ‘No, come on,’ I said. ‘You’ll be home in five minutes.’ She insisted, so we stopped. She got out and, hiking up her skirt, began wading into the fountain, at which point I got my camera and started shooting her in the fountain’s dusky glow. I remember two carabinieri standing in a corner who weren’t more than twenty years old. They didn’t say a word. They were completely entranced watching this beautiful woman in the fountain, with her long, lovely legs.

Anita Ekberg’s account differs in the details:

One night I was having photos taken by Pierluigi Praturlon. I was barefoot and I cut my foot. I went in search of a fountain to bathe my bleeding foot and, all unawares, found myself in the piazza di Trevi. It was summer. I was wearing a white-and-pink cotton dress with the upper part like a man’s shirt. I lifted the skirt up and immersed myself in the basin, saying to Luigi, ‘You can’t imagine how cool this water is, you should come in, too.’ ‘Just stay like that,’ he said, and started taking photos. They sold like hot cakes! … It was me who made Fellini famous, not the other way around.

Either way, the shots appear in a magazine called Tempo Illustrato. For a while, Pierluigi is Sophia Loren’s photographer of choice, before being superseded by Tazio Secchiaroli. He’s given the role of stills photographer for La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini. And he goes on to set up a photographic agency, headquartered in Rome with offices in London and Paris.

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg again beset by paparazzi in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita
1959. Not just on the via Veneto but wherever they go, Marcello and Sylvia can’t escape the paparazzi buzzing around them in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Photo by Pierluigi Praturlon.

The paparazzi – Fellini and La Dolce Vita

Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, La Dolce Vita, is inspired by the world you’ve been reading about – the celebrities, the scandals, the street photographers and the popular press in which their shots appear. He wants to capture the atmosphere of contemporary Rome:

I think the inspiration, even in terms of the formulation of the images, came from life as seen by the scandal sheets, L’Europeo, Oggi; the careless jaunts of the corrupt aristocracy, their way of photographing parties. The scandal sheets were the worrying mirror of a society that was in a constant state of self-celebration, self-depiction, self- congratulation.

Five scenes from the film which draw on events that have featured in the press are:

  • The delivery of a statue of Jesus Christ by helicopter to the Vatican City, pictured in the papers in May 1950.
  • The suicide of the poet and novelist Cesare Pavese following his split with Constance Dowling.
  • The “miracle of the Madonna” photographed by Tazio Secchiaroli (he gets everywhere!).
  • Anita Ekberg’s night out with Pierluigi and her midnight dip in the Trevi Fountain.
  • The strip show at Rugantino.
  • The exploits of the street photographers around via Veneto, which, according to Fellini’s co-scriptwriter, Ennio Flaiano, has “become one big party … this isn’t a street any more, it’s a beach … the conversations are like those at the seaside, referring to an exclusively gastro-sexual reality.”

With those expoits in mind, Fellini invites five street photographers including Pierluigi, Secchiaroli and Frontoni to dinner so that he can listen to their stories and pick their brains:

Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) cools off in the Trevi Fountain in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita
Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) cools off in the Trevi Fountain in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Photo by Pierluigi Praturlon. Read more.

I spent a number of evenings chatting with Tazio Secchiaroli and the other photojournalists of via Veneto, learning the tricks of their trade. How they spotted their prey, how they teased them, how they how they tailored their features for the various newspapers. They had hilarious stories of lying in wait for eternities, of imaginative escapes, and of dramatic chases.

He retains Secchiaroli to train the actors who will play the parts of the street photographers in the film heʼs planning.

That those photographers come to be known as paparazzi is down to Fellini, his co-scriptwriter Ennio Flaiano and the film crew. Paparazzo is the name of the photographer with whom the journalist Marcello (the movie’s hack protagonist) teams up. It’s inspired by a travelogue that Flaiano has been reading and that features a hotel run by a man called Paparazzo.

When Flaiano proposes the name, the sound of it reminds Fellini of the buzzing of an insect you can’t get rid of. So Paparazzo it is. And during production, the film crew use the name for the whole gang of street photographers who feature in the movie – in Italian, paparazzi is the plural of paparazzo. The term sticks and rapidly gains currency.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth on the deck of a yacht off the coast of Ischia
Ischia, 1963. Mischief in the Med. Love rats Richard Burton and Elizabeth on the deck of a yacht off the coast of Ischia. Photo by Pat Morin.

The paparazzi – society’s pariahs

The paparazzi are none too pleased with their growing notoriety. In its April 14, 1961 issue, Time magazine publishes a pretty scathing article, Paparazzi on the Prowl, calling them “a ravenous wolf pack … who stalk big names … with flash guns at point-blank range” and with “lips leaking cigarettes, cameras drawn like automatics.”

No one is safe, not even royalty. … Legitimate news photographers scorn the paparazzi as streetwalkers of Roman journalism. But like streetwalkers, they cling to their place in society.

The new generation of paparazzi are more numerous than their predecessors and have new technology at their disposal – specificially zoom-lens SLR cameras. They no longer have to get up close and personal with their victims (and, increasingly, victims is what they are), they can shoot from way off. Gradually, the bleached out, high-contrast images produced by flashguns give way to grainy distance shots.

Perhaps the most famous early example of zoom-lens scandal shots is the work of a pack of paparazzi who, in 1962, set off in hot pursuit of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to Ischia, where filming of Cleopatra is scheduled for shooting after five months in Rome. The snappers catch the couple frolicking on the deck of a yacht. It’s the first proof of an affair that has been hotly rumoured. Both are married – in fact Elizabeth Taylor is already on her fourth husband. She has a reputation as a marriage breaker and for the press the series of photos confirm her insatiable appetite and shameless depravity. The scandal also helps ensure that Cleopatra will be an unprecedented box-office blockbuster.

Christine Keeler surrounded by police and press
London, 1963. Christine Keeler surrounded by police and press as she leaves court during the Profumo affair.

And so a monster is born.

By the time he comes to shoot The Bible in Rome, John Huston tells the US press that the paparazzi have become so objectionable and impossible to avoid and objectionable that, unless something is done about them, movie-makers will find other options for their productions.

Even before then, the action has switched from Rome to London, where the story of the Profumo scandal has all the necessary ingredients: sex, politics, deceit, espionage, criminality, suicide, high society and an extra-marital affair. It blows the lid off the UK establishment just as the Montesi scandal did just over ten years earlier in Italy. And, like the Montesi scandal, it grips the country and its readers.

In the late sixties, media mogul Rupert Murdoch will enter the UK’s newspaper industry, buy The Sun (a failing broadsheet), turn it into a tabloid and, aided and abetted by editor Larry Lamb, focus it on sport, celebrities and gossip. The transformation is the subject of James Graham’s super, soaraway smash play, Ink. With its outrageous headlines, topless models and devil-may-care attitude, it will quickly become the UK’s most popular newspaper.

The Sun is just one example of the popularity of paparazzi photography and tabloid journalism. But as the quest for scandal gets more and more aggressive, unscrupulous and vicious, the issues raised will become increasingly urgent – not least, the extent to which the practices involved are tantamount to stalking by another name

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A pack of paparazzi hound Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed on holiday in the Gulf of Saint Tropez

Wolf pack

Gulf of Saint Tropez, July, 1997. A pack of paparazzi hound Diana, Princess of Wales and her partner, Dodi Al-Fayed as they holiday on board the Al-Fayed family yacht.

Enlarge
Princess Diana hugs her younger son Harry on board Mohamed Al-Fayed's luxury yacht, Jonikal

Princess Diana with her son Harry

Gulf of Saint Tropez, 20 July, 1997. Diana, Princess of Wales, on holiday with Dodi Al-Fayed, hugs her younger son Harry on board the Al-Fayed family's luxury yacht, Jonikal.

Enlarge
Princess Diana on board the luxury yacht, Jonikal

Princess Diana’s last holiday

Gulf of Saint Tropez, 20 July, 1997. Diana, Princess of Wales on board the luxury yacht, Jonikal. Less than six weeks later she will die when, chased by paparazzi, the car in which she's being driven crashes in a Paris underpass.

The whole thing will reach its grim, ignominious and inevitable conclusion in August 1997 with the tragic deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and her fiancé, Dodi al-Fayed in a car crash in a Paris underpass. At her funeral, Charles Spencer will describe his sister as “the most hunted person of the modern age.” And at the inquest, jurors will rule that she was “unlawfully killed” not just by the reckless driving of the chauffeur but also by the paparazzi who were chasing her.

It’s difficult not to feel a certain admiration, affection even, for the first paparazzi. They were desperate, they were cunning, they were audacious. They did what they had to do to claw themselves out of poverty, they grafted and they had a ball. What those who followed in their steps had to offer is more up for debate. Hyenas and other scavengers, however repulsive, perform a useful task in nature. Can the same be said of today’s paparazzi?

Robert Kennedy snapped by a paparazzo as he crosses the street
February 1967. Robert Kennedy snapped by a paparazzo as he crosses the street. Photo: Reporters Associés.

The paparazzi – a uniquely Roman phenomenon?

The answer to the question depends on what we mean by paparazzi. In some respects at least they had a forerunner in the US. His name is Arthur Fellig but he’s better known as Weegee. He’s famous for his stark and gruesome photos of New York crime scenes, car crashes and other personal tragedies. His approach, as outlined in an interview on ASX, chimes with that of the paparazzi.

News photography teaches you to think fast, to be sure of yourself, self confidence. When you go out on a story, you don’t go back for another sitting. You gotta get it.

…

The idea was I sold the pictures to the newspapers. And naturally, I picked a story that meant something, in other words, names make news. If there’s a fight between a couple on 3rd avenue or 9th avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, nobody cares, it’s just a barroom brawl. But if society has a fight in a Cadillac on Park avenue and their names are in the Social Register, this makes news, and the papers are interested in that.

And Weegee’s account of photographing a murder scene totally echoes what set Secchiaroli apart from his mates that night at Rugantino:

I arrive, right in the heart of Little Italy, 10 Prince street, here’s a guy had been bumped off in the doorway of a little candy store. This was a nice balmy hot summer’s night, the detectives are all over, but all the five stories of the tenement, people are on the fire escape. They’re looking, they’re having a good time, some of the kids are even reading the funny papers and the comics.”

There was another photographer there, and he made what they call a ten foot shot. He made a shot of just a guy laying in the doorway, that was it. To me, this was drama, this was like a backdrop. I stepped back all the way about a hundred feet, I used flash powder, and I got this whole scene: the people on the fire escapes, the body, everything. Of course the title for it was “Balcony Seats at a Murder.” That picture won me a gold medal with a real genuine diamond…

Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly ambushed by paparazzi
Monaco, 13 April 1956. Royal ruckus. Paparazzi roadblock incenses Prince Rainier during his first public outing with his fiancée, movie star Grace Kelly.

Paparazzi photography is closely related to both photojournalism and street photography. The former tends to focus on more serious subject matter and to have a more serious slant. Street photography is generally gentler than paparazzi photography – think Henri Cartier-Bresson and the post-World War II humanist school, or take a look at some issues of Picture Post in the UK, LIFE and Look in the US.

The definitions of all these genres are always going to be fuzzy. Some defining characteristics of paparazzi photography are:

  • Subject – celebrity, sensational or scurrilous subject matter (ideally, all three).
  • Location – on the street or in other public places.
  • Approach – candid shots, preferably catching the subject off-guard.

By that definition, paparazzi photography was by no means confined to Rome even back in the mid-fifties, as illustrated by the shots here of Grace Kelly (in Monaco) and Maria Callas (in Milan). Indeed photographers were looking for these kinds of shots even before World War II – just take a look at this image of Barbara Stanwyck at a Hollywood premiere back in April 1937.

So while Rome was certainly a cradle of paparazzi photography back in the 1950s, its reputation as THE birthplace of the genre probably owes as much to the legend created by Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita as it does to what was actually taking place in the city.

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Want to know more about the paparazzi?

Absolutely essential reading is Shawn Levy’s riveting book, Dolce Vita Confidential. You can find out more about two of the leading paparazzi in Diego Mormorio’s beautifully illustrated monograph, Tazio Secchiaroli, Greatest of the Paparazzi and Philippe Garner’s article for The Telegraph, Elio Sorci: the world’s first paparazzo. In TIME magazine Kate Samuelson has written about The Princess and the Paparazzi: How Diana’s Death Changed the British Media in TIME magazine.

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Other topics you may be interested in…

Claudia Cardinale – up for a challenge
Elsa Martinelli – Italy’s sassy Audrey Hepburn
Gina Lollobrigida – the temptress of the Tiber
Paris after World War II – fact, fashion and fantasy
The sixties – sex, drugs, rock and roll and a whole lot more
Barbara Stanwyck in The Two Mrs Carrolls
Unsafe sex – the starlet’s dilemma

Filed Under: Events, Films, Photographers, Press, Stars Tagged With: Aïché Nana, Angelo Frontoni, Anita Ekberg, Anna-Maria Caglio, Aristotle Onassis, Ava Gardner, Cinecittà, Diana Princess of Wales, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Maria Callas, paparazzi, Pat Morin, Pierluigi Praturlon, Richard Burton, scattini, Tazio Secchiaroli, Wilma Montesi

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