Dolce Vita Confidential by Shawn Levy

Author:Shawn Levy [Levy, Shawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Film & Video, History & Criticism, History, Europe, Italy
ISBN: 9780393247596
Google: VNqaCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-10-04T05:00:00+00:00

* It wasn’t all cheery news and delightful novelties. On a morning in November 1954, a man’s nude body lay on the sidewalk outside the Hotel Eden on Via Ludovisi, just off Via Veneto. The dead man, who witnesses said seemed to be smiling, was Raimondo Lanza Branciforte, Prince of Trabia, thirty-nine years old, heir to one of the oldest titles of Sicily and a well-known sportsman, scenester, and skirt chaser in the swell spots of Europe. He had a title and money, and he lived like a nobleman of a bygone era: He was educated in England, spent some time serving as a diplomat in Paris, and he even wrote a memoir/treatise (never published) about his life and ideas entitled Mi Toccherà Ballare (I Shall Have to Dance). He included among his amours Rita Hayworth and Carroll Baker and among his friends Luchino Visconti, Aristotle Onassis, and Gianni Agnelli. He was known to spend freely, to live hard, to use cocaine, to drink and dance and dally until dawn rose. His apparent suicide confounded those close to him. He had just come to Rome from Sicily after a party in his ancestral castle in honor of Onassis, and on the morning of his death he had been to see a doctor, who noted nothing amiss. He may have been manic-depressive—he exhibited several classic emotional symptoms of the condition. But his death was a mystery—and not only the why, but the how: the accounts of the hotel manager, the police, and Lanza di Trabia’s brother all disagreed as to which floor of the hotel he had leapt (or, as it was inevitably suggested in the newspapers, been pushed) from. The following year, the mystery inspired a song by Domenico Modugno, “Vecchia Frak” (“Old Tuxedo”), an evocative and melancholy ballad about an elegant man, wearily wandering the city in the wee hours and deciding, almost on a whim, to leap into the river and bid the world adieu.

† They also took payment: by 1962, Italy would pay back all of its billions of dollars in Marshall Plan loans.

‡ Even though Francesca also dabbled in drugs, the scandal and stress of Dado’s arrest and trial (as well as his apparent addiction to women other than his wife) cost them their marriage, and she moved on, eventually to Milan, where she threw herself from a seventh-story window in 1962.

§ In time, Pope Paul VI would do away with the Black aristocracy and all of its titles.

¶ In 1968, Muriel Spark published The Public Image, a novel about an English actress sucked up by the high life of Via Veneto and the Roman demimonde of infidelity, suicide, and wild parties. It was certainly inspired by Lee’s story, and it was short-listed for the inaugural Booker Prize.

# And there was a twist in the bunch: in 1957, Henry Fonda, then fifty-two years old, wed the Venetian baroness Afdera Franchetti, twenty-six years his junior (and only five years older than her husband’s elder child, Jane). The marriage—his fourth; her second—lasted not quite four years.

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