To Each His Own Dolce Vita

It was the Golden Age of Italian Cinema. The time of masterpieces: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita; Antonioni’s L’Avventura; Visconti’s The Leopard. Films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesco Rosi, Vittorio De Sica. It was the time of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, Monica Vita, Anita Ekberg, Maria Callas. Hollywood brought in its biggest ever films, including Ben-Hur and Cleopatra, and its biggest stars: Elizabeth Taylor, Orson Welles, Sean Connery, John Wayne. It was a time of great theatre, with new works by Dario Fo, Eduardo De Filippo and the avant-garde of Carmelo Bene. And the only man who observed it all at first-hand was a young Englishman who had declined to come of age in an England locked in austerity and sexual repression. The deliciously honest, occasionally profound and often amusing memoirs of an Englishman abroad, who was knighted for his services to Italian arts. “Astonishing... rich... vivid” Times Literary Supplement