Fellini muse lived the real Dolce Vita

When gossip columnist Victor Ciuffa emerged blinking from a private viewing of La Dolce Vita in Rome in February 1960, he had one thought in his mind: the film he had just watched was his life played out on the screen.

Federico Fellini's classic depiction of decadent American starlets and photographers changed cinema forever. Now the journalist who chronicled 1950s life on Rome's glitzy Via Veneto and briefed Fellini for his film has decided to give his own definitive account of the era. As far as Ciuffa, now 77, is concerned, 50 years later he is setting the record straight, by writing La Dolce Vita, Minute by Minute. "The real Dolce Vita started in Rome years before the cafes opened on Via Veneto and had as much to do with mysterious deaths, drug abuse and debauched Roman aristocrats as with Hollywood," he said. While photographers such as Tazio Secchiaroli have long been seen as inspirations for Paparazzo, the character in La Dolce Vita who gave celebrity-chasing photographers their name, Ciuffa claims he provided source material for the cynical columnist-about-town, played to laconic perfection by Marcello Mastroianni.

"Ciuffa lived that period intensely; I am sure Fellini was inspired by the work he was doing," said Elio Sorci, another photographer who prowled Via Veneto at the time. Like Mastroianni's character, Ciuffa enjoyed a middle-class provincial upbringing before plunging into the Rome demi-monde by chance. His first big assignment as a cub reporter was the mysterious death in 1953 of Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old whose body was found on a beach at Ostia, Rome's port. Witnesses suggested Montesi had been dumped in the sea after overdosing at a sex-and-drugs party attended by the cream of Rome's aristocracy. "The Dolce Vita started at that party," said Ciuffa. "I noticed that witnesses were regulars at a bar on Via del Babuino, which was the hangout for existentialists and artists living on Via Margutta, led by the artist Novella Parigini, who caused a stir when she put America's first transsexual, Christine Jorgensen, in a horse buggy and paraded her round Rome." The city's aristocrats were prowling for foreign girls to invite back to their palazzi, a scene later recreated in La Dolce Vita. Fifty years on, for Ciuffa the memories are still fresh. Such as the time, in June 1956, when a well-known pusher who had been exiled by Mussolini to Calabria before the war got into a fight in a bar. He was accused of passing off bicarbonate of soda as cocaine. "The police arrived and arrested a count, a marquis and a prince," said Ciuffa. The bar owner shut down, but in 1958 quietly reopened for business at the Cafe de Paris on Via Veneto, which became a magnet for US actors. As the Dolce Vita took off, Hollywood was discovering the low cost of film-making in Rome and the high jinks to be had.

Soon working as a gossip columnist at Corriere d'Informazione, Ciuffa was first to write up a scandalous striptease by a Turkish dancer in a Trastevere nightclub in November 1958, which finally alerted the world to the licentious lifestyle that became known as the Dolce Vita.

On that particular night, Swedish actress Anita Ekberg danced barefoot, a scene she would recreate in Fellini's film, before Aiche Nana stripped to her knickers, egged on by the usual crowd of "aristos". "I received the photos taken by Tazio Secchiaroli the next morning and rang the police. 'Nothing happened,' they said. 'If you journalists don't talk about this, nothing happened.' I wrote a long story and by lunchtime news vendors in Milan were yelling 'scandal'." By this time, Ciuffa was meeting Fellini regularly at the Cafe de Paris before the director started filming La Dolce Vita in 1959. As the appetite for celebrity gossip exploded, stars grinning at the camera were no longer good enough. "Many shots of actors brawling with photographers were arranged by both parties in advance," said Ciuffa, who was not shy of creating news on a dull night. "We found two cigar-smoking Cubans at the Cafe de Paris who agreed to deliver roses at 2am to Ava Gardner's address. Her assistant called the police, who arrested the Cubans. Sometimes, you needed to make it up."

Even so, Ciuffa was taken aback when he saw La Dolce Vita at a preview held by Fellini: "When I saw the film, I realised how celebrity warps characters and the stars who flocked to Via Veneto saw themselves as gods.

"I really considered stopping, but I needed the money. My editor was in the habit of calling up to say: 'Send me a piece that will give this paper an erection!"'

- OBSERVER