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.

Like Mastroianni's character, Ciuffa enjoyed a middle-class provincial upbringing before plunging into the Rome demi-monde by chance. '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. 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. 'The real Dolce Vita started in Rome years before the cafés opened on Via Veneto and had as much to do with mysterious deaths, drug abuse and debauched Roman aristocrats as with Hollywood,' he said. 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. 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. When the 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 amounted to his life played out on the screen.įederico Fellini's classic depiction of decadent American starlets and persistent photographers changed cinema forever.

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