Dolce Italia: The Beautiful Life of Italy in the Fifties and Sixties

The Italy of the 1950s and 1960s bore witness to a marriage of lifestyle and popular culture that ignited an American love of Italy and defined an age of unparalleled style and beauty. La Dolce Vita of the postwar era, invested with the iconic celebrity of Sophia Loren, Federico Fellini, Audrey Hepburn, Marcello Mastroianni, Ingrid Bergman, and others, continues to seduce and to captivate anyone who ever loved or longed to experience it. Here, through remarkable and candid images of the early days of the cult of celebrity, we can revisit and Italy that was sensuous yet innocent, simple yet glamorous, cosmopolitan yet insulated - an Italy now vanished forever in the haze of homogenizing modernity.
Featuring more than 130 duotone separations from the newly opened archives of pioneering paparazzo Federico Garolla, this is a visual celebration of the birth of an iconic era, and a nostalgic tribute to a golden age of Italian style and glamour that endures to this day.

Federico Garolla Di Bard edited the Italian photography magazines Europeo and Epoca until becoming director of Agenzia Italia, Italy's leading photo archive. He is one of the pioneers of celebrity photography.Giovanna Bertelli is a professor at the University of Palermo and a curator.