Mastroianni is the jaded gossip journalist who hangs around the Via Veneto parasitically hoping for showbusiness stories and despising himself for not having written his novel yet.
There is pure euphoria and inspiration in this magnificent film that satirises the fashionable world of Swinging Rome in the early 1960s. Fellini’s cinema put Italy at the centre of the world in the way that the Beatles would put Britain there a few years later. Mastroianni is the jaded gossip journalist who hangs around the Via Veneto parasitically hoping for showbusiness stories and despising himself for not having written his novel yet. He falls briefly in love with a visiting American star, played by Anita Ekberg, the pair disporting themselves in the Trevi fountain, and submits to a beating from her enraged husband. Later, he will report on a sighting of the Virgin Mary by two children; the sacred and profane are of equal importance here.