The Magical Kaleidoscope

By the end of the 1950s, Rome had become a favored destination for international film productions, with Cinecittà hosting a succession of Hollywood and European productions that brought actors and directors to Cinecittà, with photographers and journalists close behind. After dark, much of that world converged along the Via Veneto, where cafés and hotel terraces filled with movie stars, aristocrats, foreign correspondents, and the photographers who pursued them from one engagement to the next. Among the most prolific was Tazio Secchiaroli, whose relentless pursuit of celebrities supplied newspapers with candid photographs that helped define a new age of public visibility. When Fellini began work on La Dolce Vita, he needed little invention. Rome was already performing for the camera. 

At the center of La Dolce Vita was Marcello Rubini, the journalist played by Marcello Mastroianni with a measured reserve. Fellini had rejected more conventionally handsome leading men in favor of Mastroianni, preferring what he described as a face of "normality" to heroic perfection. Costume designer Piero Gherardi dressed Rubini in sharply tailored Brioni suits, crisp white shirts, narrow black ties, and polished leather shoes, a disciplined wardrobe worn from late-night assignments along the Via Veneto to the salons of Rome's elite, and into the Trevi Fountain beside Anita Ekberg.

The international success of La Dolce Vita left Fellini searching for a different kind of film. During this period he came under the influence of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung through his own analyst, Ernst Bernhard, whose interest in the unconscious encouraged Fellini to look inward rather than outward. He began recording his dreams in richly illustrated notebooks, preserving strange encounters and fleeting, recurring figures that would later find their way into his films. He would continue filling those notebooks for the rest of his life, treating dreams not as private curiosities but as working material. 

When production began on 8½, Fellini still did not know what film he intended to make. Sets had already been constructed at Cinecittà, including an enormous steel launch tower built for an ambitious science-fiction picture that no longer interested him. The cast and crew waited while the director wrestled with the project. At one point, he prepared to abandon it altogether. Instead, he began making a film about the very uncertainty that had brought production to a standstill. 

The uncertainty at the heart of 8½ found its form through a remarkable group of collaborators. Cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo photographed the film in luminous black and white, allowing remembered childhoods and working film sets to occupy the same visual world. The uncertainty at the heart of 8½ found its form through a remarkable group of collaborators. Cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo gave the film its luminous black-and-white photography, while Nino Rota's score moved effortlessly between circus exuberance and melancholy reflection. Costume and production designer Piero Gherardi, who had reconstructed stretches of the Via Veneto for La Dolce Vita, returned to shape Guido Anselmi's world as both architect and tailor. 

Gherardi’s wardrobe for Guido Anselmi keeps close to the formal economy of La Dolce Vita. The trim black Brioni suit, white shirt, and narrow tie return in 8½, now removed from the nocturnal theater of the Via Veneto and placed among the mineral baths, hotel corridors, and studio floors of Cinecittà. Assistant costume designer Orietta Nasalli Rocca later recalled that Mastroianni “dressed as Federico,” borrowing the director’s clothes and mannerisms for Guido. Paul Ronald’s set photographs, rediscovered after years in the photographer’s attic, preserve that resemblance from another angle: Mastroianni in dark tailoring and black frames, Fellini nearby in much the same uniform. 

Among the many objects associated with 8½, none has proved more elusive than Guido's sunglasses. Collectors and eyewear historians have spent decades trying to identify their maker, variously attributing them to Jolly, Persol, and several Roman opticians, without reaching a consensus. The uncertainty has done little to diminish their reputation. More than sixty years after the film's release, the broad black frames remain inseparable from Mastroianni, reproduced everywhere from festival posters to contemporary eyewear collections. They survive as one of the few costume elements from postwar Italian cinema immediately recognizable without explanation.