Federico Fellini and the Making of "La Dolce Vita"

Via Veneto, originally named in the last decade of the nineteenth century for the destroyed villa of Cardinal Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory XV, was renamed Via Vittorio Veneto after the Italian victory in World War I. The neighborhood that the street passes through is called Ludovisi, also known as "the neighborhood of the regions" because of its place names. The idea of having bars in hotels dates to the late 1800's, but Via Veneto took their place as the center of the worldly, intellectual society between the two world wars, with scores of cafés-like Rosati, Strega-Zeppa, Doney, and later, Café de Paris-setting tables outside in the spring and summer, and staying open late into the night. Pope Pius XII, an upper-middle-class Roman, is certainly wary of such things, and it's not entirely arbitrary to make a connection between his physical decline (he dies on October 9, 1958) and the explosion of a sort of street party that will rage for several years on Via Veneto.