“Glamour is one thing, but the photos are also very intimate and private, and that gets you to a different level of inspiration. “In the fashion world they never say that someone in the same field is doing something so special, so I was very captured by that,” Di Paolo says. Valentino’s Piccioli, who came to see the Gucci-sponsored Mondo Perduto retrospective of Di Paolo’s work in Rome, then invited Di Paolo to photograph backstage at a Valentino show. “Even the poorest had a discreet elegance that today we don’t have”. “It’s a moment of history that’s irreplaceable, and also because there was so much going on in culture, cinema and economics,” Silvia says. ![]() Her favourites include a shot of boys on a hill in Rome, another group looking into the car when her father and Pasolini were touring in a sports car actress Capucine dancing at a party in Venice, a ball at Palazzo Rospigliosi in Rome that looks, she says, like the party scene in Visconti’s The Leopard and Rampling in Sardinia. Paolo Di Paolo with his daughter Silvia, photographed by Bruce Weber. Di Paolo’s exorcism of photography went so far, his daughter says, that there are no family pictures. “He had wanted to remove any memory because quitting photography was for him a painful decision,” she says. Silvia never knew her father had been a photographer – that is until she found his negatives in a cellar in the late 1990s – an event that set in motion his rediscovery. He hung up his Leica, placed 250,000 negatives, contact sheets and magazines in the cellar, and then for 40 years served as art director of the carabinieri, Italy’s regional police force. He’d never try to provoke a situation.”īut a broken affair with an unnamed Roman society swan, and a photo editor who, in 1968, asked him to bring in “some spice” – code for a more aggressive style of the paparazzo – broke the spell. “He considered himself an amateur, and people felt relaxed with him. “His approach to photography was very spontaneous, the opposite of a paparazzo,” says his daughter Silvia Di Paolo, also the photographer’s archivist. He was dispatched by Il M ondo on a Tuscan swimming tour with the poet and later film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, and called Marcello Mastroianni, Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams, friends. Along the way, the former philosophy student – who started from humble beginnings in the small town of Larino, in the south-eastern province of Molise – trained his lens on Anna Magnani on the beach with her disabled son Kim Novak ironing in her hotel room Brigitte Bardot skipping up the steps in Spoleto and Charlotte Rampling smouldering in a shepherd’s coat on the set of Sardinia Kidnapped in 1966. The film traces Di Paolo’s brief career during which he photographed Rome’s elite of arts and letters – “for pleasure,” he has said – as well as layers of postwar Italian society. ![]() ![]() Di Paolo’s reportage, of luminous movie stars, writers, directors of Italian cinema, agricultural and factory workers, and the poor – all in the spirit of empathetic curiosity – sometimes found their way into Il M ondo, a renowned 12-page political-intellectual weekly magazine, that counted Thomas Mann and George Orwell as contributors.ĭi Paolo’s career is now being revisited – thanks in part to Italian fashion house Valentino’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli, designer of the year at the 2022 British fashion awards, ex-Gucci designer Alessandro Michele, who supported the first exhibition of Di Paolo’s work four years ago – but mostly to his daughter Silvia, who features prominently in The Treasure of His Youth, a compelling new documentary by photographer and film-maker Bruce Weber.
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