Italian design begins with la Dolce Vita
From cult architectures to Pop Art, the films starring Marcello Mastroianni offer a way to read the evolution of Italian design and taste in the golden years of Cinecittà.
Marcello Mastroianni was one of the iconic faces of an exceptional period in Italian cinema, which also coincided with the peak of national architecture and design. In the 1950s and 1970s, architects, artists, and designers were, first and foremost, intellectuals, and the same can be said of the directors who worked with Marcello during those decades: Federico Fellini, Pietro Germi, Marco Ferreri, and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Mastroianni’s films can therefore be enjoyed (and reinterpreted) from a less conventional perspective, that is, from an artistic and design-focused lens, beyond just cinema. This offers a broader mapping of the Italian style of the era, encompassing villas, interiors, cars, and even costumes.
To mark the centenary of the actor’s birth, CAM Sugar is celebrating him with a series of initiatives, including the Mastroianni 100 playlist and a deeper exploration of his connection to design. After all, it was from La Dolce Vita onwards that both design and Italy itself began to change.

Architecture
Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was the film that transformed Mastroianni from a hopeful actor into an international star, but it was the films of the following years that revealed him as a face of art house cinema. Michelangelo Antonioni cast him alongside Jeanne Moreau and his muse, Monica Vitti, in La Notte (1961). Throughout the film, the alienation Antonioni aimed to depict is mirrored and embodied by the modernist buildings of Milan’s economic boom. The contrast between skyscrapers and the countryside, which they gradually erode, is heightened by the black-and-white cinematography and Giorgio Gaslini’s jazz score.
Antonioni chose two signature buildings from among the many in the film. The first is the Torre Galfa by Melchiorre Bega (1956-1959), the clinic where Tommaso Garani (Bernhard Wicki) is hospitalised, one of the most iconic buildings of Milan’s economic renaissance, along with the Pirellone, Torre Breda, and Velasca. The second is the Barlassina Country Club, designed by Luigi Vietti in Brianza, which, unlike the Torre Galfa, became a cult building thanks to the film. It is here that the enigmatic encounter between Giovanni (Mastroianni) and Valentina (Vitti) takes place, a scene that seems to have inspired the party on the Roman terrace in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. These are two locations in stark contrast to the decadent aesthetic Fellini chose for La Dolce Vita, emphasising not only the stylistic differences between the two directors but also between two cities: the weary political capital, Rome, with the excesses of its Via Veneto cafes and night clubs, and Milan, Italy’s moral capital, dynamic, feverish, yet alienated.
Architecture as a symbol of modernist suspension and alienation reappeared a few years later in another Fellini-Mastroianni classic: 8 ½. The Chianciano thermal baths are used to represent this feeling, also becoming the setting for the famous dance between Gloria Morin (Barbara Steele) and Mario Mezzabotta (Mario Pisu), which inspired the iconic twist of John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Here, in the Parco dell’Acquasanta, one of the rooms dedicated to spa activities was designed in 1952 by Pier Luigi Nervi, marking one of the architect’s most famous works. Nervi, a collaborator of Le Corbusier and Gio Ponti on the Pirellone project, showcased his signature style in the lightweight, diamond-patterned ceiling that tops the central plan of the room, where large windows create a harmonious blend between the interior and the surrounding greenery.

Interiors
In 1965, just four years after La Notte, Pietro Germi imagined a dystopian future set in a futuristic Rome, where even the trees are painted white and the rationalist architecture of the EUR district serves as the backdrop for the chase between Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. The Space Age vision of the times finds extraordinary and memorable expression in Mastroianni and his wife’s (Elsa Martinelli) apartment.
Their loft boasts optical, black-and-white features, dominated by the sculptural and mechanical rendition of Look! (1964) by Joe Tilson, one of the leading figures of British Pop Art: a thick-framed eye that strongly recalls the eyewear of Mastroianni in 8 ½.


Product Design
Mastroianni was not only Federico Fellini’s on-screen projection; their shared passion extended to a particular car model, the Lancia Flaminia. Designed in 1956, the car represented the new flagship of Italian luxury, adopted by the leading figures of Italy’s economic boom. The prototype, the Lancia Florida, was born from the mind of Pininfarina, one of the most renowned car designers of the period, known for his visionary approach.
His Florida, later evolved into the Flaminia, which marked a pivotal shift in the way automotive design was conceived in the following decade. It’s no surprise that Mastroianni, sceptical about the institutional edge of the Flamini sedane, opted for the Pininfarina-designed coupé version. In a few short years, he also acquired the Flaminia GT by Touring and the Flaminia Sport by the legendary coachbuilder Zagato. Mastroianni, laid-back and a creature of habit, purchased all his cars from the Lancia dealer in Parioli, Rome.
The car is even driven by Guido Anselmi, Fellini’s on-screen alter ego portrayed by Mastroianni in 8 ½, where the vehicle symbolises the director’s economic maturity and social status, despite his profound existential crisis.
The star of the car fleet of La Dolce Vita is instead the Triumph TR3, in which Mastroianni drives around throughout the entire film and which he would end up buying.
Another classic design associated with Mastroianni, blending fashion and transportation, are the Persol 714 sunglasses. Loved by Pietro Germi and worn by Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style, these sunglasses were originally designed by the eyewear company as accessories for Turin’s tram drivers. Who would have imagined that the frame would instead find a new (and much longer-lasting) life thanks to cinema and endorsements from both Mastroianni and Steve McQueen, transforming the sunglasses into timeless icons of Italian design.

Art
In the early 1960s, a period of great success for Mastroianni, the actor collaborated with the eccentric Marco Ferreri on Crack-Up (1965), an absurd film in which chocolate entrepreneur Mario Fuggetta (Mastroianni) becomes obsessed with testing the limits to which balloons can be inflated, after finding one in the street.
The balloon bears a striking resemblance to Piero Manzoni’s Corpo d’Aria (1959-1960): a kit sold in 45 copies for 30,000 lire, containing a balloon (deflated), tripod, and mouthpiece to create an installation. The artwork caused quite a stir at the time, along with other of Manzoni’s pieces expressions, such as the famous Artist’s Shit and the Linee series.
Beyond these creations, the greatest invention remains La Dolce Vita, not just as a film but as a broader concept of a quintessentially Italian lifestyle. La Dolce Vita as an attitude to life, as suggested by the lines and outfits of Marcello Mastroianni, his observant gaze over the world from a café table, leaning against the bar in a nightclub, or driving a convertible through the Roman night, all accompanied by the playful, theatrical music of Nino Rota.
Opening image: Marcello Mastroianni, Federico Fellini and other protagonists of La Dolce Vita relax at a café table during a break from the film.