“The Great Beauty”, directed by Paolo Sorrentino in 2013, follows the Roman wanderings of an ageing journalist, Jep Gambardella (played by Toni Servillo). Jep’s drifting is as much physical as it is metaphysical. Once seen in his youth as a charming, brilliant man-about-town, he ultimately produced only a single book and has not written again in forty years.
Still as brilliant as ever, his intelligence has become tinged with melancholy as he moves from party to party in an Italian capital that seems, despite its incredible beauty, utterly disembodied.
And to be honest, the microcosm in which Jep evolves is just as disembodied. The parties to which he is invited are lethally boring when they are not simply ridiculous in their pedantry and self-satisfaction.
Winner of the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2014, “The Great Beauty” echoes another film, the 1960 Palme d’Or winner. Indeed, how can one not think of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”? The similarities between the two films are striking, and one cannot help but see in Jep Gambardella the ageing counterpart of Marcello Rubini (played by Marcello Mastroianni), who also drifts from party to party in his role as a society journalist. Marcello, moving through a Rome in the midst of the Italian economic miracle, open to the social changes of the 1950s, which brings greater material comfort – mirrors Jep, who has clearly benefited fully from that economic miracle, which in the 2010s has turned into a fully developed post-capitalism that corrupts even contemporary art. Both have lost themselves in ease, in material life and in the world of appearances, at the expense of their own humanity.
Both films, structured as a series of episodes and encounters, portray two male characters who are certainly charming and cultivated, yet incapable of transforming their lives. Beneath their cynicism and irony, Marcello is sad, Jep is melancholic, and their lives seem profoundly devoid of meaning. Both were endowed with genuine talent, which they squandered – perhaps out of laziness, perhaps out of frivolity. Both are lucid about the falseness of the world around them, yet that lucidity is of no use to them.
Rome, the other main character in both films, is the sublime, decadent, and empty stage of a bourgeois microcosm performing, without joy, a soulless ballet.
The history, art, and monuments surrounding the protagonists in both films serve only as decorative elements drained of meaning, and religious figures, rituals, and sacred symbols are likewise reduced to spectacle or to mere language that no longer reaches anyone.
The permanent party life becomes an outlet that allows people to avoid any reflection on life, death, and the meaning one gives to existence. People have become theatrical characters, and the score continues to be played, even without soul, even without heart.
Editor’s note: “La Dolce Vita” features the iconic Trevi Fountain, but – through a deliberate mirror effect – it is the Acqua Paola Fountain that Sorrentino places in the opening of “The Great Beauty”. And so here I am, standing before this magnificent fountain, far less crowded than the Trevi Fountain (and also before the Monument to Garibaldi, which offers a breathtaking view on Rome).
Vintage Banana Republic cardigan – Vintage skirt from Marcel & Jeannette – Vuitton heels – Ray Ban sunglasses – Lanvin purse – Max Mara coat
Pictures by Haizea Mariti
February 27, 2026
