Review: Death and the Dolce Vita March 22, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Stephen Gundle is one of the best British writers on Italy. He has dealt with Italy film industry, the Italian ideal of beauty and the relationship between Botteghe Oscure (the nasty old Italian Communist Party) and Moscow. However, his most mainstream book is Death and the Dolce Vita: the Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s, the 2012 book which heads this post. SG’s Death describes a simple incident, the passing of a young Roman woman, Wilma Montesi who drowned (or was drowned) April 9/10 1953. This was clearly a catastrophic event for Wilma, and a disaster for her family… But it produced acres of good copy for Italian newspapers from 12 April 1953 when Rome’s principal paper ran the story on its front page, to 1964 when the last legal case related to Wilma’s death was resolved: of course, retrospectives still appear today. In that long decade a minister would resign, the Christian Democrat government had a vote of no confidence brought against it, and a Roman police chief found himself in the dock all because of Wilma’s drowning. Few homicide victims have left such a mark in geopolitics.
How could an unknown girl’s death excite such a cacophony of scandal? The essence of the case was sex or, perhaps better, the perception of sex. Wilma, a ‘good’ working class girl, had been found dead on the beach wearing a slip with no skirt. Her suspender belt was also missing. The Italian press, with an all too predictable myopia, never managed to get past these facts and when it was possible to tie in Wilma’s death with an all too real culture of decadence and drug-taking among Rome’s jet set, then her fame was assured: though actually the link between Wilma and the coke-sniffers was always tenuous. Two autopsies, one suspect and one reliable, demonstrated beyond doubt that Wilma was a virgin at her death: there was a half-hearted attempt by one Padovan professor to introduce necrophilia into the case but it failed. Anyone familiar with the Italian legal system will not be surprised by serial dishonesty and incompetence on the part of the authorities, which merge and blend till the two are inseparable. There were three investigations into Wilma’s death: the first by the police, the second an independent inquiry and the third by an Italian court. Only one, the second, really convinced and even it came to conclusions that, while likely, were not proven by any decent standards of justice.
In the end, Stephen Gundle’s reconstruction of the Montesi Case is not a ‘giallo’ or murder mystery: though he does offer a three-quarters credible solution to the death. The truth is that we cannot even be certain that Wilma was murdered, she may have drowned in bizarre circumstances, or she may have been the victim of negligent homicide: perhaps she was left unconscious on the beach by some embarrassed drug-takers and slipped or fell, somehow, into the water. However, SG uses the case as a lens to look at Rome and more generally Italy as the country moved out of a particularly dreadful decade, the 1940s, and into a brighter, shinier future (‘from rags to legs’), but a time that was marked by the inevitable and perhaps healthy excesses associated with these kinds of national shifts. Still, insistent and unresolved, at the centre of the book is poor Wilma, a youngster, who found herself at the wrong place at the wrong time and suffered the worst fate possible for a human being in death: she became a symbol for social movements and frustrations that she had likely never thought of. She appeared in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita as the great sea monster beached at the end of that film, mysterious and fascinating to the decadents that dance around her: one of the great scenes of postwar cinema. She is also, this blogger likes to think, the girl that Marcello tries to communicate with just moments after as the film ends: the decent steady girl that he will never have and that he certainly does not deserve.
Beach is always looking for good books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
