SECRET DOLCE VITA

Overview

The exhibition SECRET DOLCE VITA unveils to the public, for the first time, the SECRET ARCHIVE: a newly discovered photographic trove containing millions of previously unseen negatives and glass plates that capture a hidden, intimate Italy throughout the 20th century. Rare images, most never before shown.

With the support of Dolce&Gabbana and thanks to the collaboration with Roma Capitale and the Department of Major Events, Sport, Tourism, and Fashion led by Alessandro Onorato, the exhibition celebrates the spirit of one of the most iconic chapters in Rome’s history, when cinema, fashion, and glamour took centre stage, recounted in the rapid-fire rhythm of the paparazzi’s flashbulbs.

This “urban film” unfolds as a visionary and emotional narrative: a lucid dream in which the city, unaware of its starring role, shines in all its splendour before the eyes of the world. The sequence of images does not follow a strict chronology, but instead evokes a mood, a suspended moment in time, poised between euphoria and melancholy, between appearance and truth.

Federico Fellini symbolically opens this story. Beginning with him is not only a nod to the film that gave a name to an era, but also to the emotional shift it marked. From that pivotal point, the exhibition moves backward to the years when what we now call La Dolce Vita was not yet legend but everyday life, and then extends forward, into the years when that mythos continued to evolve in new forms.

It is a story shaped by contrast: iconic flash-lit moments intersect with everyday life, far from the spotlight. Candid gestures, fleeting glances, streets walked, dreams lived. Even the most casual or intimate photographs carry a visual charge that makes them unforgettable, even if we’ve never seen them before. The past seems to speak here, but in a voice that feels startlingly present.

The selection alternates sweeping city views with close detail, layering the macro and the micro into a portrait of Rome as it was when it served as the stage of the world. But beyond the international glamour, a real city emerges: a Rome populated by ordinary people, children, unknown faces.

To see it now – through these newly unearthed images – is to reconstruct a dream: that of a past still unaware of the legend it was becoming.

Edoardo Dionea Cicconi

Curator of the exhibition