La Dolce Vita describe intrusive photographers. As to the origin of the character's name itself, Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella argues that although "it is indeed an Italian family name, the word is probably a corruption of the word "papataceo", a large and bothersome mosquito. Ennio Flaiano, the film's co-screenwriter and creator of Paparazzo, reports that he took the name from a character in a novel by George Gissing." Gissing's character, Signor Paparazzo, is found in his travel book, "By the Ionian Sea" (1901). Marcello is a journalist in Rome during the late 1950s who covers tabloid news of movie stars, religious visions and
La Dolce Vita the angelic Paola; they are framed by a prologue (Jesus over Rome) and epilogue (the monster fish) giving the film its innovative and symmetrically symbolic structure. The evocations are: seven deadly sins, seven sacraments, seven virtues, seven days of creation. Other critics disagree, Peter Bondanella argues that "any critic of "La Dolce Vita" not mesmerized by the magic number seven will find it almost impossible to organize the numerous sequences on a strictly numerological basis". The critic Robert Richardson suggests that the originality of "La Dolce Vita" lies in a new form of film narrative that mines "an aesthetic of