La Dolce Vita La Dolce Vita La Dolce Vita (; Italian for "the sweet life" or "the good life") is a 1960 Italian drama film directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. The film follows Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist writing for gossip magazines, over seven days and nights on his journey through the "sweet life" of Rome in a fruitless search for love and happiness. "La Dolce Vita" won the "Palme d'Or" (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Costumes. The film was a massive box office hit in Europe with 13,617,148 admissions in Italy and
La Dolce Vita because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside." Credit for the creation of Steiner, the intellectual who commits suicide after shooting his two children, goes to co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli. Having gone to school with Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, Pinelli had closely followed the writer's career and felt that his over-intellectualism had become emotionally sterile, leading to his suicide in a Turin hotel in 1950. This idea of a "burnt-out existence" is carried over to Steiner in the party episode where the sounds of nature are not to be experienced first-hand