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 vita agra La vita agra La vita agra, known in English-speaking countries as It's a Hard Life, is a novel by Luciano Bianciardi published in 1962 by Rizzoli. It became a best-seller in Italy and it is considered one of the most important novels in contemporary Italian literature. In 1962, when the novel was released it was praised by the public and the critics. It became a best-seller and was translated into English, French, German and Spanish. Italo Calvino wrote a review in which he regarded the novel positively and compared it to other works of the so-called "letteratura industriale" (Industrial literature),