Marcello Mastroianni uncredited extra in "Marionette" (1939) when he was fourteen, and made intermittent minor film appearances until landing his first big role in "Atto d'accusa" (1951). Within a decade he became a major international celebrity, starring in "Big Deal on Madonna Street" (1958); and in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" opposite Anita Ekberg in 1960, where he played a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome's high society. Mastroianni followed "La Dolce Vita" with another signature role, that of a film director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block
La Vita Nuova to her". The reader is invited into the very emotional turmoil and lyrical struggle of the unnamed author's own mind and all the surrounding people in his story are seen in their relations to that mind's quest of encountering Love. "La Vita Nuova" is helpful for understanding the context of his other works, principally "La Commedia". American poet Wallace Stevens called the text "one of the great documents of Christianity," and noting that the text displays the influence of Christianity in promulgating "the distinctly feminine virtues in place of the sterner ideals of antiquity." The Henry Holiday painting "Dante meets