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 chapter XXIV, "I Felt My Heart Awaken" "("Io mi senti' svegliar dentro a lo core"", also translated as "I Felt a Loving Spirit Suddenly"), Dante recounts a meeting with Love, who asks the poet to do his best to honour her. Dante does not name himself in "La Vita Nuova". He refers to Guido Cavalcanti as "the first of my friends", to his own sister as "a young and noble lady... who was related to me by the closest consanguinity", to Beatrice's brother similarly as one who "was so linked in consanguinity to the glorious lady that no-one was closer