In 1954 the - now perhaps rather corny - film Three Coins in the Fountain revealed the urban splendour of Rome to a still shell-shocked world.
Baroque façades shimmered in chiaroscuro sunlight; flights of staircases rushed to distant obelisks. The fabled fountains leapt and fell from sumptuous heights.
That these location sequences were in fact shot a mere nine years after Monte Cassino and the Allies’ liberation of the capital from Nazi occupation is incomprehensible.
A year later came the heaviest snowfall’, as Mia Martini sang. The snow layered the cities’ seven hills in deep, glistening white. Just as interwar Paris was the lure for Hemingway and the F Scott Fitzgeralds, these romantic images allured American literati, primarily young and recently released from years of combat, to an aesthetic, unfamiliar, Augustan civilisation.
