Dateline: Rome: A Novel of the Dolce Vita Days

by Anthony Delano

American wire service correspondent SHELBY STONE is posted to mid-20th century Rome, the Dolce Vita era. Intrigue and scandal surge between Cinecittá and the Vatican, the Deep South of Calabria and the glittering Via Veneto. He is taken in hand by an oversize and outrageous couple who are a goldmine of insights into the pre-war Italy of Benito Mussolini—Il Duce. (‘You wanna know if I fucked The Duck?’). He helps a Mother Superior promote her convent as a fashion house—Holy Shirt. Watches a rowdy American singer convert an entire piazza into a restaurant. Meets the British script doctor on whom Italian directors rely to make their films screenworthy. Keeps count as King Farouk eats 36 lamb chops at a sitting . Gets to know a cosmetics queen with a secret ingredient, and her glamorous gang of multi-married Hungarian jewelry smugglers. He falls for an actress married to a prince but yearns for the girl from back home whose career threatens to outshine his.

316 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 26, 2020

About the author

Anthony Delano went to London from Australia after an early newspaper career there and was soon a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mirror, which at that time sold nearly five million copies daily. He was stationed in Rome during the Dolce Vita days, in Paris when General De Gaulle was dismantling the French empire, then the United States where he covered, among many other dramas, the civil rights campaign and the assassination of President John Kennedy. Additional assignments took him all over the globe: wars in Africa and the Middle East, tours with the Queen and other members of the Royal Family; most hazardous of all, perhaps, the historic Beatles tour of America. In between there were executive stints in London. He was managing editor of the Mirror when the monstrous tycoon Robert Maxwell took it over. Clearly time to go. He began to teach journalism and research it academically, gaining first a Master’s degree at Queensland University of Technology then a PhD from the University of Westminster (his 2001 doctoral thesis, The Formation of the British Journalist 1900-2000, is widely cited). He became a senior lecturer, senior research fellow and finally visiting professor at the London College of Communication. He lives in the South of France, married to Patricia, a literary scholar.