Slim Aarons — La Dolce Vita
Tuxedos, evening gowns, magnificent gardens. Over five decades, Slim Aarons photographed Italy living la dolce vita — and he did so from the inside. The great families opened their palazzi and villas to him, posing for him at home or on holiday, without make-up artists or stylists: Raimonda Lanza di Trabia at the Palazzo Trabia, Pia Ruspoli, Anna Cataldi with her daughter Jacaranda Falck, the Puccis in Tuscany, Gianni Versace on the shores of Lake Como. Alongside them, the world of cinema: Marcello Mastroianni, Ursula Andress, Tyrone Power, George Hamilton, and Joan Fontaine, with whom he had a romance while she was filming in Italy. Earlier, in black and white: Orson Welles, Louis Armstrong, and Lamberto Maggiorani, the factory worker who starred in Bicycle Thieves.
Behind every portrait lies the country itself: fashionable destinations, historic cities, small villages, the Sicilian countryside seen from the air. Aarons had first known Italy during the war, when he was wounded at Anzio. He returned to live in Rome and never stopped going back. Christopher Sweet, his editor and friend, writes the introduction to these two hundred and twenty-five photographs, taken between the 1940s and the 1990s, in which everything appears easy, sunlit, and happy. Making it appear that way was his craft.
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