Early on a windy morning in April 1953, the body of a young woman
washed up on a beach outside of Rome. Her name was Wilma Montesi,
and, as the papers reported, she had left her home in the city
center a day earlier, alone. The police called her death an
accidental drowning. But the public was not convinced. In the cafes
around the Via Veneto, people began to speak-of the son of a
powerful politician, lavish parties, movie stars, orgies, drugs.
How this news item of everyday life exploded into one of the
greatest scandals of a modern democracy is the story Karen Pinkus
tells in "The Montesi Scandal. Wilma's death brought to the surface
every simmering element of Italian culture: bitter aspiring
actresses, corrupt politicians, nervous Jesuits in sunglasses,
jaded princes. Italians of all types lined up to testify-in court
or to journalists of varying legitimacy-about the death of the
middle-class carpenter's daughter, in the process creating a media
frenzy and the modern culture of celebrity. Witnesses sold their
stories to the tabloids, only to retract them. They posed for
pictures, pretending to shun the spotlight. And they in turn became
celebrities in their own right.
Pinkus takes us through the alleys and entryways of Rome in the
1950s, linking Wilma's death to the beginnings of the dolce vita,
now synonymous with modern Roman life. Pinkus follows the first
paparazzi on their scooters as they shoot the protagonists and
gives us an insider's view of the stories and trials that came to
surround this lonely figure that washed up on the shores of Ostia.
Full of the magnificent paparazzi photos of the protagonists in the
drama and film stills from the era's landmark movies, "TheMontesi
Scandal joins true crime with "high" culture in an original form,
one true to both the period and the cinematic conception of life it
created. More than a meditation of the intricate ties among movies,
paparazzo photography, and Italian culture, "The Montesi Scandal
narrates Wilma's story and its characters as the notes for an
unrealized film, but one that, as the reader discovers, seems
impossible to produce.
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