“La Dolce Vita,” September 5, 2022 (1960), DVD. Yes, I had managed to never see this remarkable opus from Federico Fellini. The film follows several days in the life of Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) a serious writer turned tabloid hack in a Rome growing more decadent by the day. His is a life lived at night on the celebrity beat, including Anita Ekberg, who flies in to make a film, but the emptiness of it all is overwhelming and orgies vie with suicides as the glitterati and their hangers-on wander through their lives. It pits relentlessly modern architecture against Renaissance Rome, including the famous dip in the Trevi Fountain, as searchlights continually scan the skies at night. Life in the countryside is displayed in all its venal superstitions as purported sightings of the Virgin arouse both greed and desperation. In the end, simple things and simple folk can’t be heard. A great film, it is also a relentlessly depressing look at that moment in Italian culture.