The Via Veneto Papers is a memoir collection by Ennio Flaiano, originally published in Italian in 1973, with a new expanded edition by Rizzoli in 1989 and translated into English by John Satriano in 1992.

Synopsis & Narrative Style

Wrote critic Richard Eder in Newsday: This is the first English language edition of the Italian original La solitudine del satiro (lit. The Satyr’s Solitude) published in 1973, a year after Flaiano's death. The book is divided into three sections:

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Incipit: June 1958 -- "I am working with Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, dusting off an old idea of ours for a film, the one about a young provincial who comes to Rome to become a journalist. Fellini wants to adapt the idea to the present day, to paint a picture of this “wog society” that frolics between eroticism, alienation, boredom and sudden affluence. It is a society which, the terrors of the cold war now past and perhaps even in reaction to them, flourishes a bit everywhere. But in Rome, through a mixing together of the sacred and the profane, of the old and the new, through the en masse arrival of foreigners, through the cinema, presents more aggressive, subtropical qualities. The film will have La dolce Vita as its title and we have yet to write a single line of it; we are vaguely taking notes and going to the different places around town to refresh our memories." -- The Via Veneto Papers, p.1.

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