Inside St Peter's dome, a news reporter complains that Sylvia is "an elevator" because none of them can match her energetic climb up the numerous flights of stairs.

3rd Day Sequence: Late afternoon, Marcello, his photographer friend Paparazzo, and Emma drive to the outskirts of Rome to cover the story of the purported sighting of the Madonna by two children.

4th Night Sequence: One evening, Marcello and Emma attend a gathering at Steiner's luxurious home, where they are introduced to a group of intellectuals who recite poetry, strum the guitar, offer philosophical ideas, and listen to sounds of nature recorded on tape.

5th Day Sequence: Marcello spends the afternoon working on his novel at a seaside restaurant, where he meets Paola, a young waitress from Perugia playing Perez Prado's cha-cha “Patricia” on the jukebox and then humming its tune.

With Paparazzo, they go to the "Cha-Cha" Club, where Marcello introduces his father to Fanny, a beautiful dancer and one of his past girlfriends (he had promised to get her picture in the paper but failed to do it).

6th Night Sequence: Marcello, Nico, and other friends meet on the Via Veneto and are driven to a castle owned by aristocrats at Bassano di Sutri outside Rome.

However, their inebriation causes the party to descend into mayhem, with Marcello riding a young woman crawling on her hands and knees and throwing pillow feathers around the room.

9th Day Sequence: Paola, the adolescent waitress from the seaside restaurant in Fregene, calls to Marcello from across an estuary, but the words they exchange are lost on the wind, drowned out by the crashing waves.

Having gone to school with Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, Pinelli had closely followed the writer's career and felt that his over-intellectualism had become emotionally sterile, leading to his suicide in a Turin hotel in 1950.

[12] This idea of a "burnt-out existence" is carried over to Steiner in the party episode where the sounds of nature are not to be experienced first-hand by himself and his guests but in the virtual world of tape recordings.

Set designer Piero Gherardi created over eighty locations, including the Via Veneto, the dome of Saint Peter's with the staircase leading up to it, and various nightclubs.

[16] However, other sequences were shot on location such as the party at the aristocrats' castle filmed in the real Bassano di Sutri palace north of Rome.

"[17] The film's last scenes where the monster fish is pulled out of the sea and Marcello waves goodbye to Paola (the teenage "Umbrian angel") were shot on location at Passo Oscuro, a small resort town situated on the Italian coast 30 kilometers from Rome.

[b] Fellini scrapped a major sequence that would have involved the relationship of Marcello with Dolores, an older writer living in a tower, to be played by 1930s Academy Award-winning actress Luise Rainer.

[21] Fellini claimed that Ekberg stood in the cold water in her dress for hours without any trouble while Mastroianni had to wear a wetsuit beneath his clothes - to no avail.

[26][c] Marcello is a journalist in Rome during the late 1950s who covers tabloid news of movie stars, religious visions and the self-indulgent aristocracy while searching for a more meaningful way of life.

[2] In the opening sequence, a plaster statue of Jesus the Labourer suspended by cables from a helicopter, flies past the ruins of an ancient Roman aqueduct.

The delivery of the statue is the first of many scenes placing religious icons in the midst of characters demonstrating their "modern" morality, influenced by the booming economy and the emerging mass-consumer life.

The episodes are also framed by a prologue (Jesus over Rome) and epilogue (the monster fish), giving the film its innovative and symmetrically symbolic structure.

[30] The critic Robert Richardson suggests that the originality of La dolce vita lies in a new form of film narrative that mines "an aesthetic of disparity".

Also employed as an ordering device is the image of a downward spiral that Marcello sets in motion when descending the first of several staircases (including ladders) that open and close episodes.

In general, the tendency to caricature is greater the more severe the film's moral judgement although this is never totally contemptuous, there being always a touch of complacence and participation, as in the final orgy scene or the episode at the aristocrats' castle outside Rome, the latter being particularly effective for its descriptive acuteness and narrative rhythm.

[34]Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, film critic and co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma, felt that "what La Dolce Vita lacks is the structure of a masterpiece.

In fact, the film has no proper structure: it is a succession of cinematic moments, some more convincing than others… In the face of criticism, La Dolce Vita disintegrates, leaving behind little more than a sequence of events with no common denominator linking them into a meaningful whole".

When I saw "La Dolce Vita" in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom "the sweet life" represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman.

When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way.

[41]Kevin Thomas of Los Angeles Times wrote Federico Fellini’s 1960 “La Dolce Vita" is one of the key works of the modern cinema.

A brilliantly conceived epic fable about a scandal reporter (Marcello Mastroianni) adrift in Rome’s high life, it introduced the term paparazzi into the vocabulary, and depicted, with a judicious mixture of satire and compassion, the glitter world of celebrity now avidly chronicled in supermarket tabloids.Praising Fellini's direction he wrote “La Dolce Vita” is also one of the triumphs of have-it-both-ways filmmaking: Fellini reveals the emptiness, boredom and destructiveness of the Via Veneto existence while at the same time making it highly glamorous and seductive...“La Dolce Vita” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes and situations) reminds us just how enduring and intuitively cinematic a storyteller Fellini is.

The consensus states: "An epic, breathtakingly stylish cinematic landmark, La dolce vita remains riveting in spite of—or perhaps because of—its sprawling length".

[63] In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter ranked the film 2nd among 69 counted winners of the Palme d'Or to date, concluding "What’s eternal is Fellini’s melancholy realization that behind modern-day sin, redemption, distraction and the come-hither facade of the sweet life, there lurks only emptiness.