Book review: Death and the Dolce Vita: The Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s

Thirty-six hours later her body was found on a beach more than 12 miles south of Ostia at Torvaianica. She was found face down, fully clothed, apart from shoes, skirt, stockings and suspender belt.

How did Wilma Montesi die? An investigation, by turns sensational and shocking, was to run for five years and engulf Italy in one of the biggest scandals of the post-war era. It forced the resignation of the country's foreign minister. And it turned the most searching gaze on senior figures in the government, on dubious business interests, the police, the Press and, most unsparing of all, Rome's rich and powerful playboy set. No less vividly, it was to expose, in one prolonged blinding flash, a city and a country in the throes of a social revolution. The militarised Rome of Mussolini's Fascist Italy had given way to an uneasy, fractious return to democracy.

The scandal was to centre on a particularly tumultuous aspect of Roman life, one of glamour and excess, poverty and desperate aspiration, secretive and attention-hungry by turns. Here in the cauldron of post-war Rome fame was seen as the one accessible ladder out of poverty. Thousands clung to it in the hope that some of the stardust of the Hollywood film and fashion icons and the smart set would rub off on them.

The result was a pushing, shoving assemblage of wannabes, Bohemians, sexpots, drug pushers, pimps, prostitutes and the hotly curious entourage of hangers-on and misfits crowding the bars and cafes of the Via Veneto. This was no dark underworld but one caught in a near-continuous flash of camera bulbs – the invasive throng of another exotic and invasive species the world would come to know as the paparazzi. Here was its spawning ground, the origin of the species of some of the most extreme – and extremely tawdry – exponents of red-top photo-journalism.

The death of Wilma Montesi did not cause or catalyse this playboy Rome. But what it did, in the extraordinary trials and investigations that followed the discovery of her body, was illuminate a social set and a city in the most searing light. And that beam was to stretch from the beach at Ostia to that moment years later when Anita Ekberg stepped into the Trevi fountain: the iconic moment brilliantly captured by Federico Fellini and which the world came to know as La Dolce Vita.

In Death and the Dolce Vita, it is the singular achievement of historian Stephen Gundle to backlight an engrossing whodunit with the tumultuous social and political changes gripping Rome at this time. It is the unfolding of an intense, claustrophic narrative of murder, mystery and scandal worthy of a Verdi opera. He provides a page-turning narrative that explores its extraordinary characters and even more extraordinary cover-ups, evasions and dissemblage, reaching to the top of Italian political life. Each unravelling thread leads to more knots and more tangled, mysterious threads. Gundle lights the whole, in one long, sustained paparazzo's flash: "The Montesi case reflected the profound changes sweeping across the city. It seemed to have nothing to do with the war and its aftermath: it was a true crime story that roused passions at a time when few other things united Romans. In fact, it was profoundly, and in every facet, the product of a specific moment in the city's history."

From the moment of its discovery, the corpse of Wilma Montesi, an unassuming girl from a lower-middle-class family, presented riddle after riddle. Initial summations of the Carabinieri – that, according to her family, she had drowned accidentally while bathing her feet at Ostia, her body carried by a strong current to be washed up on a beach further down the coast – was as implausible as it was convenient. It ruled out suicide. It kept at bay other explanations that might have called into question her virtue or violated the family's brittle sense of respectability. Had she been lured into some illicit entanglement, or worse still, prostitution?

Gradually the official explanation began to unravel. There was no trace of foot irritation or eczema. The mystery of her death and the speed at which the police declared the case closed prompted questions. Cover-up stories began to circulate. The police had scarcely been reformed since the Fascist period and there were just too many loose ends to merit such a swift closure.

Many were convinced that someone had been with her in her final hours. But who? Public questioning grew and the police were forced to re-open their investigation. Witnesses came forward with stories of sightings that suggested a darker side to her final hours. An Alfa Romeo 1900 with a girl resembling Wilma in the passenger seat had been spotted near Torvaianica. Why did the identity of the driver seem to enjoy police protection? Press investigation found that the stretch of coast south of Ostia was an important smuggling route for drugs and home to some of Rome's most decadent hedonists. A young girl, Adriana Biracial, one of many lured by the prospect of a career in films, stepped forward with tales of orgies and drug parties involving high-ranking people.

Another witness came forward to pour sensational disclosures into the notebook of journalist Silvano Muto: the sophisticated Anna Maria Caglio's sensational allegations were to focus national attention on two key figures. One was her lover, Ugo Montagna, a polished, silver-tongued man of the world passing himself off as a member of the Italian aristocracy who had an impressive property near the beach where Wilma was found and where he entertained powerful political and business connections. Montagna was also a habitu of the cafes and bars of the Via Veneto, rubbing shoulders with artists and film stars, the rich and famous.

Enter the second man of mystery: Piero Piccioni, playboy and jazz musician son of Italy's foreign minister Attilio Piccioni. Accusations and denials of his involvement batted back and forth between a deeply polarised Italian press – communist-leaning papers splashed stories of corruption and cover-up; Right-leaning papers, split between warring factions within the Christian Democrats, counter-splashed with tales of degeneracy and amoral behaviour.

Caglio sang to this cacophonous claque as only a jilted lover could. Her allegations, rendered all the more explosive by excoriating detail, and with an Italian election campaign raging in the background, led to the first, highly charged, public trial.

Muto was brought to trial on charges of "spreading false and tendentious news to disturb public order" in January 1954, bringing Caglio as his dynamite witness. "Her racy tales of sex, drugs and corruption", writes Gundle, "lifted the veil on a hidden world of debauchery that threatened to tarnish a hitherto untouchable elite".

With every allegation of orgies, drug- taking and "bunga bunga", public interest was brought to near hysteria. Scrums of the paparazzi gathered outside the courtroom to snatch the comings and goings of prominent people – and the leading lights of the Via Veneto. Caglio's evidence cast the most severe doubts on the integrity and provenance of Montagna: less, in her embittered view the cultured aristocrat than a property speculator sleazeball with connections to the top of the police force – and the Mafia. Caglio's evidence brought the trial to an abrupt end with no case for Muto to answer. In the pandemonium there could now be no doubt that the fate of the girl from Via Tagliamento had become an affair of state. In a sentence worthy of Zola, "the cry for justice", writes Gundle, "was on the lips of all those who felt excluded from the feast of the privileged."

A new investigation was ordered and a senior magistrate put in charge. The movements of Montagna and Piccioni on 9 and 10 April came under intense examination. Piccioni, in an improbable alibi, claimed to have made a five-hour, 186-mile journey from the upper-class playground of Amalfi to his family home in Rome, where he said he lay ill for four days with tonsillitis.

As the hysteria grew, his father was forced to resign. Such were the passions roused that when the case finally came to court in January 1957, four years after Wilma's death, it was held in Venice – a deeply Catholic city that did not take kindly to having the sleazy underbelly of Roman life brought within its historic buildings.

The defence lawyers for the two accused brought doubts to bear on Wilma's uncle, Giuseppe Montesi. Might he have been responsible for her death? They probed at his character, the family's tensions and weaknesses and revealed secret meetings between Giuseppe and Wilma. In a trial already rich with dramatic moments the revelations brought matters even further to the boil. All Italy was now absorbed in this fizzing, frothing cappuccino of intrigue and insinuation.

As for Montagna, publicly branded an unscrupulous libertine, he sought to brazen out the scandal by returning unabashed to his favourite haunts on the Via Veneto – the Hotel Flora and the Hotel Excelsior. Far from the scandal working to cool the excesses of the smart set, it only seemed to turn up the heat.

Rome became ever more of a magnet for the big-screen names looking for life, love and liaisons dangereuses. During the day cars and carriages cruised up and down, taking people nowhere in particular. But when the sun set and the cocktail hour began, "the Via Veneto became more exciting, a place of adventures and encounters". It was written up by a new breed of gossip columnists who coined the phrase "dolce vita" to capture the atmosphere. "Wealthy and well-known men trained their sights on the female talent, which ranged from the visiting star to the aspirant starlet who had done a few pin-up shots for a magazine. Escort girls and high-end prostitutes mingled among them" – and with plenty of gigolos, too, for those visiting women tourists of a certain age. "Via Veneto", observed the writer Guido Botta, "is the median meeting point between declining elites and rising low-life".

Flitting in and out of this milieu were Princess Soraya, spurned wife of the Shah of Iran; the curvaceous British TV soubrette Sabrina; Princess Beatrice of Savoy; Ava Gardner, the sex siren Kim Novak; the voluptuous Gina Lollobrigida, the seductive redhead Linda Christian; Elsa Martinelli and most famous of all, the statuesque blonde Anita Ekberg – all men, mink and money. Under the direction of maestro Fellini, she strode in a gravity defying low-cut gown into the Trevi fountain, followed by a bewildered Marcello Mastroianni. In that one visually fabulous moment, la dolce vita found its timeless signature.

In bringing all this together, in turning what began as akin to a sad home cine film into a 3D epic, Gundle has pulled off a stunning coup. When you are not caught up with the whodunit, you are engrossed by the backdrop of a Rome in convulsion. The term "eroticism of detail" could have been made for this book. As for the outcome of the trial – and legal action still going on into the 1980s – take a trip down the Via Veneto, and read the book.

• Death and the Dolce Vita: The Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s by Stephen Gundle is published by Canongate, priced 14.99.