Farewell to Paolo Di Paolo, the photographer of love

«My father has reached the end of his extraordinary life, he left us this morning, in his home town of Larino at the age of 98». As Sylviathe daughter, announces the death of Paul DiPaologreat photographer.

His are photos that tell the story post-war Italy, the Sixties, the inauguration of the Autostrada del Sole, neorealism (with private shots of Anna Magnani at her home, with her son, the dog), the Hollywood divas passing through Cinecittà and the aristocracy living a sweet life away from the Dolce Vita.

And then him, man very elegant always on the arm of his daughter, guardian of his artistic heritage. I spent a day with them a few years ago: Paolo Di Paolo told me about his extraordinary life, his magical encounters, his work as a photojournalist for The world di Pannunzio (from 1954 to 1966), he also gave me a photo that had conquered me for the gesture of kind love (Marcello Mastroianni caressing Faye Dunaway, on the set where they will fall in love). In every photo of him he looked for harmony and beauty, and the Great Beauty he lived in those Roman times.

«Amateur photographer, in the sense that I photograph for pleasure», he said of himself. But he was instead a master of his craft and really captured his zeitgeist: from political reportages, to shots of film actors, many of him friends of him, to international high society. He even tried his hand at high fashion and in 2020, he enjoyed returning to a Valentino fashion show in Paris, invited by Pier Paolo Piccioli.

Paolo Di Paolo loved photography until he was able to practice it as he said: with ethics and elegance, with passion but also with respect. He left her “disappearing” for over thirty years, retiring to the countryside. Nobody knew about his past, except his wife, until his daughter Silvia discovered a box in the garage with his cameras and Bruce Weber photos in a shop in Rome. From there the rebirth started, his second life: an exhibition in Rome, in 2016, a larger Maxxi, in 2019, Lost World, and the last in Milan at 10 Corso Como on the service that Paolo Di Paolo did with Pier Paolo Pasolini, The long sand roadfrom 1959, on the Italian summer of those times, a sociological inquiry and one of his great articles for the weekly Il Tempo, with which he collaborated for a long time.

In recent years, many articles have also made it known to the younger public. He was happy with his new success. “It had been hard to abandon everything”, but he had done it because the advent of the paparazzi and the newspapers looking only for the scoop was no longer his world.

Already over ninety, he recalled with infallible memory what Italy was like during the economic boom, the great cultural figures that we still evoke today as a golden moment of our country. Bruce Weber dedicated a documentary to him, The Treasure of His Youth, which recounts his life, starting from Larino, a small town in Molise where he decided to return to spend his last days. Last May, you received an honorary degree from the Faculty of Letters and Art History of the Sapienza University of Rome. Paolo Di Paolo passed away on the morning of June 12, he was 98 years old.

But his immense archive, 250,000 photoswill keep it alive. It often happens that the beloved daughter Silvia, now heir and curator of this heritage, writes to say «Look what I found», yet another gem. Discover Paolo Di Paolo’s photos, they are full of beauty, love and hope. They are the testimony of when we believed that the future would always be better.