Cruise-Holmes wedding brings the Dolce Vita back to Rome
Poised with his camera outside Rome’s elegant Hassler hotel, the King of Paparazzi is waiting to get a shot.
“The Dolce Vita is back!” Rino Barillari exclaimed triumphantly, in a reference to the 1960 Fellini movie that coined the word “paparazzi” and gave the world the image of the glamorous Swedish star Anita Ekberg splashing around the Trevi fountain.
It is five days since Tom Cruise first landed in Rome ahead of his highly awaited wedding to Katie Holmes. Monday and Tuesday were dry, no photos to be had.
On Wednesday, at last, Cruise and Holmes left the hotel for a late-night visit to City Hall, sending paparazzi chasing after them on motor scooters through the capital’s streets.
Yesterday, the glamour couple was photographed coming and going from a restaurant, baby Suri in tow.
“I got some good pictures,” Barillari said cheerfully.
Barillari, 62, a photographer at the Rome daily Il Messaggero who also sells to magazines, relies on a vast networks of informants to track celebrities. He is almost as well known as his subjects, and uses that to gain their confidence.
His website features the logo, “The King of Paparazzi,” and his battle cry is “War is war!” His subjects have included Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Peter O’Toole.
He said he began taking photographs for magazines when he was 14.
“This is the wedding of the century. In the whole world they will be demanding the most beautiful pictures,” Barillari said.
But, it is rumoured, the celebrity couple has sold the wedding photo rights to three U.S. magazines, according to Barillari.
Cruise and Holmes are widely expected to be married Saturday at the 15th-century Odescalchi Castle in the lakeside town of Bracciano, 27 miles north of Rome. VIP guests who have been spotted in Rome in the past couple of days include Jennifer Lopez and her singer husband Marc Anthony, Will Smith, Brooke Shields, Jim Carrey, and soccer star David Beckham and his wife, Victoria.
Barillari estimated that getting exclusive photographs of the wedding ceremony would be worth a small fortune. Chances, however, are slim.
The good news is there is money to be made merely by getting pictures of some of Cruise and Holmes’ guests, Barillari and other photographers said.
“Right there you have five or six international stars. Beckham is the most valuable one,” said paparazzo Fabrizio Grifoni, who has been selling photographs to gossip magazines since 1987. But as of tonight, the only shots were of the soccer star arriving at the Hassler hotel.
“If you get a picture of Beckham in the park with the children, you’ve got a scoop,” Grifoni said.
But there has been little movement, and the only ones who took quick strolls around the city today were Carrey and Brook Shields, Grifoni said.
Still Barillari insists “the good times are back,” citing this year’s inaugural Rome Film Festival, which brought such stars as Nicole Kidman to the Italian capital.
The veteran photographer said the glamorous 1950s and 1960s were followed by two unhappier decades in Italy that were marked by terrorism.
“It was agony. No one spoke of love and sweetness and stories,” Barillari said.
