Boccaccio ’70 (1962): Anita Ekberg Becomes Larger Than the World
Boccaccio ’70 is officially an anthology film made by four major Italian directors, built from separate stories about sex, marriage, morality and modern life. It contains Sophia Loren, Romy Schneider, Peppino De Filippo, Thomas Milian and an alarming concentration of filmmaking prestige. Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica each direct a section. Cesare Zavattini supplied the original idea, linking contemporary Italy to the erotic and satirical storytelling tradition associated with Giovanni Boccaccio.
That is the official description.
But there is another way to understand the film, and it begins when Anita Ekberg appears several stories tall, reclining above Rome with a glass of milk in her hand.
From that moment, Boccaccio ’70 belongs to her.
Fellini’s section, The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, does not merely feature Ekberg. It takes the public image surrounding her and enlarges it until it becomes architecture. She is first seen as a billboard, but the image is so huge that “billboard” feels insufficient. She becomes a manufactured moon hanging over a respectable Roman neighborhood. Her body is printed across the skyline, her voice drifts through the night, and her invitation to drink more milk turns an ordinary advertisement into a national emergency for one sexually terrified man.
The joke is not simply that Ekberg is beautiful. By 1962, that was already public knowledge. The joke is that her beauty has become impossible to contain within the ordinary dimensions of cinema, advertising or social behavior. Fellini makes literal what celebrity culture had already done to her. Anita Ekberg no longer enters a room. She occupies the landscape.
This was only two years after La Dolce Vita, when Fellini had placed her in the Trevi Fountain and created one of the most durable images in film history. As Sylvia, Ekberg had seemed less like a psychologically complete person than a force arriving from somewhere outside ordinary Roman life. She wandered through the city in an evening dress, balanced a kitten on her head, climbed into the fountain and summoned Marcello Mastroianni toward her as though she controlled the water.
That performance made her internationally immortal, but immortality can be a trap. Once a performer becomes an image that powerful, every later appearance must either repeat it, deny it or somehow survive beside it.
In Boccaccio ’70, Fellini chooses repetition through distortion. He does not ask Ekberg to become smaller, more realistic or more respectable after La Dolce Vita. He inflates the myth until its absurdity becomes visible. Sylvia had been a goddess briefly wandering among mortals. The Ekberg of Doctor Antonio is already a commercial deity, printed, illuminated and installed above the traffic.
The segment’s central character is Antonio Mazzuolo, played by the magnificent Peppino De Filippo. Antonio is a self-appointed defender of public morality, the kind of man who patrols parks, interrupts couples and interprets desire as evidence of civilizational collapse. He does not merely disapprove of sexual display. He experiences it as a personal attack.
When the enormous milk advertisement appears across from his apartment, Antonio becomes obsessed with removing it. Ekberg’s image lies casually across the billboard, smiling with the serene confidence of someone unaware that her existence has caused a bureaucratic and spiritual crisis. Her exposed shoulders and ample décolletage are presented in service of dairy consumption, which makes Antonio’s panic even funnier. The campaign can claim innocence. She is only encouraging healthy nutrition.
The slogan is effectively a command from heaven: drink more milk.
Fellini understood the strange power of advertising in the new Italian consumer culture. Postwar Italy had changed rapidly. Economic growth brought cars, refrigerators, television, mass-produced goods and an expanding commercial image world. The country was still publicly shaped by Catholic morality, traditional family structures and conservative codes, but enormous photographs of desirable bodies were beginning to appear in streets and magazines.
The contradictions were everywhere. Sex was condemned and used to sell products. Female beauty was idealized and regulated. Modern consumer pleasure entered a society whose moral authorities still spoke the language of restraint.
Ekberg’s billboard sits directly inside that contradiction. She is both scandal and sales device. She is supposedly dangerous, but the danger has been commercially authorized. The same society that condemns sexual excess has paid to place her body over the neighborhood.
Antonio is not wrong that something powerful has arrived. He is wrong about where the power comes from.
His campaign against the billboard gradually reveals that he is less a guardian of morality than its most tormented captive. Ekberg’s image consumes his attention. He watches it, reports it, measures it and dreams about it. His attempted censorship becomes a devotional practice. Nobody studies her more closely than the man insisting that nobody should look.
This is the film’s deepest comic mechanism. Repression does not remove desire. It gives desire an office, a uniform and a daily schedule.
Antonio’s outrage makes Ekberg larger. Every protest increases the image’s importance. He cannot stop thinking about her because he has defined thinking about her as forbidden. His entire moral identity depends upon resisting a woman who has not actually done anything to him.
Then the billboard comes alive.
At night, the gigantic Ekberg steps down from the advertisement and enters Antonio’s fevered imagination. The scale is gloriously wrong. She towers over buildings, moves through a miniature landscape and treats the city like a plaything. Antonio runs beneath her in terror and fascination while the object of his repression becomes physically unmanageable.
Fellini’s first work in color gives the sequence an especially artificial radiance. The reds, blues, creams and night-sky blacks do not aim for realism. The segment looks painted, lit and staged according to the logic of dreams, advertising and carnival. Ekberg’s skin, dress and hair carry the polished unreality of a commercial image that has escaped its frame.
She is not simply a giant woman. She is the return of everything Antonio tried to exclude from consciousness.
The image contains obvious male fantasy, but Ekberg does not play it passively. Her great gift in these Fellini collaborations is the way she seems amused by the mythology being built around her. She does not shrink from being seen. She looks back.
That quality separates her from a conventional screen siren whose function is merely to receive desire. Ekberg’s presence has weight, humor and an almost aggressive self-possession. She knows that the room has changed because she entered it. Even when the character is constructed from male imagination, the performer seems to retain private knowledge beyond the fantasy.
Her physical scale in Doctor Antonio makes this authority impossible to overlook. Antonio can project anything onto her, but he cannot control the result. His fantasy does not kneel obediently. It laughs, sings and threatens to swallow him.
The milk itself becomes a perfect Fellini object. It suggests innocence, childhood, maternity, health and bodily nourishment, yet the advertisement turns it into erotic spectacle. Ekberg offers the drink with a smile that makes the boundaries among mother, lover, goddess and saleswoman collapse.
Antonio’s panic may therefore contain more than simple lust. He is confronted by femininity as an entire system of dependence and desire. The milk reminds him that the supposedly pure and the supposedly sexual were never as separate as his moral program required.
Ekberg’s public persona made her uniquely suited to this construction. Born in Sweden, crowned Miss Sweden in 1951 and brought to the United States through the Miss Universe competition, she entered cinema through modeling, publicity and Hollywood’s machinery for manufacturing international beauty. Her early American roles often treated her as a striking physical presence before they treated her as an actress. She worked with major stars, received a Golden Globe as a promising newcomer, appeared in comedies, adventures and costume films, and became an ideal subject for the gossip press.
When Fellini used her in La Dolce Vita, he was not discovering an unknown woman. He was importing an already manufactured celebrity image into a film about celebrity manufacturing.
Ekberg later objected to the idea that Fellini had simply created her. She argued, with characteristic bluntness, that her own fame had helped him too. That claim matters because film history often describes actresses as muses, raw material transformed by male genius. Ekberg understood that Fellini’s image depended upon her body, temperament and existing cultural charge as much as her legacy depended upon his camera.
Muse can be a flattering word that quietly removes labor and agency.
Ekberg did not merely stand where Fellini placed her. She brought a specific force that could not have been replaced by another beautiful actress. Her face could appear both amused and remote. Her body suggested classical abundance rather than fragile fashion elegance. Her voice, dubbed or not depending upon the production, carried the idea of foreignness within Italian cinema. She was European and Hollywood, sophisticated and excessive, real woman and public hallucination.
Fellini understood her as a modern mythological figure, but she understood herself as a working actress who had helped build the myth.
That tension makes Boccaccio ’70 richer now than it may have seemed in 1962. At the time, audiences could receive the segment as a broad satire of censorship, Catholic prudery and sexual obsession. Ekberg was one of the world’s most recognizable sex symbols, and the billboard joke required no explanation. The spectacle was immediate.
Looking back, the sequence also becomes a film about what happens when a woman’s image grows larger than her life.
The billboard is not Anita Ekberg. It is a processed, commercial version of Anita Ekberg. It can be installed, illuminated, censored, desired, sold and removed without consulting the person whose body created it.
That distinction was already part of her career. Ekberg repeatedly observed that beauty opened doors and then became a limitation. Once she had been established as a particular kind of woman, casting directors and audiences returned to the same image. She could play variations on the goddess, blonde bombshell, temptress or impossible foreign beauty, but the image tended to arrive before the performance.
Doctor Antonio makes that process visible through exaggeration. The printed Ekberg is so large that the living actress almost disappears inside it. She becomes a public utility delivering fantasy to an entire district.
Yet she also defeats the image by inhabiting it too completely. When the billboard comes alive, it does not expose a hidden ordinary woman trapped beneath glamour. Instead, Ekberg becomes even more impossible. The fantasy acquires movement and will. She does not step down to explain herself. She steps down to dominate the dream.
This is why reducing the segment to “the male gaze” alone does not quite capture its energy. Certainly the camera luxuriates in Ekberg’s body, and the story is built around a man’s obsessive response to it. But Fellini also ridicules the structures attempting to possess her: the advertiser, the moralist, the spectator and even cinema itself.
Everyone wants to make Ekberg mean something useful.
The milk company wants her to mean consumption.
Antonio wants her to mean corruption.
Fellini wants her to mean fantasy.
The audience may want her to mean a lost age of glamour.
She exceeds each use.
The anthology surrounding her offers different forms of sexual and economic negotiation. Monicelli’s Renzo and Luciana follows a young working couple forced to conceal their marriage because of workplace regulations. Visconti’s The Job explores marriage, money and humiliation through a wealthy couple after a prostitution scandal. De Sica’s The Raffle gives Sophia Loren the role of a carnival worker offered as the prize in a lottery.
These stories provide a broad portrait of desire under modern conditions. Love is restricted by employment. Marriage becomes financial bargaining. Female sexuality becomes a commodity, spectacle or problem to be managed.
The project’s relation to Boccaccio lies less in direct adaptation than in its bawdy interest in the arrangements people construct around desire. The medieval Decameron offered stories in which appetite repeatedly slipped past official morality. Boccaccio ’70 updates that pattern for industrial and consumer Italy. The church, corporation, aristocracy and marketplace all attempt to regulate intimacy, and intimacy keeps mutating around them.
The original Italian version ran more than three hours with all four segments, while some international releases removed Monicelli’s chapter and presented only the Fellini, Visconti and De Sica sections. The film’s unstable release form has contributed to its reputation as an unwieldy prestige package rather than a perfectly unified work.
Anthology films almost invite ranking. One director is judged sharper, another too long, one segment light, another serious. Boccaccio ’70 can feel less like one film than a four-course banquet served by chefs who refused to coordinate portions.
But when the film exists in a collection because of Anita Ekberg, the problem disappears.
Her segment becomes the center, and the rest becomes orbit.
This is not a claim that the other episodes lack value. Visconti’s controlled cruelty, De Sica’s populist energy and Monicelli’s social observation are essential parts of the film’s portrait of Italy. Sophia Loren is formidable, and Romy Schneider gives The Job an intelligence that gradually turns marital humiliation into negotiation.
But Ekberg changes the physical law of the anthology.
The others play women in stories.
Ekberg plays the image of womanhood after it has been projected across a city.
That difference also explains why the segment may affect viewers now in ways that exceed its original satire. We live inside a world where giant female images are ordinary. Faces and bodies fill phones, buildings, advertisements and feeds. Celebrity is no longer delivered only through cinema screens and billboards. It follows the viewer into bed, work, transit and private thought.
Antonio’s obsession now looks less eccentric. He is an early citizen of image saturation.
He believes the problem is that the billboard has entered public space. A contemporary viewer lives inside a system where public and private space have nearly merged. The billboard does not need to stand outside the apartment. It is already in the hand.
Fellini’s gigantic Ekberg therefore seems prophetic. She is not merely an exaggerated movie star. She is the ancestor of the endlessly enlarged, reproduced and circulated body. The image becomes detached from scale, context and personhood. It can appear anywhere and be argued over by strangers.
Antonio’s moral crusade resembles modern cycles of outrage in which condemnation and promotion become indistinguishable. The angry viewer shares the image, discusses it, studies it and expands its reach. The attempt to suppress the object feeds the object.
He is the billboard’s most dedicated publicist.
At the same time, the segment belongs unmistakably to an older visual culture. The billboard is physical. Workers install it. It occupies real land and changes a neighborhood’s skyline. The light striking Ekberg’s printed face belongs to nighttime Rome rather than a glowing individual screen.
This gives the fantasy a material grandeur that contemporary images often lack. The billboard cannot be swiped away. It must be confronted as an object.
The film also preserves an older kind of international stardom. Ekberg’s celebrity grew through pageants, studio publicity, magazines, gossip columns, premieres and movies that traveled slowly across borders. Her image was widely known but remained partly inaccessible. Mystery survived because exposure had limits.
A current celebrity may release more images in one week than Ekberg’s audience encountered in a year. This creates familiarity but destroys distance. Fellini could transform Ekberg into a goddess because the public image still contained blank space.
The giant woman stepping from the billboard requires that distance. She is familiar enough to desire and remote enough to become supernatural.
Looking back at Ekberg now also brings an unavoidable sadness. A screen preserves physical presence while time removes the person from the world. She remains impossibly alive in the frame, smiling from above Rome, while the actress herself passed through age, declining health, financial difficulty and death.
Cinema does not stop time. It creates an image that time cannot visibly alter.
That distinction can become painful when watching stars whose beauty was treated as eternal public property. The film gives us Ekberg at thirty, enlarged beyond mortality, while knowledge of her later life remains outside the frame. Youth glows permanently. The human being continues toward vulnerability.
Fellini returned to that contrast in Intervista in 1987, when Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg watched the Trevi Fountain sequence from La Dolce Vita projected inside her home. The older performers confronted their younger screen selves, and cinema became a room where time folded against itself.
The scene is moving because it does not destroy the old image. It allows the living people to sit beside it.
Boccaccio ’70 contains the earlier half of that equation. Ekberg has not yet become a person watching the myth. She is still inside its expansion.
The sadness is ours because we know what the image cannot.
Yet this does not reduce the film to mourning. Ekberg’s performance remains too funny, too large and too self-aware for that. She is not a delicate relic asking to be handled respectfully. She stomps through Antonio’s nightmare with the confidence of someone who has discovered that the world is small enough to hold in one hand.
Her laughter remains the segment’s real authority.
Antonio wants the image punished. Fellini allows it to laugh at him.
The laughter breaks the moral structure because it refuses shame. Ekberg does not argue that she is decent. She does not request permission to exist. She finds his terror entertaining.
That may be the most durable pleasure in The Temptations of Doctor Antonio. Beneath the sexual satire and cinematic spectacle is the sight of a woman’s public image refusing to apologize for the disturbance it causes.
Antonio believes desire should be controlled by respectable men.
The image has other plans.
Seen in 1962, Boccaccio ’70 belonged to a moment when Italian cinema stood at an extraordinary intersection of popular entertainment, international glamour and directorial ambition. Fellini, Visconti, De Sica and Monicelli could be assembled into one massive anthology because Italian film culture possessed both commercial confidence and artistic prestige. Sophia Loren, Romy Schneider and Anita Ekberg could carry separate worlds within the same release.
Seen now, the film looks like a luxurious ruin from a system no longer built at that scale. Its length, episodic form, tonal shifts and unapologetic interest in adult sexuality belong to a theatrical culture that expected audiences to surrender an afternoon rather than consume content in fragments.
And within that ruin, Anita Ekberg still towers.
She is the advertisement and the attack on advertising.
She is the fantasy and the person fantasy cannot fully absorb.
She is Fellini’s goddess, her own co-creator and Antonio’s private apocalypse.
The anthology may contain four films, but the image that survives above them is a Swedish actress reclining across Rome, selling milk while a moral crusader loses his mind below.
Drink more milk.
The command remains ridiculous, erotic, innocent and enormous.
So does she.
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