When Raquel Welch danced on a table at Cinecittà

Before there was Hello!, OK! and Closer, there was Oggi. Oggi was the magazine my Italian mother used to flick through on the long dark English winter evenings. Its celebrity photo spreads were for her the armchair equivalent of the Italian national pastime, the ‘passeggiata’.

The Years of La Dolce Vita, revisited in a new exhibition at the Estorick Collection, were the glory years of Oggi. The show draws on an archive of more than a million images taken by Marcello Geppetti (1933–1998), the street photojournalist ranked by American Photo ‘the most undervalued photographer in history’. Geppetti worked the poshest passeggiata strip in Italy, the Via Veneto, 1960s hangout of all the big box-office stars of an American film industry attracted to Rome by the cheapness of the film studios and the glamour of the nightlife.

Toting his trusty Rolleiflex on his Vespa, Geppetti shot them all: Bardot, Hepburn, Ekberg, Taylor, Burton, Beatty, Delon. When Raquel Welch danced on a table at Cinecittà and John Wayne balanced on the rim of a fountain in Piazza Esedra, he was there to catch them. ‘Every night the same story,’ Anouk Aimée’s Maddalena moans to Marcello Mastroianni’s Marcello in Fellini’s famous 1960 satire on media frenzy from which this show takes its title. ‘Don’t they ever get sick of it?’ Apparently not. The freshness of Geppetti’s photographs is remarkable, given the sameyness of the settings and the props: the restaurant table, the open car window, the poised cigarette. Everyone smokes.

Some of his subjects are willing — Bardot is always up for it — some not. James Stewart with his wife and conspicuously American children looks less than happy being snapped on a street in front of a news kiosk selling Oggi, while Robert Kennedy, cornered in Trinità dei Monti, raises an impotent palm in the classic ‘Don’t shoot’ gesture.