Half a century ago, in La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini caught a mood of change as Italy entered the 1960s: Marcello Mastroianni played Marcello Rubini as a youngish gossip columnist who lives out a week’s succession of nights and dawns in the most spectacular of cities: Rome. Fellini’s masterpiece was a film of echoes, many of them ironic—like the famous opening scene of the sunbathing women looking up at the plaster statue of Christ being transported overhead by helicopter which, at the film’s close, is inverted with the Medusa-like stingray discovered on the beach and the angelic young girl trying…