Word: vitae
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When a group of men calling themselves Descendants of the Serbian Fighters From the 1912-20 Balkan Wars congregates for a ritual burning of the U.S. flag, most of the patrons of La Dolce Vita don't even bother to turn around. The morning sun is glorious on the terrace of the split-level bar overlooking the Ibar River, and the young men in black T-shirts are content to smoke their Marlboros and nurse their cokes, eyeing the more prosperous opposite bank of the river. They never cross the bridge, of course, because the Ibar marks the dividing line...
...Kosovo war, the smoke-filled, vinyl seated bar and cafe on the ground floor of a crumbling apartment block has been a gathering place for the hard line Serbs who want to keep ethnic-Albanians out of their enclave. Its position on the front line has made La Dolce Vita the target of bomb attacks against Serbs by ethnic Albanians (nine people were injured here in 2006), and also a bully pulpit for anti-Western tirades...
...still be the place to be seen in northern Mitrovica, but the riverside cafe no longer oozes a sense of imminent danger. It was tense, this past winter, when Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, and La Dolce Vita's regulars gathered in a tense silence, sipping slivovitz plum brandy, smoking, and waiting for the news from Belgrade. As the Serb capital was gripped by violent protests that included an attempt to torch the U.S. embassy, life became in Mitrovica became dangerous for Serbian and foreign journalists covering local demonstrations: Several had their cameras smashed; some were beaten. A Serb reporter...
...Vespa 150 GS, similar to the one ridden by Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 film Roman Holiday. Speed also played its part in the golden age of Italian cinema; witness the Lancia Spider that homegrown idol Vittorio Gassman drove in Il Sorpasso, a 1962 road movie dripping with dolce vita style...
...Sometimes they became mainstream hits, like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which, in tickets sold, may still be the all-time foreign-language boxoffice champ. The hits spawned satellites: suddenly Italian films were hot. In the years after La Dolce Vita, dozens of pasta pictures played the big cities; foreign-film fans sought them out because of the director, the stars, the country. Another Italian film of less reputable pedigree turned into a hit: the shock-documentary Mondo Cane, on which we can blame not just a raft of cheap-n-sleazy Mondo movies but the wedding-reception standard...