Paolo Di Paolo: the man who shot the glamour – and grit – of postwar Italy

A new film charts the extraordinary career of a photographer who captured the moment country came to life

Glamour, with it’s qualities of mystery, realism and discretion, is notoriously difficult to define, but the photographs of 97-year-old Paolo Di Paolo provide definitive visual clues. For 14 years through the 50s and 60s, he photographed post-war Italy as it was, an agrarian society racing toward industrialisation.

Di Paolo’s reportage, of luminous movie stars, writers, directors of Italian cinema, agricultural and factory workers, and the poor – all in the spirit of empathetic curiosity – sometimes found their way into Il Mundo, a renowned 12-page political-intellectual weekly magazine, that counted Thomas Mann and George Orwell as contributors.