Having dinner with Rino Barillari is a full-immersion experience.
Over the course of an evening, the setting might change, but the atmosphere around him is constant. He doesn’t answer every question he’s asked, but fascinating stories from his long career flow nonstop. Food and drink come in waves. Acquaintances drop by the table to shake his hand or exchange a few words.
Barillari, now 80, arrived in Rome from Calabria in 1959 and over the years the legendary paparazzo’s subjects have included -- among countless others -- Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni, Sean Connery, Paul Newman, Madonna, and Tom Cruise.
Yet the world Barillari and other paparazzi from the Golden Age of film helped make possible has mostly disappeared.
There was a time when movie stars wandered through Roman piazzas and ate and drank at the same spots as shop keepers and taxi drivers. But since then, the celebrity culture that once defined the Italian capital has fallen back behind bodyguards, locked gates, and PR agents.
Before meeting last week, I’d interviewed Barillari three times over the span of two decades: once each for United Press International, The Hollywood Reporter, and USA Today. Barillari hasn’t changed much over that span, but Rome has.
Back in 2007, he said he was among the last of the paparazzi “who remember the old way of doing things.” At the time, the claim sounded to me like hyperbole. But now it reads like a simple fact.
