Paolo Sorrentino’s film La Grande Bellezza is an incredible film which I fully recommend. It is a compelling tragicomedy which focuses on Italy's upper class. It is an overload for the senses, with richness, strangeness and sadness all mixed into one film. However in a most vibrant manner the film proves that the middle-aged rich do hedonism better than the young with the party still going as the night sky pales over the beautiful Roman skyline through Sorrentino's favourite glassy electro-pop lens. We have a brief insight into Europe’s wealthy party scene with bronzed, botoxed women and sweaty, bejewelled men. Italy is the "grand stage" of life that develops before your eyes when you stay at holiday villas in Lucca thankfully, there are few botoxed women, in Garfagnana where La Collina del Sole is located, however you do find that even the gardeners are elegant in the villas for rent in Tuscany How the Italians accomplish this “listless elegance” is a true Italian secret. Is it their posture? Which you can observe as you watch the world go by when you rent a villa in Tuscany - Italians saunter holding alternating wrists behind their back and gently pull, stretching their backs as they do this. Is it their innate sense of colour? Being surrounded by such classical beauty easily observable from your villa rentals in Tuscany Whatever it is “La Dolce Vita” attitude is the vital ingredient that makes a holiday in Lucca villa rental such an amazing experience.Going back to our film; La Grande Bellezza reunites Sorrentino with his favourite actor Toni Servillo. He plays Jep, an ageing man-about-town at the centre of Rome's fashionable nightlife, whose face is a mask of polite disenchantment whilst he enjoys beauty in all its forms. This could mean in the form of love, or sex, or art, or death, but above all it means Rome. The film is rich in incredible camera shots of hidden parts of Rome giving an air of mystery to the city. A dramatic sense of passion, unbearable melancholy, a sense of love and loss, and a sharp sense of the varying forms of power and prestige that enrich the film.
Go on … Watch the film in the comfort of the Lucca Villa Rental and then, having watched it at la Collina del Sole take a day trip to Rome. In Rome you will be able to revisit some of the epic architecture captured on film and bask in the hedonistic, rich atmosphere that Sorrentino manages to capture in his film.
