Glamour and grit
Dame Joanna Lumley explores Rome, and discovers two sides of the city…
JOANNA LUMLEY’S GREAT CITIES OF THE WORLD Thursday, 9pm, ITV Factual
Rome is the destination for Dame Joanna Lumley in this week’s Great Cities. She meets Hollywood royalty, enjoys a pizza-making class and visits the spot where Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC.
But first she meets the city’s most famous paparazzo, Umberto Pizzi, responsible for capturing some of the world’s most legendary stars on camera including Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly.
‘In the glamour days when Hollywood came to Rome you couldn’t walk for movie stars and the paparazzi was a new thing,’ says Dame Joanna, who meets Italian actor Gina Lollobrigida, now 94, who belonged to the Golden Age of Hollywood. ‘Umberto told me about his scrapes with Mick Jagger and how he had a lot of photos of Elizabeth Taylor looking drunk!’
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Later, she gets an exclusive dawn tour inside the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel with its gatekeeper.
‘It was wonderful going through these miles of corridors, it was like wandering through jewelled caskets. To be there alone by torchlight, it felt like a fairy story,’ says Dame Joanna, who also visits the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum to learn about their history.
But Dame Joanna is also on a mission to get beneath the skin of the city. Her trip takes her to an old salami factory that’s become a unique home for refugees.
‘It’s an extraordinary project,’ explains Dame Joanna. ‘I’m so pleased I met refugees because that’s what’s happening now. We can’t just close our eyes.’