It’s one of the most indelible scenes in all of Italian cinema. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), the actress Monica Vitti walks pensively down the streets of Noto, Sicily, as more and more men gaze in her direction. Like much of the rest of the film—about a woman who goes missing on a remote Italian island—the moment has been endlessly scrutinized for its striking imagery and subtext. The White Lotus even replicated it, shot for shot, during Season 2, with Aubrey Plaza standing in for Vitti—a performer widely regarded in her native country as the “Queen of Italian Cinema.”
“She was the type of artist and icon that comes once in a lifetime,” her nephew Giorgio Ceciarelli tells Vogue of Vitti, who died at the age of 90 in 2022. “It’s a proud legacy we always took for granted, but as we grew up, we realized she’s a national treasure.”
Throughout her multi-decade career, Vitti staked a claim as one of Italy’s most luminous and beloved cinematic exports, alongside the likes of Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Antonioni, and Federico Fellini—all of whom shot to global prominence in the 1950s. Born in Rome in 1931, Vitti was both a striking beauty and a true artist. She became Antonioni’s muse (and, for a time, his lover), also working with him on such atmospheric classics as 1961’s La Notte, with Mastroianni and the French actress Jeanne Moreau, and 1964’s Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert).
The range of her talent is currently on display in Monica Vitti: La Modernista (June 6–19), a 14-film series at Film at Lincoln Center co-organized with the storied Italian film house Cinecittà. It marks Vitti’s first-ever American retrospective.
“She transcends time,” says Manuela Cacciamani, CEO of Cinecittà. “She is truly modern because you can’t pin her down to a fixed, predictable—even if beautiful—type; Vitti instead represents change. And this applies not just to her films, but to her way of being a woman. In this sense, she embodied the changes of an entire country and remains relevant across genres and decades.”
Vitti’s legacy as a fashion icon may be just as robust as her impact on cinema. A 1966 profile in American Vogue described her much-mimicked, intriguingly “international” mien, characterized by a “definite, wiry quality which could be American, but a pink-and-white complexion and clear amber eyes which look as though English mists and Devonshire cream have been at work. On the other hand, that artfully disarranged hair”—a point of reference even now—“and a smart Italian cachet could only come out of post–World War II Rome.”