When Raquel Welch danced on a table at Cinecittà

Before there was Hello!, OK! and Closer, there was Oggi. Oggi was the magazine my Italian mother used to flick through on the long dark English winter evenings. Its celebrity photo spreads were for her the armchair equivalent of the Italian national pastime, the ‘passeggiata’.

The Years of La Dolce Vita, revisited in a new exhibition at the Estorick Collection, were the glory years of Oggi. The show draws on an archive of more than a million images taken by Marcello Geppetti (1933–1998), the street photojournalist ranked by American Photo ‘the most undervalued photographer in history’. Geppetti worked the poshest passeggiata strip in Italy, the Via Veneto, 1960s hangout of all the big box-office stars of an American film industry attracted to Rome by the cheapness of the film studios and the glamour of the nightlife.