PAPARAZZO
/ˌpæpəˈrætsəʊ/
The inspiration for the original paparazzo, Tazio Secchiaroli, has just died at the age of 73. The story of how the word came into the English language encompasses not only Mr Secchiaroli’s career, but also the making of a classic film and a journal of travels by a nineteenth-century English author around southern Italy.
It began with the discovery by Tazio Secchiaroli and some young colleagues in the late 1950s, whose beat was the bars and clubs of the Via Veneto in Rome, that magazines were becoming bored with staged photographs of the famous, and were prepared to pay good money for candid or “surprise” shots. He became famous on a single night in 1958 when he snapped the enraged former King Farouk of Egypt overturning a restaurant table, and the actor Anthony Steele reacting in fury while Anita Ekberg waited for him in a car. The context is now hugely familiar, but at that time Secchiaroli and his comrades and rivals would have been known only as street photographers.
By chance, the Italian film producer Federico Fellini was at the time thinking about the plot of a film that would focus on Rome’s new status as a decadent haunt of high society, a film which was to become La Dolce Vita of 1960 (an Italian phrase that itself has become a catchphrase). Fellini contacted Secchiaroli, who gave him a lot of help in researching the story, and so the photographer in the film was modelled on him.
By chance again, Fellini happened at the time to be reading the Italian translation of a work by the English author George Gissing, a writer of the late nineteenth-century perhaps best remembered for his novels New Grub Street and The Odd Women. He died young, in 1903, and his works sank into obscurity during the first half of the century, but in the late 1950s were beginning to be revived and appreciated. Gissing went on a tour of southern Italy at the end of the century, recording his impressions in a travel book called By the Ionian Sea, published in 1901. His descriptions are revealing of social conditions in this very poor area and remain valuable as a historical record.
At one point during the latter part of his journey, he stopped at a hotel in Catanzaro, which was run by a man named Coriolano Paparazzo. (It seems this surname is not uncommon in Calabria. It may be of Greek origin, from papasaratsis, literally “priest-saddlemaker”.) The name took Fellini’s fancy and he borrowed it for the character of the photographer companion of Marcello Mastroianni.
The film was a considerable success, even notorious, though it would now be considered very tame (as well as rather long at three hours). The name of the photographer was a useful term for the new breed of intrusive snappers and gradually became accepted, though the OED has a first written citation in English no earlier than 1968. I can only wonder at what the late Signore Paparazzo, keeper of that unnamed hotel in Catanzaro, would make of the coincidences that led through an English writer’s recording of a brief stay, and an Italian film producer’s accidental encounter with it, to the borrowing of his name as one of the more pejorative in the English language.
