Fifty years later one of the most famous movies of all time, "La Dolce Vita" by Federico Fellini, the young film-maker and writer Mauro Aprile Zanetti reveals with an authentic heretic empiricism the "feeble and monumental presence" of a still life by Giorgio Morandi through an interdisciplinary narrative study. This element, which has been almost ignored both by the general public and the official movie critics, manifests itself in one of the more complex and beautiful scenes of the movie, which is paradoxically the least remembered one: Steiner's intellectual salon.

The book – which was published in the library Bloc-notes Edition by the Italian Institute of Culture of New York – has been enriched with original illustrations by the painter and graphic designer Piero Roccasalvo (who was chosen by one of the most prominent art curators in the world, Hans Ulrich Obrist, as one of the "12 protagonists of a new generation in the international artistic scene"). He was inspired by Zanetti's witty interpretation of Fellini's movie, as if it were a story-board for a movie that had not yet been directed. Renato Miracco, Director of the Italian Institute of Culture of New York and co-curator together with Maria Cristina Bandiera of the largest retrospective about Morandi that has ever been organized in the USA (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964), wrote the introduction to the book. He stresses the fact that "the author succeeded in deepening an aesthetic element which has never been investigated by critics, in spite of the immense quantity of literature dedicated to Fellini's movies".

On December 5, 2008, Mauro Aprile Zanetti presented his book for the first time at the Italian Institute of Culture of New York, where Miracco was the moderator. Penny Marcus, Professor for Cinema Studies at Yale University, took part in the debate too. On December 8, Zanetti gave a more "technical" lecture (about direction) at the New York Film Academy, while on December 10, invited by Professor Lea Brunetti, Zanetti met the high-school students of Garden City High School of Long Island. With a very direct approach, Zanetti challenged the students' and teachers' skills and sensibility: seemingly he spoke neither about La Dolce Vita nor about Morandi, instead he said that the aesthetic fact that also Wall-E (the robot by Pixar-Disney, editor's note) among the objects that he selects from the rubbish he presses every day, keeps on his shelves a set of beautiful and colourful bottles that clearly recall Morandi's subjects, and it is not by chance.

"One more time – said Zanetti – it is not just possible to recognize this sign as an object of Morandi's art in cinema, but it is important to be able to see the creative act through which Wall-E, exactly like the artist, completely understands the function of art itself and puts up resistance against the present and the bleakness of time. He selects anonymous objects and signs from everyday life which are seemingly useless (documents) to turn them into signs of art for the future (monuments)."

In this sense, Zanetti defined art as the "ability to see things where the common opinion continues to look fixedly" and stressed the importance of the perspective of young people. In 2009 (50th anniversary of La Dolce Vita), Mauro Aprile Zanetti will start a book-tour of lectures and presentations of his work in North America through the Italian diplomatic and consular channel and in collaboration with some of the best Universities and Institutes of Arts and Cinema studies, as well as through some movie festivals (NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, L.A., Boston, Washington DC, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Kingston).