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 f

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