"Suddenly the war seemed far away, we shrugged off the dust, hunger, fatigue of the post-war period, for the first time we looked up and looked ahead. The worst was over. At that time Rome was a magnet, everyone dreamed of living in the city of cinema, of stars, the capital of elegance and modernity of which we read in magazines: and the mirage was at hand, right there, a few kilometers away".
The heroine of the Roman "dolce vita", the undisputed queen of the Spanish Quarters, was loved and courted. Tarantina's life was certainly all this, but not only. Like many other "femminielli" of her generation or the following ones, hers was also a tiring existence, made up of painful rejections (especially on the part of the family and the community of origin), of precariousness and despair, of prison and broken dreams.
