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Giò Stajano — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Career and popularity

In 1956, during the annual Art Fair in Rome's Via Margutta, Stajano exhibited her paintings, achieving some public success. She met Giorgio de Chirico, Renato Guttuso, and Alberto Moravia, began a friendship with Novella Parigini, and frequented the circles that Federico Fellini would later portray in La Dolce Vita.

In 1959 she published Roma Capovolta (Upside-Down Rome), a roman à clef based on her wild escapades in Roman high society and the burgeoning gay subculture in Italy. The authorities seized the explicitly gay book, charging her with propagating ideas contrary to "public morals" that were "harmful to customs." The scandal focused the tabloid press's attention directly on Stajano, who at the time was widely known as the "most famous homosexual in Italy."

Immediately after Roma Capovolta, Stajano hurried to publish Meglio l'Uovo Oggi (Better an Egg Today, initially, Meglio l'Uomo Oggi, or Better a Man Today), another roman à clef featuring gay life in Rome. This book described in a not-too-veiled way the private doings of various public figures. It referenced the former king of Italy Umberto II's homosexuality, giving him the nickname "Umbertina," and it featured an orgy where an actor resembling Laurence Olivier participated in drag. Another scandalous and gossipy book followed, Roma Erotica (Erotic Rome). Authorities seized both books shortly after they appeared in bookshops, but only after they had sold enough copies to further augment Stajano's growing celebrity.

Stajano became one of the most famous figures of the Roman "dolce vita." She opened a nightclub, and visually inspired director Federico Fellini by bathing in the Barcaccia Fountain in the Piazza di Spagna, just as Anita Ekberg would later do in the Trevi Fountain for the film La Dolce Vita. Fellini chose Stajano to portray one of the drag queens in the film. Stajano later claimed that, due to a dispute with the director, her shots were replaced for the theatrical release of the film, but they were later allegedly added back to restored editions for television and home release.

Besides Fellini, Stajano worked with directors such as Steno, Dino Risi, and Riccardo Freda. Between 1958 and 1961 she wrote a gossip column for the tabloid weekly Lo specchio (The Mirror).

In 1961, mostly because of her celebrity status, Giò was among those people whom the judiciary summoned for questioning over the Balletti verdi gay scandal in the Brescia area.

At the end of the 1960s she wrote for the weekly lifestyle and erotic magazine, Men. Her advice column was titled Il salotto di Oscar Wilde (Oscar Wilde's living room), and in it she replied to gay men's letters. This column was the first (and for many years, the only) feature of its type aimed at a gay audience in all of Italian publishing. In 1971 she became the editor of that periodical. During the eighties Supersex magazine photographed her for pornographic photostories.