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Aiche Nana shot to fame in striptease scandal in Rome, an episode recreated in Federico Fellini's classic film

Aiche Nana, the Turkish belly dancer and stripper whose story inspired the late Italian director Federico Fellini to make his classic film La Dolce Vita, has died at the age of 78, her lawyer said.

Nana, whose real name was Kiash Nanah, died on Wednesday night at a hospital in Rome.

She shot to fame when she performed a striptease at a restaurant in Rome in 1958. The sequence was shot by Tazio Secchiaroli, the street photographer who was the model for the character Paparazzo in the 1960 film that starred Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni.

Police raided the Rugantino restaurant while the party was still in progress and closed it for offending public morality, but Secchiaroli managed to get out with a roll of pictures of Nana stripping to her underwear. The photos...

The character played by Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini's classic film was partly based on a gossip columnist now writing his own account of Rome's scandalous 1950s

When the gossip columnist Victor Ciuffa emerged blinking from a private viewing of La Dolce Vita in Rome in February 1960, he had one thought in his mind: the film he had just watched amounted to his life played out on the screen.

Federico Fellini's classic depiction of decadent American starlets and persistent photographers changed ­cinema forever. Now the journalist who chronicled 1950s life on Rome's glitzy Via Veneto and briefed Fellini for his film has decided to give his own definitive account of the era. As far as Ciuffa, now 77, is concerned, 50 years later he is setting the record straight, by writing La Dolce Vita, Minute by Minute.

"The real Dolce Vita started in Rome years before the cafés opened on...