WASHINGTON — In “La Dolce Vita,” his 1960 film about jaded sophisticates at play, Italian director Federico Fellini portrayed a week in the life of a tabloid reporter in Rome. The reporter, played by Marcello Mastroianni, visits nightclubs and parties, has sexual encounters, drinks too much and contemplates his spiritual emptiness as the line between glamour and desperation is blurred.

Mastroianni’s partner in pursuit of pleasure and tabloid headlines is a sharp-elbowed, flash-in-the-face photographer named Paparazzo. The term “paparazzi” is derived from his character.

The photographer who may have been the model for Paparazzo was one of Fellini’s friends in Rome, Felice Quinto, who died of pneumonia Jan. 17 in Rockville, Md., at age 80.

Quinto strolled with his camera among the cafes of the Via Veneto, waiting for opportunities to capture celebrities and royals acting like mere mortals. He hid in bushes, assumed false identities and raced around Rome on his motorcycle to get the pictures that fed gossip-hungry publications around the world. He was always well dressed, and press accounts sometimes called him the “king of the paparazzi.”

“I was the first to begin in Rome before Fellini was doing his movie,” Quinto told the Dallas Morning News in 1985. “We were five to begin with, five press photographers — but freelancing. By the time Fellini came out with the movie, it was already about four years that I had been doing photography.”

According to his wife, Fellini asked Quinto to play a photographer in “La Dolce Vita,” but he declined because being a paparazzo on the streets of Rome was far more lucrative. In the end, Quinto had a brief appearance in the film as a bystander.

Truth is stranger than fiction

Fiction and reality collided for Quinto one night in 1960 when he snapped a photo of actress Anita Ekberg — featured in “La Dolce Vita” as a starlet stalked by paparazzi — smooching a married movie producer at a cafe in Rome. When Quinto staked out Ekberg’s house at 5 a.m., the Swedish bombshell emerged in stocking feet and a black cocktail dress, armed with a bow and arrow.

One arrow struck a photographer’s car and a second nicked Quinto’s hand.

“She just let it go, and goodbye Charlie,” he recalled in a 1997 interview with ABC News.

The enraged actress wasn’t finished. She attacked Quinto with her fists and a well-placed knee to the groin. “And so, from one word to another,” he later put it, “she just grab me by my coat, wow, with the right knee, get me where the sun doesn’t shine.”

The episode would seem to have come from the fevered imagination of, well, a tabloid reporter if it hadn’t been caught on film by one of Quinto’s fellow paparazzi.

Living la dolce vita

Felice Quinto was born April 11, 1929, in Milan. He trained to be an auto mechanic, but his father owned a camera store, and Quinto had taken pictures as a hobby since childhood. A newspaperman who saw him taking pictures of beggars suggested that he become a photojournalist.

He moved to Rome, drove an Alfa Romeo sports car, hung out with Fellini and generally led “la dolce vita” — the sweet life.

“I don’t come from no special school of photography. I don’t come from no school of journalism,” Quinto said in 1985. “The only school was just the necessity to eat and the love of the work. I think I’m one of the few people in the world that is satisfied with what he does.”

In 1958, he met an American schoolteacher, Geraldine Del Giorno, at an art gallery in Venice. They were married in 1963, the same year Quinto moved to the United States to work for The Associated Press.

One of his first assignments was the funeral of John F. Kennedy. He photographed civil rights marches in the South led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and won an award for a picture of white police officers beating a black man.

But Quinto was always best known for his images of celebrities. In the 1970s, he became the court photographer of New York’s Studio 54 and for a time was Elizabeth Taylor’s personal photographer.

For more than 20 years, Quinto’s wife, who taught English at Gaithersburg High School, commuted to New York on weekends to see her husband. When he retired in 1993, he settled into her townhouse in Montgomery Village and lived quietly, tending his basil and pepper plants and cooking Italian meals.

Few of his neighbors knew anything of his earlier life among the glitterati.