The Italian release of James Mangold’s Bob Dylan Biopics ”A complete unknown“Urges local media to claim that Dylan, unlike in the film, traveled to Italy in 1962 in the hunt for Suze Rotolo – called Sylvie Russo in the film and played by Elle Fanning – who had left New York to study abroad.
In 1962, Rotolo Greenwich left Village apartment where she lived with Dylan and arrived with her mother in Perugia, where she attended the Italian city’s famous university for foreigners. By the way, it is the same college that Amanda Knox participated in 2007.
The Perugia Institution has obtained a registration document from its archives in the name Susan Elisabeth Rotolo and issued a statement in which Professor Sabrina Cittadini claimed that “the love story between Suze and Dylan was full of painful searches.” Cittadini has done some interviews and collected testimony that one night in 1962 “a very young man came out of a black taxi” in Perugia’s central Corso Garibaldi, near the university, “with a bouquet of red roses.” “It was Bob Dylan and he had come from Rome to Perugia to look for his Suze,” who had moved to another address, she said.
Rotolo was 17 when she met Dylan in 1961, not long after his arrival in New York. A self -described “Red Diaper Baby”, she was the daughter of two Italian immigrants: Gioachino “Pete” Rotolo, an illustrator and the Union organizer, and his wife, Mary, an editor and columnist for the US edition of Communist Italian newspaper L. ‘Unità .
Rotolo’s separation from Dylan, who did not want her to go to Italy, is believed to have inspired the songs “Tomorrow is long time”, “Don’t think twice, it’s okay” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.”
Following her return from Perugia, Rotolo praised Arm-in-Arm with Dylan on a Slushy Greenwich Village Street on the cover of his breakthrough 1963 album “The FreeWheelin ‘Bob Dylan.”
After their relationship, shown in the film, drove Rotolo back to Italy and married Enzo Bartoccioli in 1970, an Italian filmmaker she met while a student in Perugia.
Rotolo, who continued to become an artist and teacher at Parsons School of Design in New York, died of lung cancer in 2011 at the age of 67. She is survived by her husband and a son.
