Gini Alhadeff profiles style insiders who effortlessly embody "la dolce vita"—something she knows a little about herself—and asks them to reveal their favorite local restaurants, shops, and more.

Fabrizio Mosca, film producer/Rome

One of Italy's youngest and most passionate movie producers, Mosca is French-Neapolitan by birth but a Roman by adoption. He started his adult life in London as a "yuppie banker," he says, but his predilection for "the unexpected" led him to film—making documentaries in Africa, Pakistan, and India, then producing a feature, I Cento Passi, which was nominated for a Golden Globe and a David (the Italian Oscar) in 2001. This year, Mosca produced Emanuele Crialese's Golden Door, which won the Venice Film Festival award for Best Director; he is now working on a film called Galantuomini, by young Anglo-Pugliese director Edoardo Winspeare, whose family castle in Puglia sits on the very tip of Italy's heel.

Rome favorites: Mosca likes to have drinks at the Hotel de Russie's Stravinskij Bar (9 Via del Babuino; 39-06/3288-8830; hotelderussie.it; drinks for two $30) and recommends the pizza at Ristorante Al Passetto (14 Via Zanardelli N.; 39-06/6880-3696; dinner for two $68).

Italians have a word—sprezzatura—to indicate their belief that style must be unconscious and that talent must appear effortless. You have sprezzatura if you are naturally able to perform extraordinary deeds, come se niente fosse, as if there were nothing to it. The mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, for instance, has no difficulty being a skillful administrator and one of Italy's leading philosophers at the same time.

I had some early master classes in Italian style and sensibility. When I was 12 and traveling in Japan, the architect Giò Ponti placed a natural pearl in the palm of my hand—we were in the hall of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Ponti's daughter Lisa, who ran her father's architectural magazine Domus, had an elaborate set of white luggage that consisted of slightly angled boxes with satiny steel closures. I remember being impressed. Nanda Pivano, a writer and herald in Italy of the American Beat Generation, sent me hot-pink patent leather Mary Janes, knowing my feet were too big for Japanese shoes. Years later, when I was in boarding school in Florence, she sent me poems by Jerry Rubin and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Allen Ginsberg had sent her, to translate into Italian, accompanied by letters scented with Guerlain's Mitsouko. When I went to have lunch with the Pontis, the family myths were paraded: how Giò had put risotto on his head to amuse the grandchildren and how his glamorous wife, Giulia, had once brought back a suitcase full of potatoes from Venezuela to give her friends as souvenirs because she liked their shapes.

When I worked for Giorgio Armani in the '80s, his code word for style was grinta. It sounds, in Italian, a little bit like what an animal does to show power, baring its teeth or its claws. Armani was not interested in prettiness or even "elegance," but in a show of strength—grinta.