The Italian release of James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” is prompting local media to claim that, unlike in the movie, Dylan traveled to Italy in 1962 in pursuit of Suze Rotolo — named Sylvie Russo in the film and played by Elle Fanning — who had left New York to study abroad.
In 1962, Rotolo left the Greenwich Village apartment where she had been living with Dylan and arrived with her mother in Perugia, where she attended the Italian city’s famed University for Foreigners. Incidentally, it’s the same college Amanda Knox attended in 2007.
The Perugia institution has retrieved from its archives an enrollment document in the name of 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 gathered testimony that one night in 1962 “a very young man emerged from 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 a different 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 union organizer, and his wife, Mary, an editor and columnist for the American edition of communist Italian newspaper L’Unità.
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Rotolo’s separation from Dylan, who didn’t want her to go to Italy, is believed to have inspired the songs “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.”
Following her return from Perugia, Rotolo famously appeared 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 drifted, as is shown in the film, Rotolo went back to Italy and in 1970 married Enzo Bartoccioli, an Italian filmmaker whom she had met while a student in Perugia.
Rotolo, who went on to become an artist and teacher at the 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.