Three dancers in red - Valentino red - floated like puppets on a string in front of the Colosseum. As their shadows flickered over the ancient stones, a giant balloon, celebrating Valentino's 45 fashion years, drifted by and a golden shower of fireworks exploded.
Let the fantastic festivities begin!
"La Dolce Vita" - with the soundtrack of Fellini's iconic 1960 movie kicking off Valentino's couture show - was the spirit of the Roman weekend. The designer had come back from Paris to his home city and he embraced it with a light spirit and deep opulence.
And did Valentino paint the town red! Vestals in scarlet dresses stretched their golden mannequin arms towards the Ara Pacis, or peace altar - as the dramatic mise-en-scène of a retrospective exhibition. Fresh and spirited, it is viewed in streaming sunlight through the modernist class box of the architect Richard Meier's controversial museum.
"I did all these dresses and they are like children for me," said Valentino, 75, looking at the twin groups of 33 red dresses spanning 40 years.
"I always believed so much in elegance and femininity," he said. "They could all be worn today - and that makes me very proud."
Red was the hue for the celebrity events - and especially for the Saturday night red carpet parade through the soft dusk of the Borghese gardens. Scarlet dresses shone out like beacons on Claudia Schiffer, with Valentino's signature bows pert over her bare navel; or on the Texan supersocialite Lynn Wyatt in a 25-year-old vintage gown.
The boldest colors were eclipsed by the garnet glow of Caravaggio's paintings on the palazzo walls. But once inside the vast chinoiserie dinner tent, Sienna Miller wowed the crowd with scarlet lips to match her dress. She sat on Mario Testino's lap, while the uber-photographer flashed away. Click! Mick Jagger; Click! Eva Mendez; Maggie Cheung; Tom Ford; Rupert Everett. And, this being a "very Valentino" event, the royals: Princess Caroline of Hanover (in her favorite Chanel) and Marie Chantal of Greece, gorgeous as a crimped-hair 1930s vamp - the better to fit with the Shanghai scenario. Like the chalk white Doric columns circling Temple of Venus the previous night, the fantasy palm-tree-and-mirrors set was an installation by the cinéaste Dante Ferretti.
"This kind of moment is so important - for us and for Rome," said Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino's rock and alter ego, who worked with Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, and with the Culture Ministry to make the events happen.
The couture show was less theatrical, but, as Elizabeth Hurley put it, "filled with love." Waves of impeccable clothes, the ultimate in couture perfection and grace, broke over the runway. The show, held in the Santo Spirito complex a stone's throw from the Vatican, had a floor-to-ceiling display of framed photographs of the designer's past and present.
Valentino wiped away tears when the audience - including the fellow designers Giorgio Armani, Diane Von Furstenberg, Carolina Herrera, Karl Lagerfeld, Donatella Versace and Zac Posen - gave him a standing ovation. Then he embraced Giammetti, whom he first met in 1960 in a café on Rome's Via Veneto.
"It was very emotional," said Princess Firyal of Jordan, picking out a gold "princess" dress - a gleaming column - while Schiffer admitted that it was "hard not to cry."
Valentino's best beloved clients have become his extended family with new generations of Brandolinis and both the princesses Marie Chantal and Caroline bringing along their daughters. There were also poignant memories.
"I guess it was my sister's wedding dress, when I first knew Valentino" said Lee Radziwill, referring to the girlish gown made for Jacqueline Kennedy's Greek island marriage to Aristotle Onassis in 1968.
Farah Dibah, remembering the beige wool Valentino coat with sable collar in which, as wife of the former Shah of Iran, she had fled her country in 1979, said, "It was the most terrible day of my life - but I try to look forward."
That coat is in the exhibition among a line-up of celebrity outfits on canvas dressmaker's dummies, each identified by an embroidered name as "Jennifer Lopez," "Gwyneth Paltrow" or "Julia Roberts." while a miniscreen shows virtual images of them picking up or attending an Oscar in a Val gown.
The real live celebrities (even if Paltrow's broken knee kept her at home) included Uma Thurman, slender as a lily in her white dress; Sarah Jessica Parker, sweet in silver, embracing her haute cobbler hero Manolo Blahnik; the incorrigible Joan Collins, bosoms ahoy! in scarlet; and the movie legend Gina Lollobrigida, who turned 80 on the Fourth of July, with lollipops of emeralds dangling over a red lace dress designed for last year's aborted wedding to a man half her age.
"I very wisely got rid of the future husband and kept the dress," she said.
Many of Valentino's staff members were in tears at the idea that this could be . . . might be . . . the maestro's last couture show. Backstage, the seamstresses, chorusing their 27, 31 or 40 years service, claimed that "if you join Valentino, you never leave
" - and that their master surely would carry on.
"Only Valentino's workers can take 40 meters of chiffon and make that look like thistledown," said Hamish Bowles, who helped select the exhibition dresses. Technical marvels from the new collection included a sugar pink gown with organza unfolding like the pages of a book.
There were many reminiscences, publicly from Giammetti, as he and Valentino clinked champagne glasses on stage before the surprise performer Annie Lennox sang "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" and guests invaded the dance floor.
Naty Abascal, who met Valentino as a 17-year-old Spanish model, recalled wild days in New York in the 1970s and Valentino's first, tiny red and white speed boat before his current floating palace. Jacqueline de Ribes remembered Valentino as the talented Italian sketcher at Jean Desses in Paris who helped her design, when they were both 22 years old, a collection for the American designer Oleg Cassini.
In the exhibition, conceived by Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda, are Valentino's sketches from the 1950s. He drew elongated silver screen beauties, with precise lines for the atelier, while now, half a century on, there are just a few brief squiggles on a sketch pad.
A wall of chronological dresses in the excellently conceived exhibit defines Valentino's fashion codes: one-shoulder drapes, bows, lace, beautiful backs. They were developed so early that black roses caged under a tulle skirt in the new collection can be traced back to 1959.
The first evening's alfresco elegance above the Colosseum was the most exquisite experience for its ethereal magic. But the seated dinner summed up Valentino's quest for perfection in the exact shade of pale green plates; in the food served in puff pastry pots with 'V' worked into the lid; and in the pink orchids and purple bougainvillea spilling with the abundance of a Roman garden.
Yet there was a frisson of melancholy, as though this might be the last sweet draught of La Dolce Vita - the final party on a princely scale done with absolute taste and a passion for beauty.
Viva Valentino! Or as Firyal said at the Sunday brunch in the Villa Medici, looking out over the domed cupolas and rosy rooftops of the eternal city: "We'll all be back for the 50th. This can't be the end!"
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