The famous photographer from Rome Rino Barillari denounced this Tuesday that the French actor Gerard Depardieu attacked him with several punches and knocked him to the ground when he tried to take some photos while he was in the company of a woman and two other people on a terrace of a well-known restaurant on Via Veneto in the Italian capital.

Barillari, who is 79 years old and is known as “the king of the paparazzi“, nickname given to him by the film director Federico Fellini, had to go to the emergency room due to his injuries and announced that he would file a complaint with the Police, according to what he told some media.

“I had intercepted him on Via Veneto together with a woman, I approached him to take some photos, what else could I have done? when she ran towards me like a fury“, explained Barillari who approached the famous Harrys’s Bar on the street known for ‘Dolce Vita’.

The woman, according to the photographer, kicked him several times to make him move away and desist, but then the actor arrived who threw some ice at him and then punched him three times in the face, knocking him to the ground. The photographer was assisted by the owner of the place, Piero Lepore, who was the first to ask for help.

“My head hurts, I’m not 15 anymore, I’m 79. When I photographed them at the table, obviously without them seeing me, I didn’t imagine how everything would end,” he added. This is not the first time that Barillari, the photographer who captured the ‘Dolce Vita’ period in the 60s, ends up in the hospital.

In the balance of his more than six decades of career, he includes 200 times in the emergency room, 11 broken ribs, a stab wound and 76 destroyed cameras. Gérard Depardieu adds to his list of “encounters”, which he has also had with Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Marlon Brando or Charles Aznavour, almost always in the restaurants and hotels on Via Veneto.