ROME.- French film star Gérard Depardieu repeatedly punched Rino Barillari, known as the “king of paparazzi,” on Tuesday at Harry’s Bar on the Via Veneto, the grand hotel and cafe-lined avenue that was a lively haunt for celebrity-hunting paparazzi decades ago, according to the photographer and a journalist who witnessed the altercation.

It could have been a scene straight out of “La Dolce Vita,” Federico Fellini’s early 1960s film that introduced the character of an annoying and eccentric photographer who hounded the movie stars who swelled the casts of Cinecittà film studios when Rome was known as “Hollywood on the Tiber.”

Seeing Depardieu, 75, and Barillari, 79, on the Via Veneto was like “a time machine,” said Gianni Riotta, a columnist for the newspaper La Repubblica who said he saw the attack while he was having coffee at Harry’s Bar.

Riotta said that Barillari had repeatedly been asked to stop taking photographs and that when he turned to leave he was followed into the street by a shouting woman who had been sitting with Depardieu. The actor reached the photographer “and hit him, hit him, hit him,” Riotta recalled, speaking in Italian.

“There was a lot of blood,” he said.

Riotta said he gave a witness statement to police when they arrived on the scene. It was unclear whether Barillari, who was taken by ambulance to a downtown hospital, would press charges.

Lawyers for Depardieu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Delphine Meillet, a lawyer for the woman who had been sitting with Depardieu, Magda Vavrusova, said in a statement that Barillari had “violently pushed” her, touching her chest with his arm. She said that when Depardieu intervened, he had “fallen and slid onto” the photographer. Vavrusova was taken to a hospital and planned to sue Barillari, the lawyer said.

“After everything that had happened, the photographer persisted in deluging them with photos,” Meillet said.

When Depardieu got into a vehicle after the altercation, Barillari “jumped in front of the car and kept on shooting,” Riotta said. It swerved to miss an unfazed Barillari, who photographed the car’s license plate. Then he dropped to the ground.

The altercation generated a new set of headlines about Depardieu, who last month was ordered to stand trial on criminal charges that he sexually assaulted two women during a 2021 film shoot in France, the latest in a growing number of accusations of sexual violence.

After a documentary that aired in France in December showed the actor making crude and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea, he was stripped of several international honors, and a likeness of him was removed from the Musée Grévin, a Paris wax museum.

Depardieu has denied any wrongdoing.

Barillari is also no stranger to controversy. When Italy’s contemporary art museum MAXXI dedicated a 2018 exhibit to the photographer’s six-decade career, it recorded 163 trips to the emergency room, 11 broken ribs, one stabbing and 76 smashed cameras, including stitches after a dust-up with actor Peter O’Toole.

The age of the cellphone had affected the work of the paparazzi, Barillari told an Italian paper at the time, adding that selfies ruin celebrities “because they never tell the truth.”

Barillari could not be reached for comment about Tuesday’s incident. But when he was interviewed on Rai 1, the Italian broadcaster’s main channel, he recalled some of the actors he had rubbed the wrong way, including Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor.

“They were ready to beat me up,” he said, sporting a white bandage above one cheek. But he was younger, he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.