In early 1973, a pair of young German twins—dark-haired, pale-skinned beauties who looked like Alpine forest sprites—found themselves on the beach at Sperlonga, the resort on the Tyrrhenian, south of Rome. The women had arrived in Italy the year before in a quest for meaning, beauty, freedom, experience, and adventure in all its forms, indulging in the wild mix of self-discovery and self-escape that typified the era. The sisters—as if touched by the counterculture gods—were already becoming the bohemian “It girls” of the Eternal City. Their names were Gisela and Jutta, and they were all of 23.

In Rome, they hobnobbed with filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and Roman Polanski, novelist Alberto Moravia, and artist Mario Schifano (who fell in love with Jutta). Fellini wanted to make a movie with them, but couldn’t find them. (They had no phone or fixed address—so bourgeois.) At night, they mixed with a mad array of characters on the margins, sometimes dangerously so. As Jutta would put it, “At lunchtime we had a classy lunch with Bertolucci; in the evening we sat with robbers in the street.”

And all the while they took photographs—both selfies and shots of everyone around them, the known and the unknown—and posed for countless more by the likes of Claudio Abate and Robert Freeman, who had shot the Beatles for the cover of Rubber Soul. In a way, they were Warholian creatures (in fact, the Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey was among their pals in Rome), although an ocean away from Warhol, living a life of perpetual performance. For the twins, the photographic image made existence not just a private experience but the gift of an indelible moment shared with the world.

They were Gisela and Jutta (soon to be known in their multifarious careers as Gisela Getty and Jutta Winkelmann), already becoming famous in Germany. And these kosmische Blumenkinder—“cosmic flower children”—made Italy their playground.

At Sperlonga, the sisters took a break from it all. They slept on the beach and gathered mussels for their scant meals. In this time of youthful exploration, “eating wasn’t important,” said Gisela, now 69, when I visited her in Munich recently. But there was one thing they ate on the beach that did alter them forever: LSD. Gisela told me this psychedelic experience was “the biggest moment” in their young lives. The twins tripping, staring at each other, melting into each other: “It was a moment of realization—reality really is love and the spirit. I saw Jutta and her amazing beauty and vice versa, you know?” The idea of these look-alikes staring at each other while on acid: it’s, well, trippy. “All boundaries kind of disappeared,” Gisela recalled. “I thought, Am I looking at her or am I her looking at me? Everything was just beautiful. We saw the light in everything. We felt we have to bring it into the world.”

They vowed to live their lives as “living theater”: existence itself would be art. And yet, what they couldn’t have anticipated was just how public that private world would soon become. In 1973, they would make a startling appearance on the global stage when Gisela’s boyfriend, J. Paul Getty III, the 16-year-old rebel grandson of a man considered to be the richest in the world, was kidnapped in Rome. The boy would be subjected to a five-month ordeal that famously included the severing of his right ear, which his kidnappers packaged and mailed to an Italian newspaper. Gisela and Paul would marry nine months after Paul’s release.

The kidnapping of Paul Getty has lately swung back onto the pop-culture radar, thanks to Ridley Scott’s 2017 film All the Money in the World and to Danny Boyle’s recently premiered 10-episode FX series, Trust. The two projects mine this outlandishly gruesome affair for style, suspense, and terror, helping themselves to generous “inspired by” liberties along the way. The extended Getty family—including Gisela and her two children, the actor and musician Balthazar Getty and the activist and documentary producer Anna Getty—have made a pact to not discuss these dramatizations with the media: the spotlight inevitably falls on scandal and tragedy. Yet the saga of Gisela and her twin sister, Jutta—virtually unknown in America—rekindles the strange glow of that bygone, free-spirited era. “At that time,” Gisela once said, “we felt like God’s children.”

Top, Gisela and Paul with children Balthazar (left) and Anna; Bottom, David Blue, Lainie Kazan, Bob Dylan, Robert De Niro, Sally Kirkland, Ronee Blakley, and Gisela at the Roxy, in Hollywood, 1976. Top, by Nancy Moran/Corbis/Getty Images; Bottom, by Brad Elterman.

I met up with Gisela in a tiny jewel box of an Italian bistro in Schwabing, Munich’s version of the West Village, where she’s kept one apartment or another since the early 1990s. It was hard not to notice the many eyeballs in the room straying her way: she is conspicuous, vaguely mystical, with a drizzle of white hair, eyes that retain a coal-black sparkle, Pradas on her feet. More to the point: she is known here. She is one of Die Zwillinge—the twins. Gisela and Jutta are still countercultural icons in Germany, a duo who lived large and whose exploits, from Munich to Rome to Los Angeles, have the capacity to provoke astonishment, pride, wonderment, head-shaking, eye-rolling. They’re the subjects and authors of books and photo exhibitions and documentaries, of newspaper interviews and profiles. They’ve worked as filmmakers, photographers, journalists, actresses.