According to a biographer, Fellini found school "exasperating" and, in one year, had 67 absences. Deciding on a career as a caricaturist and gag writer, Fellini travelled to Florence in 1938, where he published his first cartoon in the weekly 420. His first humorous article appeared in the "Postcards to Our Readers" section of Milan's Domenica del Corriere. In 1937, Fellini opened Febo, a portrait shop in Rimini, with the painter Demos Bonini. It seems to me that I have invented almost everything: childhood, character, nostalgias, dreams, memories, for the pleasure of being able to recount them. To say that my films are autobiographical is an overly facile liquidation, a hasty classification. It is not memory that dominates my films.
The sea creature found on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita (1960) has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in 1934.Īlthough Fellini adapted key events from his childhood and adolescence in films such as I Vitelloni (1953), 8 + 1⁄ 2 (1963), and Amarcord (1973), he insisted that such autobiographical memories were inventions: He visited Rome with his parents for the first time in 1933, the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner SS Rex (which is shown in Amarcord). In Mussolini's Italy, Fellini and Riccardo became members of the Avanguardista, the compulsory Fascist youth group for males. Įnrolled at the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare in 1929, he made friends with Luigi Titta Benzi, later a prominent Rimini lawyer (and the model for young Titta in Amarcord (1973)). Guido Brignone's Maciste all'Inferno (1926), the first film he saw, would mark him in ways linked to Dante and the cinema throughout his entire career. (Opper's Happy Hooligan would provide the visual inspiration for Gelsomina in Fellini's 1954 film La Strada McCay's Little Nemo would directly influence his 1980 film City of Women.) In 1926, he discovered the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown and the movies. An attentive student, he spent his leisure time drawing, staging puppet shows and reading Il corriere dei piccoli, the popular children's magazine that reproduced traditional American cartoons by Winsor McCay, George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper. In 1924, Fellini started primary school in an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, attending the Carlo Tonni public school two years later. Fellini had two siblings, Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later. Despite her family's vehement disapproval, she had eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. On 25 January, at the San Nicolò church he was baptized Federico Domenico Marcello Fellini.
He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI ( Italian: 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness.