Chapter 1The Fulgor

Foreword

He lied about his childhood for fifty years, and the lie is where any account of him has to begin, because it was not incidental to the work. It was the same faculty.

The famous invention is the circus: the story that he ran away from Rimini as a boy and travelled for a season with a travelling show. Everyone who writes about him repeats it, usually with an age attached — seven, eleven, twelve. What is striking, when you go looking, is that the story has no first appearance. No interview, no memoir and no reference work reachable for this book records a date on which he told it, an age he gave, or a company he named. It circulates without a source, which is how a great deal about him circulates. The most the scholarly record will say is that in 1926 he encountered a circus in Rimini and never got over it.

That is a fair description of most of what is loved about his early life, and it presents anyone writing about him with a decision that determines the book.

One option is to distrust every anecdote and build the account only from what a document establishes. That produces something accurate and lifeless, and it also gets him wrong, because he made films the way he made his biography — out of remembered images reorganised into a shape more useful than the order in which they arrived. The other option is to take his version, which most of the popular literature has done, and end up transcribing a performance.

What this book does instead is keep two registers visibly apart. Where something is established, it is stated. Where it comes from Fellini, it is attributed to Fellini, with the date and the occasion where those are known. And where the record does not settle a thing at all — which happens more often than the confident literature admits — the book says so on the page rather than quietly choosing the version that reads better.

There is a good deal of that. The venue of his wedding on 30 October 1943 is established by no source consulted for this book, in five languages. His infant son lived eleven days, and the day the child died is given three different ways. His brother Riccardo's birth and death days are each given two ways, in encyclopaedias that cite nothing. Il bidone has six running times in circulation and no canonical one, because the film was cut after Venice and went out in whatever length each territory received. What happened to him at a lunch in Rome on 17 October 1993 is told five ways, and those accounts are not variants of one story but different events. None of this is hidden here, and some of it is the most interesting material in the book.

The life underneath is remarkable enough without assistance. Rimini in 1920, the eldest of three, the son of a travelling salesman. Rome at nineteen, drawing gags for a satirical paper that came out twice a week. A screenwriting apprenticeship on two of the founding films of neorealism, at twenty-five, in a country that had just been destroyed. Then the run: La Strada, Le notti di Cabiria, La dolce vita, and 8½ — a film about a director who cannot make a film, usually read as an account of creative paralysis and argued here to be something harder and better than that.

Three things about the shape of this book.

It is weighted towards the films. Seventeen of its twenty-four chapters are about pictures he made, and the ones usually left out are here. Il bidone, which is where the mid-fifties actually becomes interesting. I clowns and Fellini: A Director's Notebook, both made for television and both routinely dropped from accounts of him. Il viaggio di G. Mastorna, the film he never made and never stopped carrying. And the three commercials he directed at the end — for Campari, for Barilla, and the Banca di Roma trilogy of 1992 — which were the last things he shot.

The marriage is not a subplot. Giulietta Masina was a major screen actor for whom he wrote two of the great performances of postwar cinema, and the professional partnership and the personal one cannot be separated. The chapter concerning their son is short because the record is short, and it is in the book because everything afterwards happened to two people who had been through it.

The late films get their proper weight. The standard account treats everything after Amarcord as decline. Some of it is weaker. Some of it is as inventive as anything he made and was received badly by critics who had decided in advance what a Fellini film was. The reception history runs alongside the films throughout, because in his case the two cannot be told apart.

On sources. This book was written from the published record: reference works and encyclopaedias in several languages, published filmographies, film-historical writing, contemporary reviews as that literature quotes them, awards records including the Academy's own published transcripts, and the recollections of his collaborators as those have appeared in print. No interviews were conducted for it and no archive was read for it. Where the wording of a document is the evidence, this book says whether it has seen the document.

His name became an adjective, which happens to very few people and never means what they meant. Felliniesque has come to signify grotesque excess and a parade of eccentrics. What he was doing, most of the time, was assembling remembered faces from a small Adriatic town into an argument about memory.

He died on 31 October 1993, the day after his fiftieth wedding anniversary. Giulietta Masina died the following March.

Chapter 1 · The Fulgor

Everyone knows the story. The boy from the seaside town runs away with a travelling circus, is found and brought home, and grows up to make films full of ringmasters, tumblers and brass bands. It is the neatest origin story any director has had, because it explains everything and asks nothing. The Encyclopedia of World Biography gives it in a single flat sentence — "At the age of 12 he ran away from home to join a traveling circus" — and attaches no source to it at all. Told aloud, the story usually makes him seven or eight rather than twelve.

The trouble is that nothing in the record consulted for this book dates a single telling of it. Neither the English nor the Italian encyclopaedia article on Federico Fellini carries the runaway at all; a full-text search of either turns up nothing. Treccani's Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani omits it, and so does the Fellini Museum in Rimini, which has every commercial reason to tell the life colourfully. What the English article does carry, cited to Frank Burke and Marguerite Waller's Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives (2003), is something quieter and differently shaped: that in 1926 he discovered the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown, and the movies. A discovery, not a flight. Whether Pierino the Clown was a performer, a company or a stock character could not be established here either.

So the chapter that ought to open with a boy on the road opens instead with a gap, and the gap is the better subject. The story is not disproved — no source reached here disproves it, and unverified is not the same as untrue. It is that nobody consulted can say when Fellini first told it, in what interview or book, or which age he gave. Tullio Kezich's full-length life, Federico: Fellini, la vita e i film (2002), is where the question would be settled, and it has not been opened for this account. Until it is, the honest sentence is the one that admits the hole: the most famous fact about Fellini's childhood has no first telling on record.

That is a strange thing to say about a man who talked to journalists for fifty years — until you know what he thought about the enterprise. In the interviews Damian Pettigrew filmed in his last years, released in 2002 as Fellini: Sono un gran bugiardo, he put it as plainly as it can be put: Sono un bugiardo nato. Per me le cose più vere sono quelle che ho inventato. I am a born liar. For me the truest things are the ones I invented. Elsewhere — the wording circulates with no date and no publication attached, so it should be read as something Fellini said rather than something he said on a given afternoon — he refused the autobiographical reading of his films outright, on the grounds that he had invented almost everything: childhood, character, nostalgias, dreams and memories, for the pleasure of being able to recount them. The people who worked beside him agreed. The screenwriters Tullio Pinelli and Bernardino Zapponi, the cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno and the designer Dante Ferretti all reported that many of the memories he described had been imagined.

He was born on 20 January 1920 in Rimini, then a town in the province of Forlì. Rimini did not become a provincial capital until 1992, so any account that places the childhood in "the province of Rimini" is anachronistic by seventy years. Four independent sources agree on the birth date. One — an article by Beppe Autuori in the Rimini paper Il Ponte, 30 October 2017, which is also what the English encyclopaedia article leans on here — adds the hour and the address: nine in the evening, in the house at what is now via Dardanelli 10. He was baptised five days later at the church of San Nicolò, with the names Federico Domenico Marcello. The same article notes an oddity in the baptismal register: the father is entered there as Giuseppe, not Urbano.

Urbano Fellini (1894–1956) came from a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders at Gambettola, a few miles inland. He went to Rome in 1915 as a baker's apprentice — English sources name the Pantanella pasta factory; Treccani confirms only the apprenticeship — and came back north as a travelling salesman and wholesale vendor in liquor, confectionery and groceries. The day, place and cause of his death in 1956 were not established for this book; the year is all three sources give. Ida Barbiani (1896–1984) was a Roman, from a bourgeois Catholic merchant family of the Esquilino, and was a housewife all her life. The day and place of her death in 1984 are likewise unestablished here. Two of the four dates in the parents' lives are missing, which sets a limit worth registering early: this book cannot stage the father's funeral, because it cannot date it.

The marriage is the family's engine and rests on a single source. English Wikipedia, citing Hollis Alpert's Fellini: A Life (1988), has Ida eloping with Urbano in 1917 against the vehement disapproval of her family, to live in his parents' house at Gambettola; a civil marriage followed in 1918 and a religious ceremony at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year after that. A Roman girl marrying a Romagnol commercial traveller against her people's wishes explains a good deal about a household in which Rome was always the elsewhere — but it stands on Alpert alone.

There were two other children. Riccardo Fellini was born in Rimini in February 1921. The day is contested — one encyclopaedia gives the 21st, another the 27th, and the German edition pushes the year to 1922 — and since nothing turns on it, this book writes February 1921 and leaves it there. He became an actor in some twenty films and a documentary director for RAI, directed one feature, Storie sulla sabbia (1963), and played a character called Riccardo in his brother's I vitelloni (1953). He died in Rome in March 1991, two years and seven months before Federico; that day is contested too. Maria Maddalena Fellini was born on 7 October 1929 and died in Rimini on 21 May 2004. Her dates need care because they are commonly got wrong: the main English article on her brother gives 1929–2002, and Treccani calls the sister Margherita. Both are errors. She married Giorgio Fabbri and, in 1993, founded the Fondazione Fellini with the Comune di Rimini and the region.

Around 1930, on the evidence of the parish Registro delle Anime, which itself hedges the year, the family moved to via Dante. The physical Rimini of this chapter has to be described in the past tense and meant: the house in via Dardanelli was destroyed when the town was bombed in 1943–44, and the building standing on the spot today was put up in 1953–54 on the original foundations.

The town itself was not a fishing village that tourism later found. Its first bathing establishment opened on 30 July 1843 and is described as the oldest on the Adriatic, so by the time Fellini was born the place was eighty years into its second career, and growing: the recorded population was 47,026 in 1921 and 57,030 in 1931, reaching 69,036 in 1941. Those figures rest on one table, which carries no entry for 1936, so the safe description of the Rimini of the mid-thirties is a town of some fifty to sixty thousand, and no more precise.

Its grandest building stood on the sea front. The Grand Hotel was inaugurated on 1 July 1908 to a design by the Swiss architect Paolito Somazzi, in Liberty style, with two hundred rooms. It had two domes. On 14 July 1920 a fire destroyed them, and a seventeen-year-old boy scout, Anacleto Ricci, died helping to get the guests out. The domes were never rebuilt.

Fellini was not yet six months old. The domed, exotic, faintly Nordic silhouette he evoked all his life — the English article on the hotel reports him recalling it as a place of crimes, kidnappings and nights of mad love — belonged to a building he could not have seen. It had burned before he could walk. This is the cleanest small demonstration of what the man did with a town: the emotional accuracy is not in question, and the object is not there. When he put the Grand Hotel on screen in Amarcord fifty years later, he did not shoot the building in Rimini. He had it built at Cinecittà.

One caution. The English article on the hotel says Fellini worked there as a caricaturist in his youth; nothing else consulted repeats it, and the Fellini Museum attributes his commissioned star portraits to the manager of the Cinema Fulgor. Two claims about two buildings, not one anecdote about a boy sketching hotel guests.

The Fulgor is the room this chapter is named for, and it too has to be described carefully. It opened on 5 November 1914 in Palazzo Valloni, an eighteenth-century building on Corso d'Augusto whose main façade was designed by Giuseppe Valadier. It was founded by a woman, Ida Ravulli Massa in Soave, described as an enterprising figure in her thirties, and the first programme was Histoire d'un Pierrot, starring Francesca Bertini, accompanied by a live orchestra. That opening is a gift to any writer, and it should be taken with its provenance visible: it rests on a single outlet, the Rimini news site Chiamami Città, in two separate articles, and two articles from one newsroom are one witness. The street number could not be confirmed by any source reached; the frequently cited Corso d'Augusto 162 is not printed here.

In 1926, at the Fulgor, Fellini saw his first film. It was Maciste all'inferno, directed by Guido Brignone (1886–1959) for Fert-Pittaluga, with Bartolomeo Pagano (1878–1947), the Genoese docker who had become the strongman of Italian silent cinema, as Maciste. The film's year is itself disputed — English sources date it 1925, Italian sources 1926 — but its censorship visa, number 20529, is dated 31 March 1926, which makes 1926 the safer date for an Italian screening. Fellini was six.

The Fellini Museum states the occasion flatly as fact; Fellini's own version supplies the weather. In an undated recollection, quoted on the Italian encyclopaedia page for the film, he said he saw it in his father's arms, standing in a great crush of people, his father's overcoat soaked through because it was raining outside: L'ho visto in braccio a mio padre in piedi tra una gran calca di gente con il cappotto inzuppato d'acqua perché fuori pioveva. Here, unusually, the myth and the record do not conflict. The film exists, the cinema exists, the date is corroborated, and the rain and the wet overcoat are his. That is the right way round for a reader to hold the rest of this chapter: the frame documented, the texture his.

There is one documented transaction between the boy and that cinema. The Fellini Museum — a single source, though the official museum in his own town — says the manager of the Fulgor commissioned him to draw portraits of film stars to advertise the programme. The widely repeated embellishment that he was paid in free tickets is not in that source and is not repeated here. The museum's version is enough: before he was anything else, he was a boy who could draw well enough to be hired by a cinema.

He gave his own gloss on the same appetite — charming, unverifiable, an image he offered of himself rather than a fact about a bed. He said he had given the four bedposts of his bed the names of Rimini's four cinemas and invented stories from them before sleep, in imitation of Little Nemo. The names of the cinemas are not in the source, and this book does not supply them. Winsor McCay (1869–1934), the author of Little Nemo in Slumberland, was his declared favourite draughtsman, read in the children's weekly Corriere dei Piccoli, which reprinted American strips by McCay, George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper. Little Nemo ran in America from 1905 to 1914 and again from 1924 to 1927, so what a boy in Rimini read in the later 1920s was reprinted material arriving years late.

One more caution about the Fulgor: the cinema a visitor walks into today is not the room in which a six-year-old watched Maciste go to hell. It was renovated between 2013 and 2018, and from 2016 Dante Ferretti — one of the collaborators who said Fellini imagined his memories — designed its scheme in wood and marble, in the style of a Hollywood picture palace of the 1930s and 1940s. It reopened on 20 January 2018, Fellini's birthday, and the date was not an accident. The town has built, at public expense, a beautiful set representing the place where the boy learned to love sets.

The schooling is thin, and the little that survives is unflattering. In 1924 he began primary school at an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo, and about two years later transferred to the Carlo Tonini public school. He then went to the Ginnasio-Liceo classico Giulio Cesare, in Palazzo Buonadrata. The start year is contested — the English article says 1929, the Italian 1930 to 1938, Treccani no years at all — so this book says at the turn of the 1930s and declines to choose. Kezich records that he found school exasperating and accumulated sixty-seven absences in a single year. He failed his military culture examination. He took his diploma in 1939, on the authority of a university thesis that could not be reached for this book.

In 1929 he became friends with Luigi "Titta" Benzi, later a prominent Rimini lawyer, who would be the model for the boy Titta in Amarcord and stayed close to him for life. Benzi is the person this chapter most wants to put in a room, and the person it can say least about. He has no encyclopaedia article in either language, and neither his birth nor his death date could be established here. One hard fact stands: he was filmed for Pettigrew's documentary in 2002, so he outlived Fellini by at least nine years. He will be named in this book and never dated, never aged, and never buried.

The politics of the childhood are not decorative and should not be tidied away. The Fascio riminese di combattimento was founded in 1921, eleven months after Fellini was born. On the night of 28 October 1922, coinciding with the March on Rome, four hundred squadristi occupied Rimini and seized the municipal buildings; he was two. The Opera Nazionale Balilla was established by law on 3 April 1926 and sorted the country's boys into Figli della Lupa from six to eight, Balilla from eight to fourteen and Avanguardisti from fourteen to eighteen; on 27 October 1937 it was absorbed into the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio. Fellini and his brother Riccardo were both enrolled in the Avanguardisti. By the arithmetic of the age bands, Federico would have been a Balilla from around 1928 and an Avanguardista from about 1934 until 1938, Riccardo roughly a year behind.

Two qualifications matter. Membership became compulsory only after 1937, and enrolment across Italy never exceeded about half the country's young, so it is wrong to picture every boy in Rimini in uniform or to write the brothers' membership as forced on them from the start. And the record is silent on what any of it meant to him. A failed military culture examination and an Avanguardista's uniform sit oddly together; no source consulted here says how they sat in the same adolescent.

The regime was rebuilding the town while he was in it: the Marecchia diversion channel completed in 1931, the lungomare begun in 1935, the airport upgraded in 1938 and turned in 1939 into a military aviation base and a stop on the Rome–Venice air route. It pushed mass seaside tourism hard as well, with hotels, pensioni, villini and the colonie marine in the outlying districts — the enormous children's holiday camps that are still the great fascist buildings of the Romagna coast, and were part of the visual furniture of his adolescence. All of it rests on one source.

One object out of that decade shows the method whole. The liner Rex was launched on 1 August 1931 and made her maiden voyage from Genoa to New York on 27 September 1932; she held the Blue Riband from 10 August 1933 to 3 June 1935, at an average of 28.92 knots. Two corrections follow. The English article on Fellini dates his first visit to Rome, with his parents, to 1933 and calls it the year of the Rex's maiden voyage; it was not — that was the previous September, and August 1933 was the Blue Riband. And the ship sailed only between Genoa and New York. She never entered the Adriatic. The sequence in Amarcord in which the whole town rows out at night to watch her pass is not a distorted memory but an event that could not have occurred, staged so that an audience would feel what the regime's spectacle felt like from a small town — which it does, which is why nobody checks. The same caution applies to the giant fish said to have been stranded on the Rimini beach in a storm in 1934 and offered as the origin of the sea creature at the end of La Dolce Vita: one uncited source, and his account rather than weather.

None of that is a defect of memory. It is a working method, arrived at early and never abandoned, and it is why the films are unmistakable at ten seconds' distance. Fellini did not photograph the world he had seen; he built the version that carried the feeling, and photographed that. The cost is that his biography has to be assembled against him.

What he actually did with his adolescence was draw. In 1937, aged seventeen, he is said to have opened a portrait shop called Febo in Rimini with the painter Demos Bonini — a claim that appears in no source consulted here except the English encyclopaedia article, where it is uncited, and that the Italian article, Treccani and the Fellini Museum all omit. Bonini has no dates on record, and the often-repeated detail that the two signed their joint work "Fellas" could not be verified anywhere and is not used. On 6 February 1938 the first of about fifteen cartoons appeared in the "Cartoline del pubblico" section of Milan's La Domenica del Corriere; he had turned eighteen seventeen days earlier. Later that year he went to Florence, and the Nerbini weekly Il 420 — published every week from 1914 to 1943 and named after a German artillery piece — began carrying his cartoons and short humorous columns, and went on doing so until the end of 1939. The Italian article on the paper calls it the first magazine to print him, which the dates allow only if the Milan items of February are set aside as reader submissions rather than commissioned work — a distinction nothing consulted here actually draws. Which of the two came first is not in question. One reference work has him working on Nerbini's L'Avventuroso in the same season, but only one, and how long he stayed is not established.

He gave his own account of those years in Quattro film (Einaudi, 1974), the volume Italo Calvino prefaced with "Autobiografia di uno spettatore": that between 1936 and 1939 he slipped out of the house without his parents' permission to get into the cinemas of the town, and that at that age he thought of himself not as a future director but as something between a writer and an illustrator. On this one, unusually, his self-account and the record match at every point — Treccani on the early talent for caricature, the Milan weekly in February 1938, Il 420 through 1938 and 1939, the Fulgor's manager commissioning film stars. He remained a professional cartoonist until 1948, and as a director went on drawing the scenes of his films as a matter of routine for the rest of his life.

Then he left, and the leaving is the last place the myth has to be taken apart. The date is genuinely unsettled: the Italian article gives 4 January 1939, with the address he lodged at, via Albalonga 13, outside Porta San Giovanni; another reference work says the spring of 1939; the English article dates only the law-school enrolment, to September 1939. The three can be reconciled — arrive in January, enrol in September — but the reconciliation is inference, so this book says the first months of 1939. What is not in doubt is the shape of the journey. His mother and his brother and sister went with him. It was a family relocation to Ida Barbiani's native city, twenty-two years after she had left it to marry, and not a boy running off in the dark.

He enrolled in the law faculty in September 1939 to please his parents and never sat an examination; Alpert found no record of his ever having attended a class. His debut in Marc'Aurelio came in April 1939. The magazine had been founded on 14 March 1931 by Oberdan Cotone and Vito De Bellis and came out twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays — not fortnightly, whatever the English word "biweekly" suggests — and it employed him steadily until 1942, for columns and drawings collected in 2004 as Racconti umoristici. That is the first job, and it is a writing job.

The rest of the town's story he did not see. Rimini was among the most heavily destroyed Italian cities of the Second World War: 11,510 air missions during Operation Olive, more than eighty per cent of it razed by German estimate, reckoned second only to Montecassino. The house he was born in went with it. So when he filmed his own departure, in I vitelloni in 1953 — a picture conceived for Pescara, then set in Rimini, then shot between December 1952 and January 1953 in Florence, Viterbo, Ostia and Rome — there was nothing left to go back to, and he did not go. He dubbed Moraldo's farewell line from the train himself, to mark the autobiographical charge of it. Twenty years later he rebuilt the town at Cinecittà for Amarcord, shooting from January to June 1973 on reconstructed 1930s Rimini sets, with exteriors at Anzio, Ostia Antica and Fiumicino. Nothing was shot in or near Rimini.

And the circus? The one time Fellini put his childhood circus on a screen, in the prologue to I clowns — broadcast by RAI on Christmas night 1970 in black and white, and in cinemas in colour within days — he filmed it like this: a boy is woken in the night by noises, goes to his bedroom window, and sees the enormous tent going up. He watches. He is fascinated, and then he is frightened. He does not go with them. It is a memory of looking out of a window at something arriving — which is a different story from running away, and a truer one about a man who spent his life building the tent himself.