However important Rimini, Gambettola, and the Romagna were to Fellini's nostalgic memories of his childhood, there were other more formative cultural influences taking place there that would begin to shape his early career. Gambettola seems to have been a breeding ground for characters with diminished mental capacities but with special emotional qualities, and in La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990), Fellini's last film, he creates another Gelsomina-like figure (Ivo) who seems to be a half-wit but who enjoys an emotional depth that normal characters cannot fathom or imitate.5 The famous harem sequence of 8I/2 where a young Guido is bathed in wine vats before being sent to bed is only one of the many scenes from Fellini's cinema that recall his childhood past in Gambettola. The mysterious capacity of many of Fellini's film characters (in particular, Gelsomina of La strada) to enjoy a special relationship with nature surrounding them was directly inspired by Fellini's childhood visits to his grandmother's home.
There Fellini visited his grandmother, encountered the typical kind of eccentric figures that rural life in Italy has always spawned, including a frightening castrator of pigs, numerous gypsies, witches, and various itinerant workers. Fellini regularly was taken to the tiny town of Gambettola in the inland area of Romagna. Other provincial influences were also subtly at work during Fellini's early childhood. Even the distant destination of the grand metropolis of Rome toward which all Fellini's anxious provincials are drawn, a theme that figures prominently in so many of his films and particularly in La dolce vita or Roma (Fellini's Roma, 1972), must always be read against the background of Rimini.4 The dream palace of Rimini's Grand Hotel that figures prominently in Amarcord as the locus of the frustrated sexual desires of the entire male population of Rimini stands as one of the most unforgettable images in all of Fellini's works. The sleepy provincial atmosphere of Rimini was re-created by him for I vitelloni (1953) on the opposite side of Italy at Ostia, Rome's ancient seaport. a dimension of my memory (among other things an invented, adulterated, second-hand sort of memory) on which I have speculated so much that it has produced a kind of embarrassment in me."3 During the entire course of Fellini's career, the director's recollections of his childhood and his adolescence would serve him as an almost inexhaustible source of fertile ideas for his films. In an essay entitled "Il mio paese," first published with a beautiful photo album of scenes from his native city and translated into English as "Rimini, My Home Town," Fellini looked back at his origins and concluded that in his life, Rimini represented not an objective fact but, rather, "a dimension of my memory, and nothing more.
Like all vacation towns, Rimini enjoyed a lazy, cyclic existence that alternated between frenetic activity during the tourist season and endless boredom afterward. Fellini himself was born on 20 January 1920 in Rimini, a small town on the Adriatic coast of Italy in a location known best as a watering hole for rich foreign tourists who would frequent the Grand Hotel and other beach establishments during the tourist season, then abandon the sleepy city to its provincial rhythms. Fellini was part of a relatively small family by Italian standards of the period:Ī younger brother Riccardo was born in 1921, followed by his sister Maddalena in 1929. His parents, Ida Barbiani (a housewife) and Urbano Fellini (a traveling salesman) were of no great distinction in terms of wealth or birth.
Nothing in Fellini's early life or background would lead the casual observer to predict the heights to which his fame would reach.