Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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family

The role of the family in Italy has always been judged ambivalently. In the late 1950s the

American sociologist Edward Banfield notoriously criticized the ‘amoral familism’ he

noted amongst peasants in the South, their inability to transcend their immediate interests

for the wider good of the community. Other sociologists and anthropologists have

similarly regarded the traditional, individualistic structures of the Italian family as

inimical to social and economic progress. Catholic ideology in the new united Italy also

set the family in opposition to the collective, a view hardly surprising given parlous

church-state relations. Later, the family was, in the Catholic view, to be the bulwark

against the rising tide of communism.

The traditional nature of the family in Italy was radically transformed in the postwar

period by a series of economic and cultural developments. Family structures already

modified and broken up first by the war and then by the rapidly increasing

industrialization, urbanization and emigration associated with the so-called economic

miracle, were further unsettled by economic and political developments. The situation,

however, was startlingly different across the country: families in the South, often

deprived of their main breadwinner, depended on money sent from the North or abroad

for survival, while in the North competition from migrant male workers led to a dramatic

reduction in work opportunities for women and young men. Increasing unemployment

led young people to stay at home longer before marriage, while university studies, albeit

sporadic and part-time for many, were one of the few alternatives to unemployment.

Even in the 1990s young people still tend to stay in the parental home far longer in Italy

than elsewhere. The absence of a mortgage market in Italy leaves younger people more

dependent on parents for accommodation; and an inadequate social security system

encourages those with low incomes to stay under the same roof. This combination of

enforced contact and increased educational opportunities for young people led to a

generation gap phenomenon more deeply felt in Italy than in most comparable countries.

The decline of collective values and movements in recent years has led to the

reassertion of the family as the principal object of allegiance for the vast majority of

Italians, old and young. Families are smaller and, in the North at least, much more

prosperous, while reforms of the 1970s guaranteed improved state medical and social

provisions. If, as some claim, the introspective nature of family life in the South has fed

into the structure of the mafia family, it is equally true that the enormous number of

successful and flourishing family enterprises and businesses in the North is without

parallel elsewhere in Europe (see Third Italy).

There are nonetheless symptoms of radical change. As elsewhere in Europe, there are

increasing numbers of one-parent families, of couples who decide not to marry and of

adults who choose to live alone, although Italian levels remain far below the European

average. The decrease of the birth rate in Italy has accelerated and Italy now has the

lowest birth rate of any major European country, with an average of just 1.3 children per

woman of child-bearing age. Nonetheless the family unit in Italy remains, on the whole,

cohesive if diverse across the country. Even while the family in Italy has seen dramatic

and sweeping changes in recent years, it retains its status as the core source of identity for

the majority of Italians.

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Further reading

Barbagli, M. and Saraceno, G. (1997) Lo stato delle famiglie in Italia (The State of Families in

Italy), Bologna: Il Mulino.

Foot, J. (1995) ‘The Family and the “Economic Miracle”: Social Transformation, Work, Leisure

and Development at Bovisa and Comasina (Milan), 1950–1970’, Contemporary European

History 4 (3):315–37 (one of several useful essays in this issue dedicated to the theme of the

European family).

Ginsborg, P. (1990) ‘Family, Culture and Politics in Contemporary Italy’, in Z.G. Baranski and R.

Lumley (eds), Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy, London: Macmillan (a brief but

comprehensive survey of the postwar Italian family).

Livraghi, R. (ed.) (1994) Economia delta famiglia ed economia del lavoro (Economy of the Family

and Economy of Work), Milan: F.Angeli.

Saraceno, C. (1996) Sociologia della famiglia (Sociology of the Family), Bologna: Il

Mulino.

SHARON WOOD

Fanfani, Amintore

b. 6 February 1908, Arezzo; d. 20 November 1999, Rome

Politician

A leading figure of postwar Italian politics, Fanfani entered Parliament in 1946 and

remained there for life. He served in the Constituent Assembly from 1946–8, was a

deputy from 1948–63, senator from 1968–72, and was appointed life senator in 1972. He

was prime minister six times between 1954 and 1987, and held many other cabinet posts

including Interior and Foreign Affairs between 1947 and 1989. In 1958 he was

simultaneously Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and General Secretary of the Christian

Democrat Party (see DC). As party secretary he carried out far-reaching reforms, making

the DC more independent of the Church and then, in the late 1950s, began the process of

‘opening to the Left’, later completed by Aldo Moro. In 1974, probably against his

better judgement, Fanfani led the unsuccessful referendum campaign to repeal the

divorce law. Like many Italian politicians, Fanfani also held academic positions and

taught economic history at the Catholic University of Milan 1936–55 and Rome 1955–

83.

JAMES WALSTON

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Fantomas

Fantomas is a character belonging to the large group of heroes of French serial novels

known as roman noir (crime novel) where the protagonist is a criminal. A typical story

presents a series of ingenious, atrocious and often gratuitous crimes performed by

Fantomas who, thanks to extra-ordinary physical strength and agility, always escapes the

implacable pursuit of the almost equally cunning police Commissioner Juve. Pierre

Souvestre and Marcel Allain published the first Fantomas story in 1911, and its

immediate success led them to write another thirty-one sequels in the following four

years. The character became an international myth through the films of Louise Feuillade.

Fantomas is known as a criminal genius, an elusive master of fear who constantly

changes his identity, an extraordinary actor who triumphs in all his roles. The novels

were published in Italy one year after the French edition and republished with some

success in 1963. But it is in the comic book field that the influence of Fantomas was

paramount, helping to generate the character of Diabolik, founder of the fumetto nero.

Further reading

Riccomini, F. (1979) Fantomas. Un mito (Fantomas: A Myth), Prato: Azienda autonoma di

Turismo (an illuminating discussion of the mythological features of Fantomas and their natural

attractions for an Italian audience).

FRANCO MANAI

fascism and neo-fascism

Despite the terrible nature of the Second World War, the utter defeat suffered militarily,

socially and psychologically by Fascist Italy and its participation in the horror of

Auschwitz, fascists or neo-fascists have constituted an important part of postwar political

life. Even before the conflict ended, those social forces which had underpinned

Mussolini’s regime rallied to the Uomo Qualunque movement of Guglielmo Giannini,

with its battle cry of ‘Abbasso tutti!’ (down with everyone). Only in 1947 would it

become clear that the Christian Democrats and not the Uomo Qualunque were to be the

catch-all party of the Right in the Italian Republic. By this time, ex-Fascists led by

Arturo Michelini had set up the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano, or Italian Social

Movement) which, until the 1990s, officially embodied postwar fascism. The MSI’s

electoral record was mixed, but generally it polled fourth in national elections behind the

Christian Democrats, the PCI and the PSI.

Like other Italian parties, the MSI was itself a coalition, socially, regionally and

ideologically. In terms of ideology, debates were at their most heated in the party’s early

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days when a radical fascism which still evoked the social policies enunciated, if not

carried through, in the Salò Republic (1943–5) had as its spokesperson, Giorgio

Almirante (d. 1988). In 1950, however, the party settled down under the moderate

secretariat of Augusto De Marsanich, for whom fascism meant a general authoritarianism

which could associate the MSI with the more conservative elements of the Christian

Democrat Republic. Radical fascism found its durable champion in Pino Rauti who,

typically, proclaimed that fascism stood for a revolutionary third way, separate from both

capitalism and socialism, systems which, in Rauti’s eyes, were incompatible with the best

side of national life. From 1950, Rauti headed an extra-parliamentary group called Ordine

Nuovo (New Order) and drew intellectual sustenance from the international far Right,

praising Nazism and the cloudy ideas of Romanian fascist C.Z. Codreanu (whose battle

cry had been ‘Long live death!’), as well as the less revolutionary and more straight-

forwardly authoritarian regimes of Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal.

In 1954 Michelini was returned as MSI secretary and favoured, at least in the public

arena, the non-revolutionary aspects of fascism. He died in 1969, to be replaced by

Giorgio Almirante, who although seeming more radical (Rauti then re-joined the party),

soon pursued similar compromise policies. After 1987, when Almirante himself retired,

the story repeated itself again and, in a leadership battle, the moderate Gianfranco Fini

overcame Rauti. In 1994–5 Fini took the neo-fascists into coalition with Silvio

Berlusconi, bringing fascists into Italian government for the first time in fifty years. Fini

now explained that he stood for a ‘post-fascism’, of uncertain character. In 1995 he

dissolved the MSI into a new grouping called Alleanza Nazionale (AN; see National

Alliance). For the 1996 elections the AN joined Berlusconi’s losing Polo della Liberia

centre—right coalition. It was still challenged by a recalcitrant rump, the ‘MSI Fiamma’

led by Rauti. Such recalcitrance is not surprising given that fascism, an ideology

committed to a powerful state and to a version of welfare, is doubtfully compatible with

contemporary conservatism’s free market economics. Moreover, the South, which with

its system of patron-client networks (see clientelism) and its widespread ‘corruption’ has

provided the main pool of neo-fascist votes, is scarcely a society to be endorsed by a

literal follower of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman.

The formal political activities of the neo-fascists are, however, only part of their

history, though the most visible and the best documented part. In many senses, the MSI

was merely the public and respectable face of believers in an ideology committed to

terrorism, murder and their own version of revolution. Even in the era of the Red

Brigades, a tradition of right-wing action flourished, though fascists preferred the

indiscriminate effect of a bomb to the more targeted killing practised by leftist terrorists.

The bombs placed in the Piazza Fontana in Milan in December 1969, in the Piazza della

Loggia in Brescia in May 1974, on the ‘Italicus’ express (August 1974) and on another

train stopped at Bologna station in August 1980, and further incidents (notably the riots

in Reggio Calabria during the summer and autumn of 1970), ensured that neo-fascist

terror took a terrible toll.

The intention behind such acts was to dismay fascism’s opponents and critics, and to

prompt some sort of armed intervention from fascism’s friends against the ambiguities

and confusions of the existing political order. This last hope was the greater because

pockets of a residual sympathy for some variety of fascism survived in many sections of

the ruling elite. Italy’s multiple secret services, despite their constant internecine warfare,

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were notorious in this regard, with dark figures like General De Lorenzo (involved in a

possible coup attempt in 1964) surfacing time and again in the Republic’s complex

political history. Revelations about the Masonic Lodge P2 and about ‘Operazione

Gladio’ (Operation Gladio) similarly confirm the unsurprising reality that Italian anti-

communism could easily embrace philo-fascism. The emigrant Italics, too (see

emigration) were frequently places in which neo-fascism retained sympathizers and

fund-raisers.

From the 1980s, the neo-fascists were able to make their presence more overt, and in

1987 Bettino Craxi, showing his characteristic realism, formally met the young MSI

secretary Gianfranco Fini. This meeting presaged that process, outlined above, which has

led to ‘post-fascism’ and to the eclipse of the view that the essence of the Italian Republic

is its anti-fascism. Among many others, Fini, Rauti and Mussolini’s own grand-daughter

Alessandra Mussolini possess voices, helping to compose the babel of that 1990s Italy

which no longer possesses a reliable past and whose future may or may not be ‘post-

fascist’.

See also: strategia della tensione; terrorism

Further reading

Ferraresi, F. (1996) Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press (a detailed and comprehensive study of neo-fascism and the radical

Right in postwar Italy).

Ignazi, P. (1989) Il polo escluso: profilo del Movimento Sociale Italiano (The Excluded Pole: A

Profile of the Italian Social Movement), Bologna: Il Mulino (the most scholarly history of the

MSI).

R.J.B.BOSWORTH

fashion

Women’s wear

Italy is seen as one of the foremost fashion centres in the contemporary world, yet the

story of Italian fashion is essentially a postwar tale. Production and presentation centres

around Milanese high quality ready-to-wear, led by international names such as Prada,

Armani, Versace and Dolce and Gabbana. Famous for its use of colour and fabric, the

essence of Italian style is casual elegance.

Before the Second World War, there was little innovative couture and no fashionable

women’s ready-to-wear industry in Italy. As in the rest of the Western world, wealthy

Italian women looked to Paris for style. However, Italian textile production was already

industrialized and supplying a growing international market, and Italy also enjoyed a

reputation for excellent craftsmanship in apparel and accessories, with names such as

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Ferragamo. Very soon after the war, there was a conscious effort to move away from

Paris, and a discernible Italian style emerged.

The first collective international fashion show of made-to-measure ‘haute couture’,

which took place on 12 February 1951, is hailed as the birth of this style. The event was

organized by Giovan Battista Giorgini at the splendid Villa Torrignani in Florence and

included presentations by Simonetta, Schuberth, Fontana, Veneziani and Marucelli.

There were also two ‘boutique’ or ‘exclusive casual ready-to-wear’ collections by Pucci

and Tessitrice. Although the couture was not highly innovative and still took its lead from

Paris, it was notable for its imaginatively decorated evening wear and the quality of both

the workmanship and the Italian fabrics used. However, it was the ‘new and exciting’

boutique collections which particularly impressed the audience. The presentations

flourished, and in January 1953 moved to the more spacious Sala Bianca (White Room)

at the Florentine Pitti Palace.

Italian culture, the Italian upper classes and their media representation were

fundamental to the international perception of Italian fashion. The Italians were renowned

for their careful appearance and for their vitality, which was related to Italy’s climate and

culture. Moreover, a high proportion of Italian designers were stylish aristocrats, and the

appeal of this fact was not ignored. Fashion buyers and journalists were entertained with

lavish parties at ancestral palaces, and both the nobility and historical locations were

widely used by the foreign press for fashion shoots. American films made in Italy from

the early 1950s also helped to create an aura of elegance for Italian fashion. Shot in

captivating locations, films such as Roman Holiday (1953) portrayed a carefree and

simple Italy which was, at the same time, full of high culture and sophistication. Ateliers

generated publicity for themselves by dressing the most famous Italian and American

stars when they were in Rome, including Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren.

Italian fashion soon became internationally known for both quality and ease. Boutique,

in particular, was seen to be well-suited for the more relaxed modern lifestyle. The

international fashion press described the boutique as sensual, young, liberating, colourful

and fresh, but at the same time comfortable, sleek, well-fitting and flattering. From the

early 1950s, boutique clothes were not only produced by exclusive ready-to-wear

designers. Certain luxury knitwear designers, such as Mirsa, were also included in this

category, and Italian knitwear was seen as an integral element of Italian fashion.

Moreover, couturiers began to show boutique collections alongside their couture at the

Florence presentations. The global market for exclusive ready-to-wear expanded and

exports of Italian clothes increased dramatically, notably to the USA, Germany and Great

Britain.

However, rivalry between Florence and Rome for the title of Italy’s fashion capital led

to a potentially disastrous geographical fragmentation of the industry. In 1967 a

compromise was reached, whereby Florence continued to show accessories and boutique

while the couture presentations moved to Rome. As yet, quality mass production at the

level below boutique was seen as ‘unworthy’ and was not considered in the negotiations.

Mass market production of women’s apparel had been slow to take off in Italy

compared to many other Western nations. Ready-to-wear manufacturers in the north of

Italy, such as MaxMara and Gruppo Finanzario Tessile (GFT) were the first to mass

produce smart fashionable garments for women in Italy, in the first half of the 1950s. By

the second half of the decade, there was an important group of manufacturers with

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modern factories, producing quality garments using predominantly Italian fabrics. The

international reputation of Italian textiles for quality and innovation continued to grow,

and the close and flexible relationship between the two industries was central to the

expansion of the Italian garment industry. From 1958–63, Italy experienced an

unprecedented economic boom (see economic miracle). The standard of living rose

substantially and the domestic market for women’s ready-to-wear expanded rapidly as

the presentation of a smart appearance, or fare bella figura, grew more widespread. By

the mid-1960s, quality ready-to-wear manufacturers had established themselves in the

Italian market and many were exporting to the USA and other European nations.

In the late 1960s growth in domestic consumption slowed and this, coupled with

industrial unrest, had a marked effect on the industry. At the same time, the international

competitiveness of Italian products waned as rivals in developing countries emerged. The

first half of the 1970s are known as the ‘crisis period’ of Italian fashion, as many Italian

ready-to-wear companies of varying sizes came to grief. Thereafter, clothing

manufacturers realized the importance of technology and began to invest in computer-

controlled production.

The 1970s saw two very important steps on the path towards Italy’s future

international success in luxury off-the-peg clothing. The first came in April 1972 when

leading ready-to-wear designers Albini, Cadette and Ken Scott seceded from the

Florentine presentations and staged a show in Milan, which was already seen as the

centre of the Italian ready-to-wear industry, and was close to the hub of Italian textile

production. Over the next few years they were joined by more and more top ready-to-

wear names, including Krizia, Versace, Ferrè and Missoni, and by the mid-1970s the

focus of Italian fashion had shifted firmly from Florence to Milan.

The second significant move came when GFT agreed to produce collections for both

Valentino and Armani, successfully marrying designer labels to mass production. This

example, together with the ‘crisis’ of the early 1970s, dissuaded designers from

establishing their own factories and encouraged them to have their lines manufactured by

existing producers. Alongside these collections sold under their own names, designers

also worked anonymously under contract for manufacturers. Such arrangements grew

more and more common at both top and middle range ready-to-wear. At the top, for

example, Versace was contracted to Genny, Albini to Basile and French designer

Montana to Complice. In the middle market, manufacturers relied increasingly on

innovative design, led by MaxMara, using predominantly French designers. Significantly,

although many of the designers employed in Italian fashion were foreigners, the designs

they produced were seen as Italian.

Italy’s reputation for high-quality, fashionable yet wearable garments burgeoned as the

focus of global fashion production shifted further away from made-to-measure. From

1960–70 a number of Italian couture houses closed. With the exception of Capucci, the

rest stopped presenting their clothes in collective fashion shows and concentrated on

designing accessories which were produced under licence. Italian couture garments grew

richer and more elaborate in search of new markets in the Middle East, and a clearer

stylistic distinction emerged between Italian couture and Italian ready-to-wear, which

continued to be known for its understated elegance.

These developments transformed the Italian fashion industry and were confirmed in

1978 with the establishment of the ‘Milan Collezioni’ by Beppe Modenese as an

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international showcase for the best Italian ready-to-wear. By the end of the 1970s, most

of the important brand names were established, the Milan fashion industry had settled

into a relatively stable pattern and the city’s position secured as Italy’s fashion capital.

Ready-to-wear production escalated, and although the domestic market remained strong,

exports represented an increasingly high proportion of turnover.

Furthermore, during the 1970s Italian industry earned foreign respect for its marketing

skills and this was also crucial to the subsequent expansion of Italian fashion. Benetton’s

enormous global success since the late 1970s in the mid and lower ready-to-wear market

is a pertinent example of this. Despite its franchise basis, Benetton developed a

conspicuous and unified corporate identity worldwide. Image-conscious marketing is

seen as a key factor in the continuing good fortunes of the Italian fashion industry. By the

early 1980s Milan was one of the top three destinations on the international fashion

circuit, challenging the stylistic dominance of Paris. Italian fashion production was

widely perceived to be both technologically innovative and of an excellent standard, and

leading designers from around the world sought to have their collections manufactured in

Italy, often in Italian fabrics. All Italian manufacturers and designers continued to

acknowledge the significance of the support of the innovative and flexible Italian textile

industry to their sustained success.

New names emerged on the Milan scene in the 1980s, including Gigli, Moschino, and

Dolce and Gabbana. Despite the global recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s which

hit the luxury Italian fashion industry particularly hard, none of the big manufacturers or

designer labels went out of business. In the early 1990s, Gucci and Prada hit fashion

headlines with modern streamlined designs, which became the ‘must-haves’ of the

world’s fashion cognoscenti. Around this time a certain amount of interest shifted to

Florence, largely as a result of more aggressive marketing for the Florence shows but

Milan remains the unchallenged centre of Italian fashion. The essence of Italian fashion is

still a combination of luxury and ease, and it clear with hindsight that Italian ready-to-

wear has been profoundly influential in the development of international postwar fashion.

Men’s wear

Italian men’s wear is well-known worldwide for its high quality, yet while the expertise

of Italian tailors was widely acknowledged, there was no identifiable ‘Italian style’ in

men’s wear until the mid-1950s. The most obvious unifying factor in the dress of Italian

men was a tendency to conform to the traditional British model. However, in the

immediate postwar years visitors to Italy noted a careful elegant vitality in the dress of

Italian men, at odds with the restrained attitude associated with British style. There was

an emerging distinction between a select elite who remained faithful to the British

tailoring tradition, and a predominantly middle-class group who preferred the ‘American

style’ they saw in films. This centred on a vigorous new masculine ideal, symbolized by

the abito a sacchetto or ‘baggy suit’.

This look remained fashionable until the early 1950s, when a distinct ‘Italian style’

emerged. Instead of a long, spacious double-breasted suit with its wide, turned-up

trousers, the Italian suit, with its short, straight jacket and narrow trousers, was seen as

‘modern’. The association with modernity, together with the quality reputation of Italian

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products and relatively low prices combined to make the Italian look alluring. The look

was an amalgamation of Italy’s desire to join the ‘modern world’ and the slim off-duty

wear of American GIs who occupied Italy at the end of the war, and by the mid-1950s it

became internationally influential.

Also in the 1950s, Italian tailoring experienced a golden age, with names such as

Brioni and Caraceni achieving international renown. By the early 1960s, Italy’s postwar

economic recovery had produced a moderate degree of prosperity and a broader range of

consumers. The growing ready-to-wear industry with its two leading manufacturers,

Lanerossi and Marzotto, offered a viable alternative to made-to-measure for the masses,

and tailoring declined. Throughout these years Italian clothing manufacturers built a

strong relationship with the Italian textile industry. The interaction was fundamental to

the success of Italian fashion, particularly from the late 1960s, when textile houses began

making fabrics to meet the demands of individual designers and manufacturers.

In 1969, men’s wear presentations were introduced alongside women’s luxury ready-

to-wear at the Pitti Palace in Florence. Twelve men’s ready-to-wear houses of the highest

quality, including Litrico and Pucci (by Zegna) were very well received internationally

because they filled a gap between ready-to-wear and made-to-measure. Pitti Uomo was

launched in Florence in 1972, for the exclusive presentation of quality men’s wear, and

was soon seen as the most important men’s wear show in the world. However, in the late

1970s a number of designers, such as Albini, Basile and Armani, moved to Milan to

present their collections and the city became the unchallenged centre of Italian fashion

for both men and women. Henceforth, the unstructured, luxurious aesthetic of Italian

men’s wear became a universal symbol of the successful male and contributed to a

transformation of the businessman’s wardrobe.

Further reading

Bianchino, G. et al (eds) (1987) Italian Fashion, 2 vols, Milan: Electa.

Chenoune, F. (1993) ‘“Tempo di Roma”, Europe, Italian-style’, in A History of Men’s Fashion,

Paris: Flammarion.

NICOLA WHITE

Fellini, Federico

b. 20 January 1920, Rimini; d. 31 October 1993, Rome

Film director, scriptwriter and cartoonist

Renowned worldwide and both loved and respected in Italy, Federico Fellini is

universally regarded as perhaps the greatest of Italian film directors. Indeed, during a

long and fruitful career that saw him continually present in half a century of film

production, Fellini’s name came to be simply synonymous with Italian cinema itself.

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After an uneventful provincial childhood in Romagna where the future director

showed his talent as a cartoonist, the young Fellini moved to Rome in 1939, working on

the humour magazine Marc’Aurelio, a periodical with an enormous circulation that

included many journalists working in the cinema. Fellini contributed comic gags,

cartoons, serial narratives and humorous vignettes. In 1943 he married Giulietta Masina,

began scriptwriting in earnest, and in the following year met Roberto Rossellini, who

engaged him as one of a team of writers who created Roma, città aperta (Open City). Its

release in 1945 heralded the rebirth of postwar cinema, was the occasion for the rise of

Italian cinematic neorealism, and garnered the young Fellini his first Oscar nomination

for scriptwriting. After collaborating with Rossellini, Pietro Germi, Alberto Lattuada

and Luigi Comencini on a number of scripts, Fellini made his debut as director,

collaborating with Lattuada on Luci del varietà (Variety Lights) in 1951, initiating that

trilogy of character analysis that would continue with Lo sceicco bianco (The White

Sheik) (1951) and I vitelloni (1953), his first critically successful work that also scored at

the box office.

Fellini’s career assumed international dimensions with the subsequent trilogy of grace

or salvation: of the three films dealing with the nature of innocence in a cruel and

unsentimental world, two—La strada (1954) and Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of

Gabiria) (1956)—both won successive Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film in 1956

and 1957. This critical success was followed by the stupendous commercial success of La

dolce vita in 1959, which began his long collaboration with Marcello Mastroianni. The

film’s title became synonymous everywhere and in numerous languages with the society

life depicted by Rome’s gossip-column photographers or paparazzi, a word that Fellini

contributed to the English language. The film critics regard Fellini’s masterpiece to be

8½, made in 1963 with Mastroianni as a film director and perhaps Fellini’s alter ego,

which earned Fellini his third Oscar. The high modernist aesthetics of 8½ has become

emblematic of the very notion of free, uninhibited artistic creativity.

In the wake of 8½ Fellini’s name would become forever linked to the vogue of the

postwar European art film, even though he was one of the few non-American directors

who could be counted on by his producers to score at the box office. Nevertheless, his

post-8½ production would include a number of brilliant films but also a number which

were commercial disappointments. Many of them dealt with the myth of Rome, the

cinema, and consequently with Fellini’s own subjective fantasy world. Fellini Satyricon

(1969) demonstrated his mastery of a dreamlike cinematic language in an original

adaptation of Petronius’s Latin classic; Roma (1971) provided a personal portrait of the

Eternal City, including much autobiographical material; and Amarcord (awarded Fellini’s

fourth Oscar in 1974) offered a nostalgic portrait of Fellini’s provincial adolescence

during the Fascist period. Other films of his late period, however, encountered both

critical objections and commercial difficulties: the sumptuous sets of Casanova in 1976

somehow failed to mesmerize audiences except, perhaps, in Japan; La città delle donne

(The City of Women) (1980) offended every feminist except Germaine Greer. Other

films—such as E la nave va (And the Ship Sails on) in 1983, Ginger e Fred (Ginger and

Fred) in 1985, Intervista (Interview) in 1987 and his last work in 1989, La voce delta

luna (The Voice of the Moon), are still being evaluated following Fellini’s death, as film

historians attempt to come to grips with the complex evolution of Fellini’s cinematic

style over a period of forty years.

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