Rimini is a great place, really stunning. You have all in one single city: sea, beach, culture, art, hinterland and past to discover. An illustrious citizen of Rimini is Federico Fellini, a great italian director dead in 1993 and greatly appreciated by all movie enthusiasts around the world. Fellini has been a lovely son for Rimini, and this love has been reciprocated by Fellini through its movies where this city appears in many different situations.

Looking at the streets of Rimini through Fellini’s eyes (1920-1993) transforms real places into visions of places half-recalled. In this way, “Piazza Cavour” and “Piazza Tre Martiri” become the piazza in Amarcord (1974, winner of the Oscar for best foreign film), where public and social life converge, under porticoes and in buildings, in shops and on benches. However, it is also the place where I Vitelloni (1953) are seen loafing around. Rarely in movie history has a film connoted a place with such sociological accuracy and with such evocative power as I Vitelloni did with Rimini and the Romagna Riviera. The idleness of the five protagonists, the repetitiveness and the self-referential nature of provincial life, the schemes dreamed up in the bar without the slightest desire to put them into practice are at one with the streets, the piazzas, the desolate beaches and the rough sea of the coast out of season. Never had Rimini, stripped of its seaside resort cliches and at times dreamlike appearance, seemed so gray. And yet, just as Fellini tainted the elegy of provincial life with his critical and bitter realism, he made it immortal in the collective imagination, aided by the extraordinary performances of his leading actors. Along “Corso Augusto”, a short distance from Piazza Cavour, looms the Fulgor cinema, portrayed in Amarcord, as a place of dreams and desires. It is an image which belongs to a bygone era. Cross the “Ponte di Tiberio” bridge and continue as far as the ancient hamlet of S. Giuliano, which seems secluded from the chaos of the rest of the city. Here you will find Gradisca, Volpina, Saraghina, Ronald Coleman, Don Balosa, Pataca, the crazy uncle, Titta, the lady tobacconist, Mastroianni and Ekberg, the characters and the actors from Fellini’s best-known films, reproduced on the walls of the houses. Leaving the hamlet you reach Marina Centra and the Grand Hotel, which in Amarcord was the symbol of unattainable, exotic, prohibited worldliness. The music of its orchestra accompanies you as far as the wharf, the winter haunt of I Vitelloni and the setting for the stunts of Scureza, the motorcyclist in Amarcord. And then the beach, where the mysteries of sex are revealed. Here women’s bodies are glimpsed for the first time, spied on in secret while they strip off, in La Città delle Donne (1979); here young lads look for the wild sensuality of Saraghina with a mixture of excitement and fear, in 8 1/2 (1963). Three years after Fellini created his most famous work, La Dolce Vita (1960), he made 8 1/2, another surreal and visually outstanding masterpiece, adding even more autobiographical elements, starting with the setting. The esplanade of Rimini, the coast between Cesena and Savignano and his parents’ home at Gambettola (a village of less than 10,000 people not far from Cesena) are the haunts of Fellini’s childhood and youth, destined to remain the landscape of his soul even after he moved to the Italian capital just before the outbreak of the World War II. The existential, sentimental and professional crisis of Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini’s faithful alter ego, mirrors the growth of an artist in search of new means of expression and the sense of life.

Symbolism and metaphor are the vehicles he uses to go to the heart of people and absolute themes such as love, art and death. The end, with the leading characters reunited on the film set dancing to the tune of Nino Rota’s circus march, has entered the annals of cinema history. The film was awarded two Oscars in 1964: best foreign film and best costumes (Pietro Gherardi). Finally, the vast ocean where the marvellous transatlantic liner Rex materialises in front of a crowd of incredulous, enchanted local people: the chance of a dream, a faraway life overseas (Amarcord). All with that down-to-earth hospitality which is part of the people of Rimini and sojourns there. “… I left Rimini in ‘37. I returned in ‘46. I came to a sea of ruined houses. There was nothing left. The only thing to emerge from the rubble was the dialect, the familiar cadence, a Siren’s call: Duilio, Severino! Those strange, curious names… I was struck by the industriousness of the people, holed up in wooden shacks, who were already talking about building hotels, hotels, hotels, this desire to build houses”. You might pay homage to the great maestro, recognised in 1993 with an Oscar for lifetime achievement, in addition to two other Oscars for best foreign film for La Strada (1954) and Le Notti di Cabiria (1957), in the Municipal Cemetery, at the monumental tomb designed by Arnaldo Pomodoro. The quotations used above are from Federico Fellini’s La Mia Rimini 2003 (translated into English as My Rimini).

Technorati Tags [ Rimini | Fellini | Amarcord | Movies | italian directors | Dolce Vita | Mastroianni | Vitelloni | Anita Eckberg | places | emilia romagna ]

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Posted: August 11th, 2007 under Movies, Cities, Romagna, Italy.
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