This archive was created for personal reasons, as everything is.
I met Fellini when I was only a child; he was shooting Roma, the set was by the Colosseum, and it was night-time. All of my encounters with him occurred during my childhood, and in a sense it is fortunate it should have been so.
He would call me ‘la nana’, the dwarf; at which everyone laughed and I couldn’t understand why.
He loved using nicknames for everybody, and hase fews for me too: ‘testona’ (Miss
That is the kind of relationship we had: a relationship among equals – which is to say of one child with another.
He sent me presents for my birthday and Christmas, and though I didn’t really get who they were from, I did understand they were the kind of strange present one child gives another, because, like all great artists and innocents, Fellini had retained every scrap of his childhood.
And that’s a hugely rare thing.
Owing to a family history that has to do with my grandmother and will be recounted elsewhere, every so often I was bundled off to be an extra in one of his films (The Clowns, City of Women, Casanova... ) – not that I knew what a film was, but at home I’m sure they thought it just wonderful. I was not quite so amused, but I understood I should keep my doubts to myself and for years never said anything.
But I liked the dressing up, and having lunch with Fellini; and the real magic, as I remember, was the entrance, with the lifting barrier and the men in uniform who would say hello. I loved, too, being in the car with my aunt, and she loved driving, and whistling away turned the wheel first right, then left, into a place that was not the city – so where were we? A wide empty space, known as Studio Cinque (5).
It was not comfortable, and I didn’t like that; and it was full of agitated strangers, a lot of them shouting: come here, bring that over, shift this out of here, come on then, move it and the very strange thing was that it was normal that they were shouting.
After a time I was just plain bored, though I didn’t dare say so because I understood that everyone around me regarded this "cinema" thing like something otherworldly, and what-do-you-mean-you-don’t-like-the-other-worldly?.
It was only when I turned 16 that I told them I really wasn’t interested, and they all got the idea, and I was exempted. I studied art, instead, and worked as a journalist for most of my life, and have always gone to the cinema, sometimes with my aunt, who liked to pick up two movies at a time, and or the same one twice. I grew up hearing cinema talk at mealtimes, dinner after dinner, late into the night; and that was before we even had a TV. Perhaps that is why I never saw the interest.
Fellini I did find interesting, however: above all I loved his desk, chock-full of tins of coloured markers, his thick, greenish loden, which looked like it must be soggy and uncomfortable, and his hat (which he wore still as they were going out of fashion), and I loved it that he too thought it was great to drive along with my aunt, and that he too would look out of the window, like me, as if he were on a boat, and my aunt drove as if she were on a boat, and he loved my aunt too, and he too laughed when she started whistling. And I liked it that he was possessive of his coloured markers, his sheets of paper, and his paint-brushes: that he lent them to me with immense caution, just to make a friend of me, exactly as children do.
And I loved it that when he spoke to me he always looked at me and listened, the way adults never do. And straight in the eyes, confident and true, as only kids with no shame, and true curiosity, can be. He said once that he would have love to make a movie only with those children’s looks, misterious, silent and meaningfull, but was to an impossible task. I can understand his fascination for this profound unspoken communication.
It was only as a grown-up that I understood why he called me la nana. And so many other things I’ve understood about myself, about life, which he already knew and had told me about when I was small, in his letters to me, in the drawings he made for me, the poems he sent me, or through his eyes, just by looking at me. But that would be a long and too private a tale.
We did so many things together, only some of which I remember.
I don’t take great relish in making them public; but I’ll do it here by way of presentation of this work which is to serve for study and research purposes and I hope to get finished over time.
I remember when he came to dinner with Giulietta Masina and my mother bought a tablecloth of grey linen which immediately became the Masina cloth and was never used again, or when she took me to the Orfei Circus; and I remember lots of things happening on set, seen from a height of 90 cm., and their truly scary garden in Fregene, which was the garden of Giulietta degli Spiriti, and his hands, the physical space he occupied, the absurd restaurant lunches, full of tomato sauce, yellowish tablecloths, waiters he’d make laugh, huge spoons dipping into broth, and gazes and wide eyes.
And then, very clearly, I remember his funeral.
For all those present it was memorable, something more than a funeral. It was doleful and yet had something of the angelic about it, in the silent tread, all day and all night, of people on tiptoes who had come saddened, bewildered, perhaps devastated, and it was almost as if they were the ones who had departed, and life had stolen something from them: and they all stood there listening to a trumpet sounding, an invisible sound, in an empty blue sky. It was only then, probably, that I realized my childhood friend had been the friend of so many people; though that isn’t to say I quite figured why or how, and perhaps I didn’t in fact realize: it just didn’t matter, really, and it would be years and years before I understood this silent understanding we had, this gift life had made me, would become, more plainly, a string of open questions and a short story to tell.
This archive was created for personal reasons, as everything is.
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