Roma explores the city of Rome from several different perspectives, giving it a mystical life of its own that hangs in the balance between its rich history and its modern identity. With no real chronology, Roma is a tapestry of bizarre scenes and familiar images that blend together into a gorgeous visual carnival. Typical of Fellini, with the carnival comes a critique--and Roma tears through the city's political and religious history, satirizing the Catholic church and various faces of Italian government from Renaissance times through Mussolini's reign and on into the 1960s. While the camera lavishes affectionately over Rome's art and architecture and is clearly a tribute to the Eternal City, most of the sets in the film are constructed, reinforcing Fellini's narrative imagination and keeping viewers caught in a perpetual contradiction between reality and fantasy, history and the present, fact and fiction.

Federico Fellini's love for his adoptive city was unique. It was only natural he would make this film in which his awe and admiration for what became his playground is captured in vivid images which only could come from one of the most important masters of the Italian cinema of all times. The film is both a comedy and a sort of documentary in which we watch the director, himself, performing the role of what he did behind the camera, for our benefit.

The film is autobiographical in many aspects. We watch as the young Federico, an aspiring journalist arrives in Rome from his native Rimini. His new home is in an apartment where he has been recommended to stay by relatives. The place was pure chaos with the many different Roman characters he found there. The heat of the summer brought everyone to the streets where dining was an art. The food in great proportions in spite of a war going on. Fellini is an observer of his new surroundings. The woman street singer that goes through the tables, reminds us a little bit of Gelsomina, an immortal character created by the director, and also of Cabiria, the fun loving prostitute.

Rome, being a the chaotic place it was, is presented at a dizzying speed by the director who has taken his camera outside along a busy highway as fans from Naples arrive to attend a soccer match against the local team. The autostrada is some is a metaphor that emphasizes the confusion and the chaos anyone feels when arriving to Rome. Fellini ends it all in a massive car tie up in the street around the Colosseum. Fellini renders homage to his city in the last sequence as well taking the viewer through a night ride by motorcyclists that passes by all the best known monuments of the city.

We are also taken to a neighborhood music hall that presents vaudeville acts. The atmosphere was typical of the one found in such places where everyone went to have a good time with their friends and neighbors. These places attracted a rough crowd that made a tough place for performers in which to act. Theater in Italy, although not remotely close to the scene Fellini shows, is a place where the real drama is not presented on stage; the real show is given by all the people that go to be seen without shame of behaving in strange ways.

The subway excavation sequence offers an interesting aside in which the present day and the olden times come together when the workers discover a Roman home underground. The magnificence of the images that are discovered reveal the proud past of one of the oldest and most artistic civilizations of all times. Alas, it is only short lived because of the air that penetrates the hidden frescoes found under the rubble make them disappear.

The brothel also played a big part in the sentimental education of the maestro. We have seen prostitutes in all of of Fellini's films in one way, or another. He wants to take us to two different kinds of pleasure houses, one for the common citizen and a high class one that closes up when important celebrities decide to have private fun. Fellini juxtaposes the scenes at the brothels with a gathering of the Catholic Church higher ups that have come to Princess Domitilla's palace for an ornate fashion show for ecclesiastical fashion that is decadent in the excesses presented. Like with other Italian creators, Fellini had an ongoing love-hatred by the institution that has ruled the lives of Italians for centuries.

"Fellini's Roma" was a great creation by Federico Fellini. It is as important as some of the other films because it captured the soul of the city Fellini loved so much. This was possible because of the images cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, a amazing photographer of many of the director's work. Nino Rota's musical score is also an asset in the film. The cast is enormous to single out anyone, they all contribute to make this film a tribute to Rome, the eternal city.

Legendary Italian director Federico Fellini creates a movie of his life from childhood under the Fascists to his youth in the city to his filmmaking life in the craziness of Rome. This movie is rather scattered in its plot, such as one exists at all. It's more a feeling of Roman life than an actual story. I do wonder if a Fellini enthusiast would recognize some of the scenes in this movie. Maybe some interactions inspire him in creating some of his famous films. This is probably a must-see for his fans.