In January 2020 Rimini was a party. The hometown of Federico Fellini was preparing to celebrate in style the centenary of the birth of its most illustrious citizen with the inauguration of the colossal Fellini Museum, a kind of Fellini Guggenheim dedicated to the extensive legacy of the master of the seventh art. During those days, wandering through that fog-shrouded Rimini when leaving the exhibition had something inexplicably magical. The music of Nino Rota echoed through the Place Cavour; At the Fulgor cinema, the Zanni family was eager to show the world the restoration that had brought back to life the legendary room that so marked the director’s childhood. Amcord; The chef of the Gran Hotel, the filmmaker’s second home, had prepared a “special centenary” menu. The entire city seemed to have mobilized and the then mayor, Andrea Gnassi, could not contain his enthusiasm, because in a matter of months, he told me, Rimini would be on the lips of all the film buffs on the planet. But a few weeks later, the arrival of the pandemic ruined everything.
The other day, when I looked into X, I had the pleasant surprise of seeing that, almost four years later, Rimini’s great dream of returning Fellini to the world had not died. Not only the Fellini Museumreopened in August 2021, had just receive an award at the Venice Architecture Biennale but, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the director’s deathwhich occurred in Rome on October 31, 1993, the mayor’s office had inaugurated a photography exhibition which included the moving and multitudinous last farewell of the inhabitants to the genius of cinema. That November 2, 1993, more than 20,000 people accompanied the coffin to the municipal cemetery where it rests next to Giulietta Masina under a bronze sculpture in the shape of a bow that remembers the ship of Amcord and Fellini’s mistrust-tinged fascination with the sea. From there precisely, the new mayor reaffirmed in a video his will to continue exploiting the inexhaustible intangible heritage left by the artist to a city that for many continues to embody the archetype of an ultra-tourist seaside resort devoid of the slightest cultural interest.
30 years old #FedericoFellini.
An ‘Amarcord’ that Rimini will always live on. Nei suoi luoghi, nelle sue piazze, nel suo cuore. And in those projects that we carry will always dream big, ‘dove all if you imagine’. Tante the initiative in the city in your memory#fellini pic.twitter.com/s5ByWld8Ak—Comune di Rimini (@comunerimini) October 31, 2023
I would need another column to tell you about the impressive historical and artistic heritage that Rimini treasures beyond what is strictly Fellini, such as the Arch of Augustus or the Amintore Galli Theater of neoclassical architecture whose beauty left me shocked. About how friendly and welcoming its inhabitants are, like Elena, the owner of a hair salon, who did not hesitate for a single second to stop everything she was doing – among other things, drying my hair – to try to locate one of her clients who had She was Fellini’s physiotherapist – and she succeeded. But if I limit myself to the universe of the master, Rimini is still special for any devotee of the filmmaker. The director used to say that his hometown, that “indecipherable, terrifying and tender squiggle,” was “a dimension of [su] memory”, a memory necessarily “invented, adulterated and manipulated”. And it is clearly what is perceived when walking through its streets and seeing the elements that fed his unique imagination. From the municipal cemetery, a paradoxically happy place where the photographs of the deceased seem taken from a casting for one of his films, to the terrace of the Gran Hotel, where I thought I glimpsed his figure through the fog, sitting in one of those white wrought iron chairs so recognizable, walking through this city I seemed to feel Fellini more alive than ever. .
#Fellini #lives #Rimini