The boys gaze wistfully from behind a gate at the express train bound for the city as it stops briefly at their station without letting passengers on or off. Rome in these sequences is seen from a distance and through the filters of the school and various media: the ancient Rome of Latin texts, slide shows, theater (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar), and silent gladiator movies the modern Rome of Fascist newsreels and the Pope on the radio. It opens in Rimini, with a series of short sequences set around 1930, during the time of Fellini’s childhood, all of which point in different ways to Rome and to the rest of the film. Roma has a loosely autobiographical structure, but the autobiography is semifictionalized. As a result, Rome, he said, was “a city of idle, skeptical, ill-mannered children,” but Romans were also very attached to family.

But his own mother, Ida, came from Rome, and he called the city an ideal mother, one who has so many offspring she cannot devote herself to each and lets them do what they like. When he made this film, he had been there for over thirty years, so he could be described as an outsider-insider. He himself was born in a provincial coastal town, Rimini, and moved to Rome in 1939, when he was nineteen. The ideas of the city as “easygoing” and “maternal,” a mother-city, were ones he often repeated. At the same time, it does convey his own feelings about Rome. This dialogue, like the rest of the script, was written by Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi, and it slyly anticipates what Fellini knew he would be accused of by some critics: avoiding the real city, dealing in stereotypes that would appeal to the film export market. Another says, “We hope we’re not going to get the usual shabby, easygoing, messy, maternal Rome.” Fellini replies, “I think one should only do what one finds congenial.” One asks whether it will have “an objective point of view” and deal with contemporary issues: education, factories, housing. There is a scene in Roma where some students approach Federico Fellini in the Villa Borghese park and challenge him about the film he is making-the film we are seeing.

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