The filmmaker simplified his chaotic diaries “with zen-like intent,” writes Italian author Gian Piero Brunetta: “I was born in Rimini, then I came to Rome, got married and entered Cinecittà. That’s all there is.”

Zen in the eyes of Fellini: “Images with powerfully expressive colors … increasingly invade the space, elbowing words out,” writes Brunetta.

Fellini’s sketches increasingly became “chronicles of urban, extra-urban, railway, maritime and space voyages, told as *fait-divers,* as monstrous news.”

“These are Dantesque, in some cases Kafkian voyages.”

“Deep dives into the abysses of the subconscious; odysseys that run along the privileged Rome-Rimini axis and back again.”

La Dolce Vitae

Federico Fellini began recording his dreams around the time he was working on La Dolce Vita. On the centenary of his birth, diary sketches illustrate the filmmaker at his most personal

By Federico Fellini

The Italian director’s films are often said to be the stuff of dreams; others have referred to them as a “cinema of dreams.” A new, expanded edition of the diary Fellini kept from the 1960s until 1990 to record his dreams and nightmares offers a singular look into his imagination and creative vision. Fellini described his notes as “bad sketches, hurried and ungrammatical notes,” yet from them we get a sense of the director’s mindset as well as the principal characters in his life. “Federico asked anyone and everyone to tell him their dreams,” writes Lina Wertmüller, who worked with him on 8 1/2. “For him, it was more than just curiosity, because dreams—both his and those of others—helped him work.” —Julia Vitale