Federico Fellini is often considered a disengaged filmmaker, interested
in self-referential dreams and grotesquerie rather than contemporary
politics. This book challenges that myth by examining the filmmaker's
reception in Italy, and by exploring his films in the context of
significant political debates. By conceiving Fellini's cinema as an
individual expression of the nation's "mythical biography," the
director's most celebrated themes and images -- a nostalgia for
childhood, unattainable female figures, fantasy, the circus, carnival --
become symbols of Italy's traumatic modernity and perpetual adolescence.