Roma

Travelogue, memoir, and outrageous cinematic spectacle converge in this kaleidoscopic valentine to the Eternal City, composed by one of its most iconic inhabitants. Leisurely one moment and breathless the next, this urban fantasia by Federico Fellini interweaves recollections of the director’s young adulthood in the era of Mussolini with an impressionistic portrait of contemporary Rome, where he and his film crew are shooting footage of the bustling cityscape. The material delights of sex, food, nightlife, and one hallucinatory ecclesiastical fashion show are shot through with glimmers of a monumental past: the Colosseum encircled by traffic, ancient frescoes unearthed in a subway tunnel, a pigeon-befouled statue of Caesar. With a head-spinning mix of documentary immediacy and extravagant artifice, Roma penetrates the myth and mystique of Italy’s storied capital, a city Fellini called “the most wonderful movie set in the world.”

Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1972
  • 120 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.85:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #848

Special Features

  • 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Audio commentary featuring Frank Burke, author of Fellini’s Films
  • Deleted scenes
  • New interview with filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino on the lasting influence of director Federico Fellini
  • New interview with poet and Fellini friend Valerio Magrelli
  • Images from the Felliniana archive of collector Don Young
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar David Forgacs

Cover by Brecht Evens

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Essential Fellini

Essential Fellini

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$199.96

Special Features

  • 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Audio commentary featuring Frank Burke, author of Fellini’s Films
  • Deleted scenes
  • New interview with filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino on the lasting influence of director Federico Fellini
  • New interview with poet and Fellini friend Valerio Magrelli
  • Images from the Felliniana archive of collector Don Young
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar David Forgacs

Cover by Brecht Evens

Roma
Cast
Peter Gonzales
Federico Fellini, age eighteen
Fiona Florence
Dolores
Pia De Doses
Princess Domitilla
Renato Giovannoli
Cardinal Ottaviani
Dennis Christopher
The hippie
Feodor Chaliapin Jr.
Julius Caesar
Elliott Murphy
Extra
Anna Magnani
Playing herself
Marcello Mastroianni
Playing himself
Gore Vidal
Playing himself
John Francis Lane
Playing himself
Federico Fellini
Playing himself
Credits
Director
Federico Fellini
Story and screenplay by
Federico Fellini
Story and screenplay by
Bernardino Zapponi
Produced by
Turi Vasile
Music by
Nino Rota
Cinematography by
Giuseppe Rotunno
Edited by
Ruggero Mastroianni
Production design and costumes by
Danilo Donati
Set decoration by
Andrea Fantacci

Current

Paolo Sorrentino on Fellini’s Roma
Paolo Sorrentino on Fellini’s Roma
Federico Fellini’s love letter to his home city, Roma, is a hallucinatory blend of everyday observations and extravagant spectacle. Interweaving memories of Fellini’s young adulthood with vibrant images of contemporary Rome, this semi-autobiograp…
Roma: Rome, Fellini’s City
Roma: Rome, Fellini’s City

Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.

By David Forgacs

Explore

Federico Fellini

Writer, Director

Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini

One of Italy’s great modern directors, Federico Fellini was a larger-than-life maestro who created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique. While his most popular—and accessible—film, the darkly nostalgic childhood memoir Amarcord, is a great entryway into his oeuvre, , a collage of memories, dreams, and fantasies about a director’s artistic crisis, is perhaps his masterpiece. In his early career, Fellini was both a screenwriter for neorealist pioneer Roberto Rossellini and a newspaper caricaturist in postwar Rome, competing influences he would bring together with startling results. After such early works as I vitelloni, Fellini broke away from neorealism’s political strictures with the beloved La strada, and from there boldly explored his obsessions with the circus, societal decadence, spiritual redemption, and, most controversially, women, in such films as Nights of Cabiria, Juliet of the Spirits, and And the Ship Sails On.