He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. Fellini was nominated for 17 Academy Awards over the course of his career, winning a total of four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film the most for any director in the history of the award. Fellini was born on 20 January , to middle-class parents in Rimini , then a small town on the Adriatic Sea.
His mother, Ida Barbiani β , came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family's vehement disapproval, she had eloped with Urbano in to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fabbri; β In , Fellini started primary school in an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, attending the Carlo Tonini public school two years later. An attentive student, he spent his leisure time drawing, staging puppet shows and reading Il corriere dei piccoli , the popular children's magazine that reproduced traditional American cartoons by Winsor McCay , George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper.
Guido Brignone 's Maciste all'inferno , Maciste in Hell , the first film he saw, would mark him in ways linked to Dante and the cinema throughout his entire career. In Mussolini 's Italy, Fellini and Riccardo became members of the Avanguardista , the compulsory Fascist youth group for males.
He visited Rome with his parents for the first time in , the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner SS Rex which is shown in Amarcord. The sea creature found on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in It is not memory that dominates my films. To say that my films are autobiographical is an overly facile liquidation, a hasty classification. It seems to me that I have invented almost everything: childhood, character, nostalgias, dreams, memories, for the pleasure of being able to recount them.
Deciding on a career as a caricaturist and gag writer, Fellini travelled to Florence in , where he published his first cartoon in the weekly According to a biographer, Fellini found school "exasperating" [ 6 ] and, in one year, had 67 absences. In September , he enrolled in law school at the Sapienza University of Rome to please his parents. Biographer Hollis Alpert reports that "there is no record of his ever having attended a class".
