The most immediate expression of Federico Fellini’s extraordinary imagination has always been drawing, both during the preparation of films and in those more intimate, carefree and therefore joyful moments when, having drained himself of all creative energies, he would dive into the more relaxing and liberating ones that drawing suggested to him.
It was a special time when he became a child again.
Playing with felt-tip pens, he would put all his fantasies, anxieties, memories, fears, desires, imaginations and dreams on a sheet of paper.
In fact, behind each of his drawings, behind each character, there was a story, a small script, a mysterious interweaving of reality and fantasy, a paradoxical plot.
Once the drawing was finished and perfected, and after he had finished putting the finishing touches on the stroke and the colour, if everything had turned out exactly as he wanted it, he would give it away with a smirk of complicity.
If not, he would tear it up.

Thus was born this collection of forty drawings that are part of the collection of Daniela Barbiani, Federico Fellini’s niece and his assistant director in the last four films from E la Nave va to La Voce della Luna.
The drawings exhibited here for the first time as a national preview on the initiative of the Fellini Museum and the Cineteca of the Municipality of Rimini, have previously been at the Guggenheim in NY, the Cannes Film Festival, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, the Renault Foundation in Paris and the Puskin Museum in Moscow.