As a Fascist commander, pool cue in hand, prepares to play a shot in the local bar, one of his minions tiptoes around the room, so as not to disturb the maestro at work. Fellini wastes no opportunity to find them absurd. “Amarcord,” his most autobiographical film (which is saying something, for no director has fed more hungrily on the fruits of memory), is set in a heightened version of Rimini, staffed with figures in black uniforms. So it was that Fellini grew up in the embrace of Fascist rule. Fascists strode en masse toward the capital, and, shortly afterward, Mussolini came to power. We should also remember the notorious March on Rome, in 1922, two years after Fellini’s birth.

It is not like being in a city, it is like being in an apartment. Now I consider Rome my private apartment. As soon as I came to Rome, I had the feeling that I was home. As Fellini explained to Lillian Ross, in 1965, in this magazine: The first word that we hear in “The White Sheik” (1952), his first film as a solo director, is “Roma.” It is uttered by a man at a train window, nearing his destination. Exhausted orgiasts, in “La Dolce Vita,” drift through pines and emerge onto a barren strand, where a monster of the deep, with viscid and accusing eyes, has been dragged ashore in a net.) Rimini’s other face is turned inland, toward the Eternal-and maternal-City, which beckons Fellini’s characters and gathers them to its bosom. (The bullying hero of “La Strada,” a circus strongman, winds up collapsing in tears on the sand. One face looks out to sea, and any Fellini fan will recall the beach scenes that litter his films. Many of them are warmed by the music of Nino Rota. The time and the place matter more than anything else, as we approach him now and try to make sense of the movies he bequeathed-crown jewels such as “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and “8 1/2” (1963), Oscar winners such as “La Strada” (1954), “Nights of Cabiria” (1957), and “Amarcord” (1973), and a cluster of other works. A hundred years ago, on January 20, 1920, Federico Fellini was born in the Italian town of Rimini, on the Adriatic coast.

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