THE SCENE | Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni in a famous moment from 'La Dolce Vita.' Alamy

Stazione Termini, Rome's main train station, is a marvel of cool architectural rationalism above and a milling press of commerce and humanity below. Federico Fellini nailed this paradox in the opening scenes of his swan-song cinematic homage to variety theater, "Ginger & Fred" (1985). The aging dancer played by the director's wife, Giulietta Masina, arrives in the Galleria Gommata—the long, austere, high-ceilinged gallery that runs the width of the building between tracks and entrance hall—to find it thronged with comers and goers, buyers and sellers, festooned with garish publicity displays, including an enormous roast pig dangling from a crane.

Vineria Reggio SIME/4Corners Images

The further away one stands from Rome and Italy, the more likely one is to read such scenes as the work of a genial fantasist. Spend some time in the Eternal City, and you realize that in many respects Fellini was an out-and-out realist. When I arrived by train at Stazione Termini recently, the Galleria was plastered with billboards advertising underwear. Two elderly nuns trailing large suitcases stopped for a rest. One gazed up wonderingly at a tanned David Beckham, who was leaving little to the imagination in all-too-brief Armani briefs.

Off Duty Italy Special

Photographer Pernille Pedersen snapped these iPhone photos on a recent trip across Italy, with stops in Rome, Perugia, Sicily and on the island of Ischia. Pernille Pedersen




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I'd been in Rome less than a minute, and I'd already experienced my first Fellini moment.

Unless you're an obssessive cineaste with trainspotting tendencies, there's little sense in ticking off the Roman locations from Fellini's films, the places associated with il maestro's life. Many of those spots have become dreary, Disney-fied or otherwise uninspiring. It is vastly more rewarding to try to see Rome as Fellini saw it—an ancient, contradictory, preening, theatrical wonder—and live it as he lived it.

Centro Storico Alamy

Some of that can come serendipitously, while wandering the city. Big, busty Roman matrons with tiny lap dogs, workmen struggling with an enormous red sofa in the shape of a pair of lips—sometimes I get the feeling that Fellini's up there in the sky somewhere, directing this stuff.

But it also helps to be looking through the proper lens—to notice, for instance, that those would-be flaneurs outside trendy Bar del Fico (Piazza del Fico, 26;, their heads turning in unison every time a pretty girl walks by, are straight out of "I Vitelloni," the director's pivotal portrait of frustrated, provincial 20-something men.

Sometimes Fellini's Rome and Felliniesque Rome live in close proximity. The apartment that Federico and Giulietta shared (Via Margutta, 110) is on a small, charming street where Truman Capote once lived and Puccini composed. There's not much to see except a plaque on the building with caricatures of the pair and a commemorative poem in Roman dialect. But notice the number on the door of the palazzo: above the 110, it says "Già 113"—formerly 113—a very Felliniesque address.

Piazza del Popolo is where Fellini used to get his espresso fix, at Bar Canova (Piazza del Popolo, 16), a classic morning coffee and evening aperitivo hangout. In the mid-1980s I literally rubbed shoulders with the great man here. The bar was crowded, and after two years in Rome I'd learned that it was no good being politely British if you wanted to get served. So I squeezed in, receipt in hand, and levered myself some space. Only when my caffè arrived did I noticed that the white-haired, tweed-jacketed gentleman I had nudged a few centimeters south was none other than Federico. He didn't seem to mind a bit: An adoptive Roman like me, he knew the city's ways.

Roma Termini rail station entrance Alamy

Today the bar has had a makeover and in the process has lost some of its charm. Fellini, who died in 1993, is now a marketing strategy: A television in the corner loops through scenes from his films. To find its former flavor, head across the square to Rosati (Piazza del Popolo, 5; This historic bar, with liveried waiters serving Campari to a well-dressed clientele, may be the most elegantly "dolce vita" of Rome's watering holes.

Via Veneto, principal setting for the actual "La Dolce Vita" (1960), was in Fellini's day a café-lined thoroughfare whose luxury hotels drew Hollywood stars, Arab princes, society gadflies and the paparazzi who clung to them like ivy. The Via Veneto of the third millennium is staid, its hotels mostly owned by bland chains, its sidewalk café tables imprisoned in ugly steel gazebos.

To capture some of the old spirit, head into the centro storico. Back in the '50s and '60s, forward-looking Romans associated the lanes and piazzas of the historic center with a not-so-distant past of poverty and deprivation. Fellini commented on this in the famous Trevi Fountain scene in "La Dolce Vita": Here is this hydraulic marvel, its drama enhanced by the fact that, like Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni in the film, you stumble upon it in the middle of a maze of Medieval streets. Yet he shows it deserted, when the night is still young back on the Via Veneto.

These days it's historic piazzas like Campo de' Fiori, in the curve of the Tiber that cradles Rome's oldest quartieri, that are buzzing with groovers. Here and in the dense network of alleys west of Piazza Navona, restaurants, wine bars, cocktail spots and nightclubs keep a new dolce vita alive (much to the chagrin of residents). Though most of the bars in the area seem to have opened last week, there are a few old stalwarts, like La Vineria, aka Vineria Reggio (Campo de' Fiori, 15; 06-6880-3268). You may even come across an extra from the film—one or two of the foreign correspondents recruited for the Anita Ekberg press conference scene are still regulars at this unreconstructed, bottle-lined imbibery. The ivy-covered Bar della Pace—officially, Antico Caffè della Pace—dates back to the 19th century, yet still attracts a glamorous crowd of artists, celebrities and politicians (Via della Pace, 3;

Bar della Pace SIME/4Corners Images

Fellini's "Roma" lets the spirit of the city determine its very structure. The film is a picaresque ramble through a half-real Rome in which gridlocked cars are turned into living spaces; cardinals, monsignors and fawning aristocrats preside over Vatican fashion shows; and the district of Trastevere becomes a huge fairground teeming with local characters, guitar-strumming hippies, uniformed carabinieri.

Not a lot about Rome has changed on this front. The burly centurions, most from Naples and points south, who tout for souvenir photo business outside the Colosseum would surely have been featured in "Roma." And while Trastevere is a little less alternative and more touristy than it was, it still has pockets of boho charm—like the upscale vintage shop Twice (Via di San Francesco a Ripa, 105/A,, where you can pick up a handbag or dress that looks out of il maestro's films of the 1960s or 1970s.

But to get a real bohemian frisson in Rome today, you need to head for an area like Pigneto, a village-y enclave of low-rise housing in the city's high-rise eastern suburbs that has become the cool place to meet up with Roman friends. One of the lynchpins of the Pigneto scene, funkily retro Bar Necci (Via Fanfulla da Lodi, 68;, was frequented by a slumming director Pier Paolo Pasolini back in the days when it was full of young proletarians hunched over billiards tables.

Giardino degli Aranci Alamy

Fellini liked his food to be of the traditional variety. He frequented Al Moro (Vicolo delle Bollette, 13;, near the Fontana di Trevi, but these days the two restaurants that exemplify the dependable, filling Roman cuisine, somberly rustic décor and no-nonsense service that marks a place as una vera trattoria romana are Settimio al Pellegrino (Via del Pellegrino, 117; 06-6880-1978), near Campo de' Fiori, and La Campana (Vicolo della Campana, 18;, a few blocks north of Piazza Navona.

Everywhere you go in Rome, somebody's shooting another film. As "8½" (1963) made clear, Fellini viewed the artifice of the film set as a metaphor for life's tragicomic circus. He would have chuckled at a shoot I witnessed in the Giardino degli Aranci at the top of the Aventine Hill, a spot for lovers and loners with views across Roman rooftops to St. Peter's Basilica. It was the wrong time of year for the garden's famous orange trees to bear fruit, so some lowly wrangler had the job of attaching oranges to the trees with wire.

It is all a part of the combination of showmanship and self-deprecation that is Rome's defining feature—and Fellini's as well.

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