The City as a Celebration Reciprocities between architecture and the notion of the "festive" in Fellini's ROMA

Reflecting on his 1972 film ROMA, Federico Fellini spoke of the city of Rome as the most wonderful movie set in the world. Deriving from the character of the city itself, the movie is indeed an assemblage of wishes, dreams, visions and memories that are constantly projected back to the Roman palimpsest from which they came. If the city is the set, the movie could also be read as a theatrical play. Fellini’s vignettes have something of Serlio; they constantly alternate between the comic, the tragic and the satiric. But, regardless of the individuality of each story, it appears that the movie as a total is signaled by the very same notion; that of the “festive”. The idea of regarding Rome as an endless repository of festive architecture derives greatly from its ancient traditions and it has contributed the maximum to the city’s mythical character. For the Romans, it also consisted of a point of departure from the Greek influence; where ancient Greeks were tearing down fortifications to honor the advent of the Olympic winners, the Romans were commemorating victories by erecting triumphal arches. Over the years, the architecture of Rome was greatly informed by various drawings, buildings or temporal installations built specifically for festivals. Through the aforementioned, the idea of the festive became tangible in the city’s urban fabric and it fueled a constant and reciprocal celebratory interaction between buildings and people. In the work of Fellini, it seems that Rome is the stage in which festivities are architecturally “arrested”, in a way similar to P. Zucker’s description for High Baroque. By paraphrasing H. Arendt, it could be argued that as the festive spirit overwhelmed the Roman public realm, people became ready to perform their roles in the play. Considering the idea of the festive as an unwritten, structured way to behave unstructured, the current contribution desires to track down the various incarnations of the festive in the architectural scenery of ROMA. As a fact, the festive character is not only apparent in the great events or processions but it also appears during the lesser, everyday events such as the famous night feast scene. Inspired by the real forms found in the city, Fellini constructed an analogous “Cinecittà” Rome in order to communicate his own interpretations. It is in these analogies that the main characteristics of festive architecture become tangible. In the bottom-line, ROMA is a festive movie precisely because Rome is a festive city.