“Gli sconosciuti”, Dante Ferretti’s Roma, somewhere between Fellini and Scorsese

“I’ve been asked so many times which city I’d like to live in, and every time I reply, like Federico, ‘In Cinecittà’, because every day you can invent it, turning dreams into reality”. The Federico in question is Fellini, and the speaker is Dante Ferretti, an Oscar- and Nastri d’Argento-winning costume and set designer. The quote is excerpted from the book that Ferretti, together with David Miliozzi, has just published with Rizzoli, Gli sconosciuti. I miei anni con Pasolini, Fellini e Scorsese. Memoirs are very often the backbone of a country’s – and indeed a city’s – collective consciousness and identity. They bring to the surface memories, fragments of lives, crossroads, whirlwind romances and historical dramas. And when the narrator is a figure such as Ferretti, who has shaped and envisioned cinema – not just Italian cinema – the picture becomes even more vivid and richly textured.

Rome, throughout the pages of the book, is a constant presence – and not merely because of the central role played by Cinecittà, that ‘dream factory’ which shapes the scope of both artistic and personal fulfilment: the Eternal City becomes a safe haven, a comforting womb, for those not born amongst its streets; Ferretti, in fact, is from Macerata, yet he returns there regularly after journeys to film sets, producers’ studios and natural settings transformed into film sets. The volume is further enriched by Ferretti’s own set designs, which accompany his biography in a captivating manner. Born, as mentioned, in Macerata, he experienced the violence of war at a young age. During an Allied bombing raid, his father lost a leg; a skilled carpenter and furniture-maker, he later went on to craft a prosthetic leg with his own hands. The first Rome he encountered, when he arrived there as a very young man, was that of the Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated. He began his career in cinema in the Marche region, but realised that the big break – what he truly wanted to do – lay in the capital. He moved to Via dell’Oca. Thanks to a friend from the Marche, he found accommodation in the building that also housed the barber’s where Pier Paolo Pasolini went to have his hair cut. He was staying there as a lodger and, quite by chance, came across the poet; he saw him from behind, with his hair freshly cut, as he walked off into the distance. And over the following years, he would go on to collaborate closely with the poet and director.

As assistant to set designer Luigi Scaccianoce, he worked alongside him on Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St Matthew,” “The Hawks and the Sparrows” – which gave him the chance to meet Totò in person – and “Oedipus Rex.” It was precisely the latter production that provided the opportunity for a conversation with Fellini – nicknamed ‘Il Faro’ (The Lighthouse), as he was known at Cinecittà – and marked the beginning of a further artistic collaboration. He would never, however, abandon Pasolini, for whom he produced the set designs for Medea and the infamous Salò, the Paris premiere of which, as Ferretti recalls, took place after Pasolini had been murdered in Ostia. In the book, this detail is accompanied by a glimpse of Rome: Mass in the church of Sant’Andrea, and the walk Ferretti takes to get there. The contrast effectively conveys the sense of the sacred in the set designer’s works of art and the twilight liturgy of the Friulian poet, who was tragically murdered at the Idroscalo, beneath a livid sky and a churning sea, amongst the reeds. It equally captures this shifting of perspectives, right up to the encounter with Martin Scorsese, in which Rome is always the adopted home to which one returns, a compendium of architecture, landscapes and sculptures. Beauty, often unexpected, accompanied by the desolation of the suburbs. Particularly evocative is the sequence in which Ferretti, at the wheel of a car, becomes lost in a labyrinth of roads, emerges onto the Grande Raccordo Anulare and drives in circles for a while, before recognising the pleasure of the thoughts running through his mind as he drifts aimlessly in his car. Suddenly, the sign – ‘Rome’, in fact – alerts him and saves him.