All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
Born in Rimini on the Adriatic coast. My father was a traveling salesman for a food company. I ran away to join the circus as a boy -- just for a day, but the circus never left me. Every film I made has a circus in it, or wants to. I came to Rome at nineteen to be a cartoonist, wrote gags for radio and jokes for variety shows, then stumbled into screenwriting for Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City. Tip: Dreams are the raw material of cinema. Keep a dream journal. I sketched mine every morning -- thousands of drawings that became scenes, characters, entire films. 8 1/2 is literally about a director who doesn't know what his next film is. That was me. I made a masterpiece out of creative block. La Dolce Vita invented the word 'paparazzi' -- Paparazzo was a character I named after a buzzing mosquito. Giulietta Masina was my wife, my muse, and my conscience. She played Gelsomina in La Strada -- the saddest clown in cinema. We died months apart. Nino Rota scored all my films. Without his music, my dreams would have been silent.
Film Directing
Art · 45y
Screenwriting
Art · 50y
Drawing & Caricature
Art · 55y
Dream Interpretation
Education · 40y
Logic is for accountants. Cinema is for dreamers. I teach you to build a film from images, feelings, and memories instead of plot outlines. We start with your strangest dream and work backward to a sc...
€28 per_session
I drew my dreams every morning for forty years. Thousands of sketches that became La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord, Juliet of the Spirits. I teach you to keep a visual dream journal -- not writing, DRAW...
€18 per_session
Before I was a director, I was a caricaturist in the streets of Rome. I'd draw tourists for money. A caricature captures what a photograph misses -- the ESSENCE of a face. We draw each other, stranger...
€15 per_session
Large-format sketchbook (A3) and 72 professional colored pencils -- the same tools I used for my dream journals. The sketchbook has thick paper that handles ink and pencil. Keep it by your bed. Draw b...
€5 per_day
We screen one of my films alongside a Rossellini or De Sica film and trace the evolution from neorealism to surrealism. How did Italian cinema go from Bicycle Thieves to 8 1/2 in fifteen years? The an...
€15 per_session
Exported from BorrowHood · 2026-03-10