This isn't Rome anymore. Everyone's gone crazy. Too much of a hurry.
I've never been there in person, but it's safe to say there would be no mistaking Federico Fellini's Roma for anyone else's. Made in 1972, the film is comprised of a series of loosely connected vignettes invoked by the director's memories of his youth and young adulthood when he first came to the city that he would call home. In a lot of ways, the beginning of Roma is like a dry run for the following year's Amarcord since it's concerned with Fellini's schooling and upbringing in northern Italy. (Naturally, a seminal moment is an outing to the movies with his family, during which they see a newsreel about Mussolini.) From there, the film splits its time between scenes of Fellini as a young man (played by Peter Gonzales), whose innocence is made plain by the white suit he arrives in, and the Rome of today, during which he shadows a camera crew capturing its impressions of the city on film.
Less a narrative and more an assault on the senses, Roma includes unbilled cameos by Gore Vidal and Mamma Roma herself, Anna Magnani (in her final screen appearance), and such memorable scenes as a raucous dinner during which Gonzalez is plied with all kinds of dishes, a variety show that is beset by persistent hecklers and interrupted by a war report and an air raid, visits to two very different brothels (one of which is decidedly more upscale than the other), and the infamous Vatican fashion show, in which the nuns' habits and ecclesiastical vestments become more and more outrageous as it goes on. For my lire, though, the most effective sequence is the one where the film crew ventures into a subway tunnel that is under construction and is present for the discovery of an astonishingly well-preserved ancient Roman house. Then they watch helplessly while the frescoes contained therein are destroyed by their exposure to the open air. It's a pointed metaphor, but it perfectly conveys the notion that any new construction has the potential to permanently erase what it's being built on top of, especially in a city with as much history as Rome.