Fellini's cinema managed to capture values, desires, attitudes, unwritten rules, categories of life itself, in resonance with the many existing ways of being Italian. With no restrictive ideological presuppositions, but with the ability to illuminate glimpses of the History, customs, and aspirations of contemporary Italy, his gaze reinvented an Italy made prosperous and apparently self-confident by the economic boom, but still plagued by poverty and archaic cultural legacies. In a constant dialogue with the "real country", Fellini's cinema featured an acumen we could only compare to that of Pier Paolo Pasolini in its talking about the problems of urbanisation and wild speculation, the uncontrollable persuasive power of the mass media, and the crisis of male chauvinism as opposed to the assertion of new desires by the female world.
