Italo Calvino spoke of a 'Masina zone' in Fellini's cinema, referring to that dimension of the Rimini director's imagination that most recalls the circus and its figures. Of those figures, Masina was the most inspired and gifted interpreter: she possessed their lightness, vitality, grace and candour.
With La strada, in 1957, Fellini won the first of his five Oscars and at only 37 years of age he entered the Olympus of the greats of cinema, but it was Giulietta Masina with her interpretation of Gelsomina who conquered and moved audiences all over the world.
Charlie Chaplin recognised her affinity with his Tramp, and among the spectators in those distant 1950s was a young Argentinean named Mario Bergoglio who, decades later and having become Pope in the meantime, would remember that character whose gaze "knows how to capture in winter what is already spring".
Only one year goes by and Fellini wins his second Oscar with Le notti di Cabiria. Again Giulietta Masina as the protagonist, perhaps in the role she most loved and in which she perhaps most recognised herself. To her, whom Fellini often portrays in The Book of Dreams with the features of a fairy, the Fellini Museum dedicates a photographic exhibition.
Seventy years after La strada and just a few weeks after the thirtieth anniversary of her death, from Thursday 22 February till Monday 1 April, 34 photos from the Penzo and Reporters Associati / Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna archives is on show on the second and third floors of the Palazzo del Fulgor. These 34 photos come from the sets of the seven Fellini films in which Masina starred: in addition to the two films already mentioned, there are also Luci del varietà, Lo sceicco bianco, Il bidone, Giulietta degli spiriti and Ginger and Fred.