Federico Fellini directs Marcello Mastroianni & Bernice Stegers on the set of City of Women (1979) (via)

Marcello Mastroianni & Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita (1960, dir. Federico Fellini) (via)

Anita Ekberg warming up on the set of La Dolce Vita after wading in the Trevi Fountain (1959) (via)

“Anita Ekberg was a glorious apparition! She was like phosphorus, an extraterrestrial with a lunar pallor in her face and hair. It’s been a long time since I saw Anita. Watching her weather so many seasons as she has…I particularly appreciate her because in one of my films, a filmetto called Intervista, I narrated a visit with Mastroianni to her villa in the country. She’s a woman of a certain age who’s put on weight, who lives with her dogs and ducks, like a happy peasant.

And I saw she’d aged gracefully, a tranquil aging, sober, wise…She’s no longer the glorious diva, the Olympian she once was but she seems to me a beautiful example of serenity.”

-Federico Fellini, 1993 (via)

Claudia Cardinale in 8 1/2 (1963, dir. Federico Fellini)

Anita Ekberg & Federico Fellini during rehearsals for Ekberg’s dip in the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita (1960, dir. Federico Fellini) (via)

Sylvia come Via Lattea (“Sylvia as the Milky Way”): One of Fellini’s preparatory sketches of Anita Ekberg as La Dolce Vita’s Sylvia 

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Above, Sandra Milo during the filming of Juliet of the Spirits (1965, dir. Federico Fellini); below, a still from the completed scene.

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Giulietta Masina on the set of La Strada (1954, dir. Federico Fellini) (via)

“Mr. Fellini says that his wife sometime resists his view of her talents, which he summarizes as ‘a mingling of youngish and clownish.’ But make no mistake: in suggesting that his wife is a clown, Mr. Fellini means no insult. ‘The clown is the aristocracy of acting,’ he says. ‘To be a clown means to have the possibility of making people cry and laugh.’

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One of Federico Fellini’s initial sketches of La Strada’s Gelsomina 

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8 1/2 (1963, dir. Federico Fellini)