The streets of Rome are paved with rubble: Fellini's Roma

Thinking ahead about planned visit to Rome this fall watched Fellini's Roma (1972), a mixed bag for sure and hardly a vision of the kind of Rome that I expect to see - this is not Rick Steeves's Rome!; though the movie is dated in many ways and though it was not Fellina at the height of his powers - he was pretty self-indulgent here, full of himself rather than devoted to story-telling, cresting on the wave of his great successes such as LDV and 8 1/2 - still worth seeing for the great sequences alone, among them: arrival in Rome and welcome at the small pension where the central "character" (a 20-something version of Fellini, though cast as a writer, not a filmmaker, arrived for first time in the big city from his small-town home in the North [F was from the South, I think]) as he meets about 20 people living in the pension, walking through warren of rooms, a whole world of Italy revealed on one floor of an old apartment building - an exaggerated v. of the experience that anyone renting a pension in Italy would experience, maybe today as well; the al fresco dinner during his first night in Rome with an astonishing amount of food plus singing, yelling, flirting, fighting, everything; the incredibly funny (and sad at times) variety show, with the totally uninhibited and expressive audience, yelling at one another, tossing a dead cat onto the stage, fighting and screaming - again, not as much of an exaggeration as some would think, if you'd ever been to a movie theater in Italy as late as the 70s; the sorrowful and weird visit to the cheap and crowded brothel, with the hookers on parade, selling their services; and the drive on the crowded highway in the rainstorm into "contemporary" (i.e. 1972) Rome, with the dead cattle on the highway. Other scenes are too stagy and over the top, especially the visit of the cardinal to the castle of the princess where they witness a papal fashion-runway show. The humor wears thin. Movie structured, such as it is, as a young boy in the provinces yearning for more experience (F. himself did this much better in I Vitelloni, and it's a common theme, cf Cinema Paradiso), then we jump 20 years and he arrives in Rome - but F. does not actually deign to build a plot; once that arrival is established he decides to compare 1940s Rome with 1970s Rome, and we see scenes, including F. himself, of a contemporary documentary about R. All of this kind of a mess - and a missed opportunity; it's as if he had the material for a great coming-of-age film about arrival in the city, but rather then build that story, he backed off into a loosely structured personal documentary. The 1970s stuff, other than the ride into the city, feels the most dated today, oddly, and by far the least interesting - F. better as a creator than as an observer/documentarian. Worth seeing once, though.