Federico Fellini Trivia
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50 free Federico Fellini trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Federico Fellini trivia quiz covers the whole arc of the director's life, from the boy in Rimini drawing cartoons and staging puppet shows to the maestro whose funeral at Cinecittà drew an estimated 70,000 mourners. The easy questions are the ones every film fan should get: which country he came from, the film that gave the world the word paparazzi, the strongman and the waif of La Strada, and the actress he was married to for fifty years. From there it digs into the details that make his career so strange and rich: the humour magazine that launched him, the Rossellini script that earned his first Oscar nomination, the title he almost gave 8½, the psychoanalyst who introduced him to Jung, the day he toured Disneyland with Walt Disney, the Romagnol word behind Amarcord, and the espresso technique baristas still call the Fellini move. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Fellini, his major films and his closest collaborators before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Italy, Oscars and classic movies quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Italian city was Federico Fellini born in 1920?
Rimini
Rimini runs through his films, yet he barely shot a frame there: for Amarcord, his portrait of the town in the 1930s, he had its streets rebuilt on a studio lot in Rome.
Q 02Which Canadian actor played the title role in Fellini's Casanova in 1976?
Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland got the part only after Fellini fell out with a producer who wanted Robert Redford; the director then had the actor's face rebuilt with a false nose and chin.
Q 03Which Rome street, where photographers stalked visiting film stars, is the hub of the nightlife in La Dolce Vita?
Via Veneto
Via Veneto was where real photographers chased the stars in the 1950s; the film's own snapper, Paparazzo, left his surname to every celebrity-hunting photographer since.
Q 04Giulietta Masina's Gelsomina in La Strada was widely compared to the work of which silent-film star?
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin returned the compliment, calling Masina the actress who moved him most; one French critic wrote that her Gelsomina drew on the best of his work yet felt freshly invented.
Q 05Which Hollywood star played the brutish strongman Zampanò in La Strada?
Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn was playing Attila the Hun for the same producers that year and, by his own account, shot both at once: Zampanò at dawn, the Hun in the afternoon, looking haggard in each.
Q 06Which composer wrote the scores for Fellini's films, including the circus marches of 8½?
Nino Rota
Nino Rota scored Fellini's films from The White Sheik on for the rest of his life. His Godfather music lost its Oscar nomination because he had reused a tune from Fortunella, an earlier comedy Fellini co-wrote.
Q 07Which actor starred as tabloid journalist Rubini in La Dolce Vita and as Guido in 8½?
Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Mastroianni recalled Fellini telling him why he, and not the Hollywood star the money wanted, had the first of those parts: Paul Newman was too beautiful, and he had 'the face of normal'.
Q 08Which famous Rome landmark do Marcello and Sylvia wade into in La Dolce Vita?
The Trevi Fountain
Earlier that evening they dance in the Baths of Caracalla before slipping away from her bored fiancé.
Q 09Which Swedish-born actress played the film star Sylvia in Fellini's La Dolce Vita?
Anita Ekberg
Anita Ekberg, who played a star mobbed by photographers, turned on the real ones the same year: followed home to her Rome villa, she came out to face them with a bow and arrow.
Q 10What does the title Amarcord mean in Fellini's native Romagnol dialect?
I remember
"I remember" is the dialect phrase a m'arcord run together, and the word outgrew the film: Italian dictionaries now list amarcord as a noun for any fond, nostalgic look back.
Q 11Fellini Satyricon (1969) is loosely based on a bawdy ancient novel by which Roman writer?
Petronius
Petronius's novel survives only in fragments, and Fellini built that into the film: it is deliberately broken up, with episodes that start and stop without warning like the surviving text.
Q 12Which crime novelist chaired the 1960 Cannes jury that gave La Dolce Vita the Palme d'Or?
Georges Simenon
Georges Simenon, the creator of Maigret, did more than hand over the prize: he and Fellini became friends, and their letters to each other were later published as a book.
Q 13Fellini's La Strada won the first-ever Academy Award in which category?
Best Foreign Language Film
Q 21Fellini's first solo-directed feature, The White Sheik, starred which comic actor in the title role?
Alberto Sordi
Alberto Sordi played the sheik as a seedy photo-romance heart-throb. The film flopped, and when Fellini wanted him again a year later the producers balked, and the director had to fight to keep him.
Q 22Which 1953 film about small-town layabouts won Fellini a Silver Lion and his first real success?
I Vitelloni
I Vitelloni rescued a career that had opened with two flops: it was Fellini's first hit with critics and audiences alike, and it won him his first distributor outside Italy.
Q 23Asked in 1963 for his ten favourite films, which American director put Fellini's tale of provincial layabouts first?
Stanley Kubrick
Best Foreign Language Film had only just become a competitive Oscar; until then foreign films were handed honorary awards, with no nominees. Fellini's Nights of Cabiria won it the following year.
Q 14Fellini's Nights of Cabiria was adapted into which Broadway musical, later filmed by Bob Fosse?
Sweet Charity
Sweet Charity moved the story from Rome to New York and softened it: Fellini's hopeful streetwalker became a dance-hall hostess, played by Gwen Verdon on stage and Shirley MacLaine on film.
Q 15Fellini's film about a blocked director inspired which 1982 Broadway musical by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit?
Nine
Nine adapts 8½: it keeps the film's blocked hero and makes him the only substantial male role among a stage full of women. It won the Tony for Best Musical and was filmed in 2009 with Daniel Day-Lewis.
Q 16Which neorealist director recruited the young Fellini to help write Rome, Open City?
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini's film became the calling card of Italian neorealism, and its script brought Fellini an Oscar nomination years before he directed anything himself.
Q 17Fellini played a wanderer mistaken for Saint Joseph in the 1948 film The Miracle, acting opposite which Italian actress?
Anna Magnani
Anna Magnani played the peasant, and Fellini bleached his black hair blond for the part. New York banned the film as sacrilege, and the case led the US Supreme Court to rule in 1952 that films are protected speech.
Q 18Fellini made his name in wartime Rome on the staff of the magazine Marc'Aurelio as what?
A cartoonist
A cartoonist and gag writer: the magazine's staff was a nursery for Italian cinema, and the jokes he sold there led straight to his first screen credits, as a comedy writer.
Q 19Fellini met his future wife while she was voicing which character in his wartime radio serial?
Pallina
Pallina was half of Cico and Pallina, the young newlyweds of his radio sketches; before the serial had run its course, its writer and his leading lady were a married couple themselves.
Q 20Which film, co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, was Fellini's first feature as a director?
Variety Lights
Variety Lights was paid for by a cooperative of the two directors and their actress wives; it failed at the box office, left them in debt for years and ended their partnership.
Stanley Kubrick gave the list to the American magazine Cinema with Fellini's film at its head; the same film later fed Scorsese's Mean Streets and George Lucas's American Graffiti.
Q 24In Fellini's Il Bidone, what do the swindlers dress up as to con poor farmers out of their savings?
Priests
Priests: the gang, led by the Hollywood actor Broderick Crawford, turn up at poor farms in cassocks, spin the families a tale and drive off with their savings.
Q 25Which poet and future director translated Nights of Cabiria's dialogue into Roman dialect?
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini knew the slang at first hand: his novel about the street boys of Rome's slums had just earned him an obscenity trial, and Fellini hired him to make the dialogue ring true.
Q 26Which producer wanted Paul Newman for La Dolce Vita and sold the rights when Fellini held out for his own choice?
Dino De Laurentiis
Dino De Laurentiis had produced Nights of Cabiria, but he let this one go rather than gamble on a little-known lead; the publisher who bought it ended up with a film that broke Italy's box-office records.
Q 27What does a helicopter carry over Rome in the opening scene of Fellini's La Dolce Vita?
A statue of Christ
A statue of Christ is on its way to the Vatican, but the hero's news helicopter, tailing it, peels off so he can try to get phone numbers from women sunbathing on a roof; the rotors drown him out.
Q 28Fellini's 'Toby Dammit', his part of the 1968 anthology film Spirits of the Dead, loosely adapts a tale by which writer?
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe's comic tale Never Bet the Devil Your Head became the last days of a drunken English actor, played by Terence Stamp, who is lured to Rome by the promise of a Ferrari.
Q 29Which title did Ennio Flaiano suggest for the film that eventually became 8½?
La bella confusione
La bella confusione, 'the beautiful confusion', suited a film about creative paralysis, but Fellini's producers wanted a title at once and he simply numbered it, like an opus, by the tally of films he had made.
Q 30To please his parents, Fellini enrolled at Rome's university in 1939 to study what, though he never sat an exam?
Law
Law it was, on paper only: one biographer found no record that he ever attended a class, and within months he was selling his work to a Rome magazine instead.