The unlikely story of how a Fellini memorabilia collection came to Toronto

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A forgotten industrial pocket in the northwest corner of Toronto is hardly the place to go looking for glamour and celebrity. And yet there, in a low, non-descript building only a few blocks from the scrap metal yard at Lawrence Avenue and Caledonia Road, lies a treasure trove evocative of postwar Italy’s cultural mystique and la dolce vita itself.

The North York storage facility may seem an unlikely place to be housing the film reels, posters and props that were left behind in the office of the celebrated director Federico Fellini, but the story of how the collection came to Canada is equally unlikely.

“My first question was how did this get here?” said Alberto Zambenedetti, a scholar of Italian cinema at the University of Toronto who is consulting on the collection. “It’s beyond odd.”

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The collection, which includes the director’s chair as well as his signature hat, scarf and glasses, will be shown to the public for the first time at the Italian Contemporary Film Festival, which launches next week in the Distillery District. It was brought to Canada by Toronto television producer Dominic Sciullo almost by accident.

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“I didn’t go looking for Fellini but I’m glad Fellini found me,” Sciullo likes to say. He was travelling in Rome in 2019 when an entertainment lawyer he knew introduced him to the 87-year-old Roberto Mannoni, who was Fellini’s producer on his later films. Mannoni had been entrusted with the contents of the director’s office at the film studio Cinecitta by Fellini’s widow, the actress Giulietta Masina, who died of lung cancer only five months after her husband suffered a fatal heart attack in 1993.

Mannoni offered to show Sciullo the office, maintained as the director had left it, and the Italian-Canadian was transported back to his youth watching Fellini’s movies. Not only were the director’s desk and typewriter untouched, the place was packed with posters, caricatures, photos and props including a stuffed lion and the costumes from Ginger & Fred of 1986. There was also an exotic Asian headpiece that appears in a nightclub scene in La Dolce Vita, the controversial 1960 film that was Fellini’s biggest box-office hit and came to symbolize what Zambenedetti calls “a certain kind of Italian cool.”

There were the clapboards from films such as Casanova, the 1976 biopic starring Donald Sutherland, and Satyricon, the fantastical 1969 film about ancient Roman decadence that sums up what people mean when they call something Felliniesque. There were portrait sketches of the stars, from Marcello Mastroianni, who played the journalist in La Dolce Vita, to Roberto Benigni, who starred in The Voice of the Moon, one of the director’s last films.

Sciullo was amazed – and even more surprised when Mannoni offered to sell him the collection.

“I didn’t know whether to jump for joy or to cry. I didn’t really come to buy the collection or to find Fellini. I was honoured, but I was scared,” he said.

Sciullo returned to Toronto and enlisted two local contacts – Paul Golini, board chair at the ICFF, and the medical doctor Fabio Varlese – to form a partnership and buy the collection. They paid an undisclosed but “significant” sum and shipped the collection to Toronto in 2021. A year ago, they recreated Fellini’s office in the borrowed storage facility and began planning to show the material at ICFF.

The sale to Sciullo’s partnership may have provided a solution for Mannoni, who had to clear out the old office in the midst of a major expansion and renovation of Cinecitta. Contacted by The Globe and Mail in Rome, Mannoni declined to comment on why he let the collection leave Italy. There are two European institutions devoted to the director’s legacy that might have made more obvious homes: The Fellini Foundation is an exhibiting archive in Switzerland; the Fellini Museum is an interactive display of his films in Rimini, the seaside town that he escaped at 17. (Meanwhile, his niece holds his Oscars.)

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In Toronto, Italian consul general Luca Zelioli said it was better to have the collection remain intact than be dispersed at auction, and pointed to the strong cultural ties between Canada and Italy. “Art connects people and Fellini is a giant of the 20th century. Why not pay homage in Toronto?” he said.

The next question for Sciullo, and the project now named Fellini Forever, is what happens to the collection here. The film reels, which include raw footage, outtakes and several commercials Fellini shot shortly before his death, are of interest to scholars, as are the papers, especially an undated treatment for an untitled picture to be shot in Venice as well as the scripts for Intervista and The Voice of the Moon.

At the University of Toronto, work is under way to raise the $300,000 to $400,000 needed to digitize the reels at the university’s Media Commons Archive. It’s one of the few places in Canada with the cold storage to preserve the reels, and the archivists and digitizers to make their contents discoverable.

But the library’s chief fundraiser notes that the university is an unlikely home for all the memorabilia and props.

“We are not a museum,” said Michael Cassabon, director of advancement for the libraries. “There would have to be a groundswell of support from the community.”

Zambenedetti, who is helping curate the exhibition at the ICFF, has selected a few samples from the reels that will be shown there, including some outtakes from Casanova and a commercial for the Bank of Rome. He also sees value in the sketches, props and business records as teaching tools, evidence for his students that film is not just something that appears magically on your laptop.

Meanwhile, Sciullo is still figuring out how to make Fellini Forever a Toronto reality: “We need to display this in a true Felliniesque manner,” he said. “It was purchased for the sake of preserving.“