The exhibition Fellini/Trubbiani – E la nave va (1983-2023), promoted by the Fellini Museum in Rimini, is an opportunity to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of one of Federico Fellini’s greatest films, while telling the story of a truly extraordinary encounter, that between the director and sculptor Valeriano Trubbiani.

Fellini, fascinated by Trubbiani’s works ever since he saw them for the first time at the 1972 Venice Biennale (which also left a mark on Nobel Prize-winning writer José Saramago, as we read in the long, intense passage on Trubbiani in his Manuale di pittura e calligrafia), finally found the right combination to involve the artist in a series of scenic solutions for the 1983 film. Trubbiani was commissioned to deal with three things: the gash on the hull of the liner Gloria N., the sick rhinoceros and the Austro-Hungarian battleship.

The exhibition will present a significant selection of Trubbiani’s sketches and drawings, as well as a rich series of photographs, those of the visit that Fellini made to his atelier in Candia di Ancona in 1982 and those of the actual work carried out at Cinecittà, also documented by ten original drawings by the director, a sort of guide-notes for the sculptor.