In this episode, we return to Italy through memory, ritual, and the absurd pageantry of daily life. Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (which means “I remember” in Romagnol dialect) recreates a year in the life of a small provincial town under Mussolini’s fascism. The result is both whimsical and damning.

At first glance, Amarcord looks like a coming-of-age comedy: adolescent boys ogle the town beauty, uncles escape asylums, and the seasons change with festivals and schoolyard pranks. But as we explore in this conversation, fascism is everywhere, even if it doesn’t arrive in uniform. It appears in the school chant, in the censorious church, in the barbershop where shaved heads emulate Il Duce, and in the face of the young girl who swoons at a fascist parade.

As we say in the episode, “It’s not a film about fascism showing up—it’s about how fascism has already shaped everything.”

The fascist rally arrives almost halfway through the film, but when it does, we recognize the faces: the teacher, the priest, the cop, the neighbor. They’re the townspeople we’ve been laughing at and living with. The parade is full of pageantry and spectacle, but it’s all hollow. A young boy fantasizes about marrying a giant flower-headed Mussolini. Later, the town rows out at night to salute a fascist ocean liner that turns out to be a painted cutout on a studio set. The whole thing is performance.

We talk about Amarcord as a critique of the culture that made fascism possible: an infantilized, spectacle-hungry society driven by base desires and easily distracted by rituals. There are no real heroes or villains—just people swept along. Fellini’s own quote hangs over the film: “One cannot fight fascism without identifying it as that aspect of us which is stupid, shabby, and weak.”

As the episode unfolds, we consider how Amarcord fits into the larger story of fascist cinema—not as a warning from outside, but as a memory from within. It’s funny, warm, and disturbing in equal measure.