Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Federico Fellini’s Roma

Fellini’s Rome (1972) exemplifies the interesting life of a quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, even if it is a very short and rather bizarre “cameo”, as it were, of a fragment from a play about the Roman leader. The Fellinian quotation shows the way in which such passing references, so marginal to the narrative of the films, are often interpreted by “Shakespeareans” as quotations from Shakespeare’s plays and made sense of in the light of their ponderous literary background. Whether or not it derives from Shakespeare, Fellini’s reference puts the tribe Shakespeareans on alert, immediately reminding them of Shakespeare’s crucial role in the process of negotiating questions of national identity and in articulating the contradictory relationship between Italian culture and its troublesome Fascist history.