The special issue on Federico Fellini by the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (JICMS) is one of the most valuable contributions to have resulted from the scholarly production that peaked during the celebration of the director's centennial. The issue officializes a research trend that began during the previous decade, which can be described as a new and explicit effort to delineate the historical and cultural contextualization of Fellini's cinema. According to this new line of inquiry, Fellini's filmography is examined with awareness of the hagiographic nature of the perspectives born out of auteurist criticism and the director's own authorial propaganda. It is a type of research that has led, in recent years, to a new understanding of the director's cultural and artistic sources, his collaborative practices, and his political engagement, to name only a few aspects. Thanks to this special issue of JICMS, we can now add to this list the examination of Fellini's brand and public image. With a visual metaphor, we could compare this type of scholarship to the work of filling in the minute details of a portrait's background scenery, which gradually causes the solitary and monolithic stance of the central figure, Fellini, to acquire new meaning through novel contextual relationships.In opening the issue, the editors rightly lament the lack of distribution and direct knowledge of Fellini's actual films in contemporary times, noticing how Fellini is mainly known through the echo of his own stereotype: the artist-magician and the creative maestro par excellence. As the eight articles collected in this issue successfully demonstrate, maintaining a focus on the mechanics behind Fellini's public image, it provides a way to pierce through the very collective notion and the socio-cultural impact that the director has had and continues to have nationally and internationally.Marco Bertozzi's “Media Architecture: Fellini's Rimini, a Town of the Imagination” provides a meditation on how Fellini's films influenced the image of Rimini, starting from I Vitelloni but especially with Amarcord, endowing both realistic and imaginative sites with a new level of iconicity, and consequentially inspiring other filmmakers and artists to focus on Rimini and the establishing of new organizations and museums. In “A ‘Means of Distribution’: Federico Fellini and Italian television,” Damiano Garofalo and Angela Mancinelli examine Fellini's ambivalent relationship with television, including both the representation of this medium in earlier films such as The Swindle and La dolce vita and the critique moved by Ginger and Fred. The essay shows how, in the 1970s and 1980s, Fellini fell on both sides of the television debate, on the one hand, engaging in a legal battle against advertisement interruptions to art films and, on the other, working with the public broadcaster RAI and creating his own TV ads.Francesca Cantore and Giulia Muggeo's “Federico Fellini and the Debate in Italian Feminist Magazines (1973–80)” provides an insightful overview of the attacks that Fellini experienced by various feminist groups for his portrayal of women. The debate started in 1973, when the feminist magazine Effe criticized Amarcord and peaked with City of Women, even though Fellini attempted to directly collaborate with members of the feminist movement, the latter film being bitterly criticized by magazines such as Quotidiano donna. In Joanna Staśkiewicz's “Gelsomina Transgressed: A Subversion of Fellini's World in the Clownish Neo-Burlesque,” we find a gender studies analysis of the new type of clown that the director created around the sexless figure of Gelsomina from La strada. Blending qualities of gracefulness (the white clown) and childishness (the Auguste clown), the figure draws from Fellini's idea of circus clowns as gender-neutral figures and is contrasted with new developments in circus culture and with the concept of the “burlesque.”In “The Gestures of Hermes: Federico Fellini as an Interpreter and Circulating Agent of Images,” Ivan Pintor Iranzo addresses the popular view of Fellini as a type of guru or hermeneutic guide, as shown, for example, in the comic strip Viaggio a Tulum, cocreated with Milo Manara. The analogy—which is anchored on the category of Hermes the messenger and deceiver—links features of the director's public reputation (i.e., “born liar”) and of his work (i.e., the interpretative openness that his films preserve even when repurposing already-codified images). Stephan Ahrens's “The Sanctifying Effect of Federico Fellini” explores the genesis and implications of Fellini fandom in Germany, which is traced as being inextricably linked to the notoriety of Giulietta Masina in the wake of La Strada, and which impacted the country's cinema during the 1950s and 1960s.In “‘Mon cher Fédérico’: Fellini and the Cannes Film Festival,” Valerio Coladonato examines the role that the Cannes Film Festival had in establishing Fellini's presence as a notable director and “auteur celebrity,” especially through the agency of the festival's delegate general, Fave Le Bret, the coproduction of some of his films, and a series of publications and screenings dedicated to him.In “Fellini the Founder? The Fellini Brand in Film Production,” Barbara Corsi, Marina Nicoli, and Alfonso Venturini address the short circuit effect caused by the director's need to continue to promote the Fellinian brand and his attempt to act as producer. The analysis of Fellini's joint venture with Angelo Rizzoli in the company Federiz, and its aftermath, reveals the causes behind the production failures linked to film projects such as Accattone, Banditi a Orgosolo, and Il posto.This special issue of JICMS, which also includes four reviews of recent and important volumes and monographs on Fellini, is a necessary reference for scholars of Fellini, auteur cinema, and Italian cinema.