Twenty years after I Vitelloni, Fellini returned to Rimini. In Amarcord he calls on the free-spirited fantasies of his later films, as well as the bittersweet comedy and intimate sense of detail of his early films, to evoke a year in the life of this small Italian coastal town in the mid-1930s. Amarcord is filled with phantasmagorical gems from the director's imagination: a peacock flying through the snow alights on the piazza to signal the coming of spring; a child on his way to school encounters a herd of cows who are transformed by the early-morning fog into frightening monsters. But the film is also rooted in history, filtered through memory: focusing on one family of perfectly normal eccentrics, Fellini examines their impact on each other's lives and the impact of life on them through a series of interacting tales (“some romantic, some slapstick, some elegiacal, some bawdy, some...mysterious” Vincent Canby). Fascism was a fact of life and, for Fellini, a focal point around which to examine the community, the Church, the state and the family--all of the elements that made Mussolini's acceptance possible. Like his protagonist Titta, a man in his fifties in 1972, Fellini looks to the past in this film for “the source of our illusions, our innocence and our feelings.” But for Fellini, it is also a catharsis: “I made Amarcord to finish with youth and tenderness,” he has commented.