ROMA, the Federico Fellini-directed benchmark of the Italian New Wave, explores the city of Rome from several different perspectives, giving it a mystical life of its own that hangs in the balance between its rich history and its modern identity. With no real chronology, ROMA is a tapestry of bizarre scenes and familiar images (Fellini peppers the film with easily identifiable references to his earlier works) that blend together into a gorgeous visual carnival. Typical of Fellini, with the carnival comes a critique--and ROMA tears through the city`s political and religious history, satirizing the Catholic church and various faces of Italian government from Renaissance times through Mussolini`s reign and on into the 1960s. While the camera lavishes affectionately over Rome`s art and architecture and is clearly a tribute to the Eternal City, most of the sets in the film are constructed, reinforcing Fellini`s narrative imagination and keeping viewers caught in a perpetual contradiction between reality and fantasy, history and the present, fact and fiction.