Where does Mastorna come from?

Essential information

• Project title: Il viaggio di G. Mastorna detto Fernet.
• Creator: Federico Fellini, with several drafts developed over time alongside his collaborators.
• Premise: Giuseppe Mastorna crosses a suspended, metaphysical city after an aviation incident.
• Status: unfinished and never filmed in a definitive form, despite years of preparation.
• Why it is famous: it is considered one of the great unrealized projects in Italian cinema.
• Critical mythology: it is often called Fellini’s “cursed film” because of its repeated delays and production blocks.
• Graphic-novel version: Fellini and Milo Manara transformed material connected to Mastorna into a visual narrative, giving it a life beyond cinema.
• Novelization: the project also received a prose adaptation connected to the same narrative world.
• Cultural legacy: Mastorna became a symbol of creative incompletion and of the imaginative force of Fellini’s cinema.

A short timeline

1. 1960s: Fellini develops Il viaggio di G. Mastorna detto Fernet as a film project.
2. Late 1960s–1970s: the film enters a long period of delays and uncertainty without reaching production.
3. Following decades: notes, drafts and accounts of the project feed the legend of the “film never made.”
4. Graphic-novel version: Fellini and Manara give Mastorna a new editorial life in comics.
5. Novelization: the story also enters prose through a work connected to the same world.
6. Today: Mastorna remains a central reference in discussions of unrealized Italian films.

Note

The material surrounding Mastorna is layered and comes from different sources: interviews, notes, the graphic novel and later editorial reconstructions. Dates and details may therefore vary between editions.