Maestro Nino Rota is best known for the seventeen film soundtracks he composed for the great Italian director Federico Fellini. These date from "The White Sheik" in 1952 to "The Orchestra Rehearsal" twenty-seven years later. Along the way the composer and director forged a singular creative partnership, capturing the absurdities and romances of Italian provincial life, of the circus and the street parade, of nightclubs and cafes, complimented by that indefinably nostalgic quality that is so characteristic of Rota"s work. To Fellini, Nino Rota contributed scores for such masterpieces of European cinema but his greatest international success came in 1972 with the music he created for Francis Ford Coppola"s "The Godfather". Rota s soundtrack for Coppola"s epic would prove to be one of the most enduringly popular in film history, but there was also controversy; Rota"s score being removed at the last minute from the list of 1973 Academy Award nominees when it was discovered that he had used the theme in Eduardo De Filippo"s 1958 comedy "Fortunella", and therefore the music for The Godfather was deemed ineligible for an Oscar. Nino Rota s original music for "Fortunella"- that would re-emerge as the famous love theme in the Godfather - is included in this set along with themes from all of the Fellini feature films of the fifties that established him as a major new directorial voice.