Excerpt from Fellini: A Life by Hollis Alpert

Federico avoided serving in the war by having his medical staff friends grant him "sick leaves." Unfortunately, when the time came for his certificate to be renewed, German officers were now overseeing the examination procedures. Avoiding the war would not be so easy:

“Fellini was still determined to be rejected on medical grounds. He went to the military hospital an hour early, and spent the time running up and down four flights of stairs as fast as he could. When his name was called out, he sprinted to the examination room, sweating, weak in the knees, his heart pounding. Hoping that in this condition his heart would reveal a murmur or a valve leak, he faced the inquisitors sitting behind a green baize-covered table. And at precisely that moment the shriek of air-raid sirens was heard over Bologna.
Almost at once, two hundred Flying Fortresses began dumping their bomb loads. The hospital was hit, badly damaged, and the examination team disappeared in the wreckage. Fellini, luckily, emerged from the debris with only minor scratches. Somehow, he found himself out on the street and running---running through ruins. “Suddenly I was alone in the open country on a road lined with farms. I could hear the crescendo of exploding bombs behind me. People were screaming. Church bells were tolling. Airplanes were droning in. The heavy odor of death was in the air…A lifetime is not enough to forget it.”
He received no more draft notices after that experience, which brought home to him the full nature of war, its horrors and murderousness. Apparently, his military records had been destroyed in the bombing. He returned to Rome, where he continued writing for radio. While still at Marc’ Aurelio he had written several sketches around two marrieds he named Cico and Pallina. He then used the sketches and the characters as the basis for a radio series sponsored by a perfume company. Cast for the role of Pallina was a young actress who was then still studying at the University of Rome and acting in an experimental theater.
Federico and Giulietta have given differing versions of their meeting. Fellini’s is that he had not met the young woman playing Pallina on radio but came across a picture of her in Radiocorriere, a weekly devoted to news of radio and its personalities. So struck was he by the remarkable embodiment of his Pallina that he decided to telephone her and invite her to lunch.
Giulietta agrees about the telephone call and the lunch, but she claims that there had already been talk about making Cico and Pallina into a film, and that Fellini was concerned about the casting. “He called me on the phone and asked for my photograph in order to decide whether they could use me in the film. A few days later we met and discussed plans for the film.”
Another time, she said: “He telephoned me one day, and he said, ‘My name is Fellini and I am fed up with life, but before I die I would like to see what my heroine looks like.’ I though he might be joking, but I couldn’t risk having a corpse on my conscience.”
--From Fellini: A Life by Hollis Alpert