“It might make one in love with death”, declared Shelley, “to be buried in so
sweet a place.” Keats, on his deathbed, hearing that daisies and anemones
grew wild on the graves there, rejoiced, saying that he “already felt the
flowers growing over him”. They were referring to the Protestant Cemetery in
Rome, which could be a churchyard in the English counties were it not for
the cypresses and cicadas. It is appropriate that Shelley, with his Romantic
proto-socialism, should lie here a few tombs from Antonio Gramsci, the grand
theoretician of Italian Marxism and co-founder, in 1921, of the Partito
Comunista Italiano – the now defunct PCI. Later, this drowsy place became
the setting for one of the most audacious poems written in Italy since the
Second World War: “The Ashes of Gramsci”, by the writer and filmmaker Pier
Paolo Pasolini.
Published in 1952, Pasolini’s verse epic championed the disinherited and
damned of post-war Italy, and allied Gramsci’s intellectual Leftism with a
Franciscan Catholicism. (Blessed are the poor, for they are exempt from the
unholy Trinity of materialism, rationalism and property.) The poem, written
in a Dantesque terza rima, revived the Italian tradition of nationalist
“civil poetry”, which speaks in personal terms of Italy’s history and
politics. Alone in the cemetery, Pasolini addresses his “civil message” to
the prostitutes along the Tiber and the scrap-metal merchants of Testaccio.
His solidarity with sub-proletarian Rome was at heart romantic, and in the
poem he can only compare it to the youthful idealism of Shelley, who drowned
off the Italian coast in 1822:
. . . Ah, how well
I understand, silent in the wind’s wet
humming, here where Rome is silent,
among wearily agitated cypresses,
next to you, Spirit whose inscription calls out
Shelley . . . . How well I understand the vortex
of feelings, the capricious fate (Grecian
in the aristocratic Northern traveller’s
heart) which swallowed him in the dazzling
turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea: the carnal
joy of adventure, aesthetic
and boyish –
(from Poems, translated by Norman MacAfee with Luciano Martinengo, 1984).
The doleful cemetery music conceals a notion of death as a way to spiritual
redemption. “Mo’ sto bene” – “I’ll be all right now”, cries the thief-hero
of Pasolini’s first, great Roman film, Accattone (1961), as he lies dying
after a road accident. Pasolini’s own wretched end was foreshadowed in his
work. On the morning of November 2, 1975, on the outskirts of Rome, he was
found beaten beyond recognition and run over by his Alfa Romeo. A woman had
noticed something in front of her house. “See how those bastards come and
dump their rubbish here”, she complained.
Pasolini was murdered by a rent boy called Pino (“Joey the Toad”) Pelosi – a
homosexual assignation gone fatally wrong. Or was Pasolini the victim of a
political assassination? His presumed killer, it emerged, was in league with
the Italian neo-Fascist party; a verdict is still open on the case. Pasolini
was fifty-three. The scene of his death, the shanty town of Idroscalo near
Fiumicino airport, recalls a setting for one of his Roman films; shacks lie
scattered across a blackened beach and in the distance rise the tenement
slums of Nuova Ostia.
Though Pasolini was born in Bologna (in 1922), Rome was the place where the
writer in him was born; it provided him with material for the novel that
made him famous. Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi), published in Italy in 1955,
is made up of a series of vignettes from the Roman underworld. It recounts
the adventures of a gang of youths who subsist on the city outskirts by
thieving and pimping. Its street violence was to find more ample expression
in Pasolini’s films of the classical Greek myths, Oedipus Rex (1967) and
Medea (1970), which starred Maria Callas. His earliest movies, however, were
scripted in Roman dialect to remind Italy of a language it had largely
ignored. It was part of his lifelong polemic against what he called “la
lingua dei padroni”.
After graduating in literature from Bologna University in 1943, Pasolini moved
with his parents to Casarsa, a small town in Friuli near the Yugoslavian
border. Friuli was the birthplace of Pasolini’s mother, and his attachment
to the region was an extension of his profound love for Susanna Pasolini.
His earliest poems were written in Friulian dialect; the poor farming
communities of Friulian-speaking peasants would thus become “historically
self-aware”; and he, Pasolini, would be the acknowledged legislator of their
awareness. This might have been the specious delusion of a young man of
letters, had Pasolini not discovered the works of Gramsci.
In 1948, eleven years after Gramsci had died in a Fascist jail, his Quaderni
del carcere were published in Turin. Gramsci’s “prison notebooks” would
influence not only the future policies of the PCI but the entire
intellectual Left in post-war Italy. Close to his heart was the question of
a “popular nationalist literature”, which would incorporate marginalized
Italian peoples and their dialects, and enrich the standard literary Italian
consolidated by Alessandro Manzoni in his nineteenth-century novel I
promessi sposi. Pasolini’s ambition was to substitute the lives and language
of the Friulian poor for those of the Roman sub-proletariat.
His early days in Casarsa were dogged by scandal. In 1949, Pasolini was
charged with “corruption of minors and obscene acts in a public place”. What
exactly happened is unclear, although the scandal was presumably linked to
his homosexuality. Pasolini was acquitted through lack of evidence but the
after-effects were drastic. The Casarsa edition of the Communist L’Unità
newspaper denounced Pasolini as a “bourgeois deviationist” whose fall from
grace had been caused by an “unhealthy interest” in the novels of André
Gide. Pasolini was expelled from the Casarsa branch of the PCI, and in the
winter of 1949 he fled with his mother to Rome, “as in a novel”, he later
recollected. The decision was taken without consulting his father, Carlo
Alberto, an alcoholic infantry officer who had served in East Africa under
Mussolini, and who was left behind in Friuli.
On his arrival in Rome, Pasolini began to write the first draft of Ragazzi di
vita and completed Roma 1950: Diario, a sort of “book of hours” composed of
fifteen short poems in rhymed hendecasyllables – the Italian equivalent of
blank verse. (As a metricist Pasolini was a traditionalist.) Perhaps it was
inevitable that the twenty-seven-year-old “Rimbaud lacking in genius”, as he
mockingly styled himself, should begin his Roman days among the
traditionally despised and persecuted in a run-down flat in the Jewish
ghetto. Feelings of alienation, of moral and physical boundaries, were no
doubt encouraged in Pasolini by the claustrophobic nature of the city’s
Jewish quarter. Hemmed in by the Tiber and via Arenula on one side, and
Largo Argentina and via del Teatro di Marcello on the other, the ghetto was
(and still is) a world to itself.
From a sexual as well as a literary point of view, though, Rome proved a
revelation. In those post-war years, the city’s outlying districts retained
the unspoiled, semi-rural atmosphere of “l’Italietta” (Italy’s little
homelands). Migrants newly arrived from the South brought their own
moralities and dialects; Pasolini documented these with ethnographic
exactitude. From the “Christian North” of Italy he believed he had arrived
in the “pagan” Centre-South, a world of “solar vitality” whose “archaic”
values were thrillingly opposed to those of the bourgeois capitalist North.
Pasolini’s life changed in the summer of 1951, when he moved with his mother
to the Roman borgata (suburban district) of Ponte Mammolo, and began his
sainted exile in the outskirts of the city. There is undoubtedly something
pejorative about the word borgata. It derives from borgo, meaning “village”,
but has come to mean a section of a city sprawled into the countryside,
neither rural nor urban, but a midway zone of high-rises and fields, often
blighted by crime. In Pasolini’s day, many Italians were unaware that such a
“zozzo mondo” (filthy world) existed.
His complicated, often polemical relationship with Rome cannot be understood
without prior knowledge of the borgate, argues John David Rhodes in his
fascinating study of Pasolini’s Rome, Stupendous, Miserable City. The
periphery of Rome began to grow in 1925, when Mussolini declared that the
centre must “appear ordered and powerful, as in the days of the first empire
of Augustus”. Accordingly, the medieval and Renaissance houses and alleys
round St Peter’s, the Colosseum and the Forum were demolished to make way
for “Mussolini modern” buildings with stone wolf motifs and other
pseudo-Roman insignia. Those made homeless by the demolitions were
transported to housing estates on the outskirts, which Mussolini had ordered
his architects to build “rapidissime”, overnight.
Pasolini’s seventeen-year-old assassin came from one of these borgate –
Tiburtino III. Built in 1935 on marshland, Tiburtino III is still
periodically flooded by the Aniene, a tributary of the Tiber, its
Fascist-era tenement blocks now blanched ochre, with peeling green shutters.
The tenements are not the “human habitations” promised by Fascism, “but
coves of disease, of violence, malavita and prostitution”, in the words of
Pasolini. Yet the outskirts, strewn with broken washbasins, chicken coops,
prams, shoes and old tyres sprouting poppies, present a characteristically
Pasolinian pasticcio of the poetic and the squalid.
Ponte Mammolo lies north-east of the city centre along the Via Tiburtina,
which runs east from Termini station into the countryside past Rome’s most
congested industrial zones, before snaking its way into the Tivoli hills. It
is dominated by the municipal prison of Rebibbia, a giant concrete rectangle
pierced by rows of barred windows. From his “Rebibbia house”, as Pasolini
called his home at 3 via Tagliere, he mapped out his second Roman novel, Una
vita violenta (1959, A Violent Life), a didactic work in which the hero
renounces the consumerist utopia of house, family and job in order to join
forces with the PCI.
Pasolini’s Rome was not an aesthete’s fantasy, Rhodes argues convincingly, but
a real place recorded on celluloid with a gritty “news-reel” immediacy.
Accattone, a work of astounding sensory realism, unfolds amid junkyards and
rubbish tips near Pietralata borgata. It remains one of the great works of
post-war Italian cinema, a film whose documentary verismo influenced Martin
Scorsese as well as the young Bernardo Bertolucci, who was at that time
Pasolini’s assistant cameraman.
Accattone (“Beggar” in Roman dialect) is a familiar Pasolini hero, a pimp but
also a potential martyr or grubby saint out of Caravaggio. Much has been
made of the Baroque iconography in Pasolini’s cinema. At the end of Mamma
Roma (1962), the low-life hero lies stretched out on a prison bed like a
dead Christ by Caravaggio or Mantegna. The implied blasphemy of Caravaggio’s
offensively barefoot Christs and Virgin Marys excited the iconoclast in
Pasolini. His third Roman film, the forty-minute La ricotta (1963), starring
Orson Welles, led to a suspended prison sentence for Pasolini on blasphemy
charges. (Over a tableau vivant inspired by Baroque paintings of the
Deposition, Welles cries out: “Get those crucified bastards out of here!”)
Mamma Roma, more than any of Pasolini’s films, caught the new mood in Italy as
the economic miracle of the 1960s brought chewing gum, Coca-Cola, jeans and
other trappings of American-style consumerism to the borgate. Mamma Roma,
played by Anna Magnani, is a Roman prostitute determined to do well for her
teenage son Ettore. With enough money, she promises him, they can move into
a respectable neighbourhood inhabited by Italians “de n’altro rango”, of
another rank. Ettore only sinks deeper into Rome’s thieving underworld, and
eventually dies a martyr’s death. The film’s final shot is of a series of
high-rise complexes near Cecafumo (an expanse of wasteland off the via
Tuscolana) like great bare concrete dominoes. The reward, Pasolini seems to
be saying, for Rome’s new-found affluence.
In his final years, Pasolini wrote a series of often savage newspaper polemics
attacking drug abuse, long hair, offensive advertising and anything else
that contributed, however marginally, to what he saw as the erosion of the
moral codes and ideals of his adored pre-industrial Italy. A curiously
old-fashioned Pasolini emerges from these famous “lettere alle romani”.
Pasolini’s most zealous attacks were directed at television, which he
believed was replacing Italy’s multifarious dialects with a consumer
Esperanto of garbled Americanisms and other linguistic imports. So much so,
he wrote in 1974, that if he wanted to make Accattone again he would not be
able to do so, as the Roman dialect of the original had all but disappeared.
Pasolini gave the name “aphasia” to the phenomenon.
Disillusioned, he turned to the Third World for inspiration. The Cappadocia of
Medea or the Yemen of The Arabian Nights (1974) are like visually exquisite
versions of Flaubert’s Salammbô – cinematic flowerings of European
decadence. After a ten-year residency in Monteverde Nuovo (a middle-class
district situated behind the Janiculum), Pasolini moved to Esposizione
Universale Roma (EUR), a smart Roman suburb built, ironically, by Mussolini
for the international exhibition of 1940. He bought a Maserati to add to his
white Alfa Romeo, and now dismissed the Roman poor as “odiosi”, even
“orribili”; they had lost their innocence to the miracolo italiano and
become greedy for material gain.
Much of Pasolini’s journalism from the 1970s was collected in the posthumous
volume Descrizioni di descrizioni, now reissued with an introduction by the
Turin-based critic, and friend of Primo Levi, Giampaolo Dossena. Scholarly
appreciations of Italo Calvino Alberto Moravia and Leonardo Sciascia combine
with reflections on Dostoevsky and the “Crepuscular” poet Giovanni Pascoli.
The Caravaggio scholar Roberto Longhi is hailed as a “true maestro”, whose
historic exhibition of the painter’s work at Milan in 1951 inspired
Pasolini’s poetic transfigurations of Rome.
Yet, for all the marvellous variety of his literary journalism, Pasolini could
not escape his public image as a commentator on Italy’s troubled political
life. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, his last (and least appealing) film,
was released in 1975, shortly after his murder, and is a violent critical
essay on Italy’s Nazi-Fascist past. The exuberance of Pasolini’s early Roman
films has gone; Salò is the work of a dispirited man. If Rome has changed,
however, the value of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s achievement has not.
John David Rhodes
STUPENDOUS, MISERABLE CITY
Pasolini’s Rome
194pp. University of Minnesota Press. $60 (paperback, $20).
978 0 8166 4930 3
Pier Paolo Pasolini
DESCRIZIONI DI DESCRIZIONI
Edited by Graziella Chiarcossi
622pp. Milan: Garzanti. ¤22.
978 88 11 67523 5
Ian Thomson’s Primo Levi: A Life won the W. H. Heinemann Award 2003.
His book on Jamaica, The Dead Yard: Tales of modern Jamaica, is forthcoming.
great article on pasolini, he was a great poet, filmmaker,novelist and more. He was for the everyman and the "sub" common man who was not afraid of dialects. he embraced them instead of attaching inappropriate stigmas to them. great article!!
ps. (zozzo mondo) is actually (sozzo mondo)
jesse, houston, texas