Dear manager, Saturday 9 April we will dedicate the twenty-first edition of the «Senato & ‘Cultura» cycle to Pier Paolo Pasolini, paying homage to his figure, in the hundred years since his birth, in an event where readings, films, music, choreography and testimonies will alternate. Doing justice to the whole kaleidoscope of the personality and art of the great Pasolini is almost impossible, but we will try to tie some threads of his memory and his thoughts back to our present. The writer Dacia Maraini – a great friend of the poet in a partnership of life and projects that also involved Alberto Moravia – will also help us in this – who will be with us to converse in the presence. It will be possible for everyone follow the event live on Rai3 starting at 10.55 on Saturday.
These weeks of setting up the demonstration were marked by terrible international events and, until just a month ago, unthinkable: war, with its load of specters, destruction and inhumanity has returned to the gates of Europe. And Europe has returned to come to terms with itself and its identity in the very days when, after being killed by another “invisible” enemy, the Covid pandemic, was painfully returning to normal.
But precisely this accelerated precipitate and intertwining of calamities, which makes Italians live with their nerves on edge and has been putting our families in difficulty for more than two years now, led me to wonder what Pasolini would have written – of Covid, of war, of economy – it was he who, from the columns of the Corriere della Sera, spoke on many issues and nodes of our country.
And he did it with a frankness and a depth at times bewildering. With a high gaze and reflection, without ever indulging in the controversy of the occasion.
His italics for the “Corriere”, which then became the volume of Corsair writings in the opera omnia, they are much more than a literary document.
His every word weighs and affects the dialogue with the Italians and Italy, which he loved so much and yet never gave up on prodding.
“War has never seemed so disgustingly awful to me as it does now: but have you never thought about what a human life is? », wrote Pasolini as early as 1943 in a letter to his friend Franco Farolfi. These are direct words, which echo in all their truth, precisely in these days when debates and multiple positions risk exasperating souls, while the images of women and children on the run, of hospitals under bombs, of many innocent victims appear in our homes.
Yes, what would Pasolini write about it today? Perhaps he would have looked with gratitude to Pope Francis, who on March 27, on the occasion of the Act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, entrusted the Ukrainian and also the Russian people in his prayer to the Virgin, divided by war but united by it. devotion. And he called for the elimination of nuclear devices. The moral revolt against all wars is one of the high points of this Pontificate, and it is not difficult to imagine that Pasolini would have united his own voice of a restless heretic, of “nightingale of the Catholic Church” (as the title of one of his early collection of poems states).
And again: if it is true that in recent years our watchwords have become “sustainability”, “ecological transition”, “circular economy”, it is also true that the ongoing war leads us to inexorably confronting ourselves on the link between black gold, gas and global powers, that Pasolini had described all too clearly in his latest work, perhaps the most visionary and prophetic, entitled not by chance Petrolium.
And finally allow me, kind director, to remember the Pasolini singer of the least, of the dispossessed, of marginalized and destitute people, whom he in a certain sense mythologized because he thought he understood them better than others.
The bare data of the statistics tells us that, even in an “affluent” society like ours, the area of citizens who live in poverty, or who in any case suffer situations of exclusion and painful distance from a dignified existence, has expanded in a disturbing way. .
These days the shortage of raw materials, not least food and the price of energy are affecting families, businesses and general prices, and therefore the lives of millions of Italians. It is certain that, if the negotiation does not prevail and the weapons are not silent, the many who already live in a disadvantaged situation will pay the price for the war social.
It was really in memorable italics, published August 1, 1975 in the Corriere della Sera, which Pasolini invited the official country – of institutions, finance, information – to deal with the most urgent problems in the life of Italians. A warning that is still alive and current.
On April 9, we will remember a great poet and author from the Italian Senate, so that the many questions he posed about our society and its real needs become our questions again.
The event on April 9 and the live Rai
A morning to remember Pier Paolo Pasolini on the centenary of his birth. On 9 April at Palazzo Madama the president of the Senate Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati (author of the text that we publish here) will dedicate the twenty-first appointment of «Senato & ‘Cultura» to one of the greatest Italian artists and intellectuals of the last century. Appointment at 10.55 for the “Tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini”, an event organized in collaboration with Rai which will broadcast live (on Rai 3) the event hosted by Serena Bortone. President Casellati will open the day. The notes of the Italian Anthem will resound, performed by the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Andrea Morricone, who will perform several times during the event. In the hemicycle there will be artists who will give voice to passages taken from various works by Pasolini: the actors Luca Bastianello and Giovanni Scifoni, the students of the National Academy of Dramatic Art “Silvio d’Amico”, the singer Giuliano Sangiorgi. During the celebrations, the writer Dacia Maraini will be interviewed: an excerpt from her book Dear Pier Paolo (edited by Neri Pozza) will be read by the actress Milena Vukotic. The event will close with the notes de Passion according to Matthew by Johann Sebastian Bach performed by the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra with the participation of the mezzo-soprano Lucia Napoli.
In the meantime, initiatives to celebrate the Pasolini century continue throughout Italy. The exhibitions are in progress in Rome The Orient by Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Casa del Cinema (until April 19) e Medea – The exhibition. Pasolini 100 at Pigneto at the Mameli Library (until May 5th). In Bologna, the Cineteca continues the review on Pasolini’s cinema (until May) and guided tours of the exhibition Figurative electrocutions (open until October 16). The exhibition is extended until May 1st at the Centro Studi Pasolini in Casarsa (Pordenone) Pasolini. The drawings in the lagoon of Grado, and guided tours continue every Sunday.
April 8, 2022 (change April 8, 2022 | 21:44)
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