Saturday 12 March the second issue of the series dedicated to PPP in the centenary of his birth. Eur, Trastevere, Pigneto, Monteverde …: the writer and the capital
There was no choice on my part, but a kind of compulsion of fate: and since everyone testifies to what they know, I could only testify to the Roman village, wrote Pier Paolo Pasolini in one of the texts collected in Stories from the city of Godthe volume, edited by Walter Siti for Guanda, which collects Roman stories and chronicles from 1950 to 1966. They are written published in magazines and newspapers that they narrate the city around the writer through the different forms that the PPP itself has practiced: literature, cinema, photography, reportage, because no one has been able to mix, handle, experiment and reinvent genres and languages as much as he was.
That volume also contains the historical-urbanistic definition of the main set of the diptych Life boys e A violent life. In the second novel, which arrives on newsstands on Saturday 12 March with Corriere della Sera in the series celebrating its centenary, Pasolini abandons the corality of the first to concentrate an exemplary, fierce and violent individual odyssey in the story of the protagonist Tommaso. the condition of being different, of excluded experienced by the same writer; but the centrifugal force that from the center dragged him towards the periphery, from a personal and literary point of view, the engine of the narration. The township, Pasolini writes, an agglomeration born from the Fascist eviscerations that did not obey only an aesthetic-D’Annunzio ideal, obviously: but were – in essence – police operations. The writer continues: Strong contingents of Roman underclass, swarming in the center, in the ancient gutted neighborhoods, were deported in the middle of the countryside, in isolated neighborhoods, built not by chance as barracks or prisons. the style of the hamlet: the background, of a classical, imperial type, but what is typical is the obsessive repetition of the same architectural motif: the same house repeated in a row five, ten, twenty times.
The discovery – in 1950, when he moved from Friuli to the capital with his mother – of that humanity still in a humble and dirty, confused and immense reality, the contact with the underclass and all its peculiarities, starting with a regressed language whose adoption is an undaunted declaration of love towards the real world ( as Gianfranco Contini wrote), brings with it a sort of mythical statute that aggregates what was visceral and ideological, sublime and trivial in PPP.
At the beginning Pasolini, who was and liked to call himself Bolognese, lived with his mother Susanna in Piazza Costaguti, in the Ghetto. That of the streets around the Portico of Octavia was at the time a very beautiful and cheerful Rome, which offered continuous adventures. Sandro Penna also wandered in those streets, like Kavafis in Alexandria in Egypt, recalling Nico Naldini, cousin, friend, companion of the writer, in an interview with Antonio Debenedetti published in Corriere della Sera in November 2000 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of death. Naldini reconstructed the Roman wanderings of PPP: after the Ghetto, when his father Alberto joined his wife and son, the Pasolini went to live in Ponte Mammolo, a working-class village where there was a lot of misery but it was not the misery of the underclass. Then Monteverde, first in via Fonteiana in a popular residence, and then in via Carini, in the same well-to-do and middle-class building where the family of the poet Attilio Bertolucci was staying, and finally Eur. But Pasolini also knew Ciampino well, where the Abruzzese dialect poet Vittorio Clemente, grateful to the writer who had included him in his anthology, helped him find a place in a recognized middle school.
On the way from Ponte Mammolo to school, PPP wrote the verses of The Ashes of Gramscthe. The boys of Trastevere belong to that stupendous and miserable city, where it still appears sweet in the evening; the Pigneto where it turns Beggar (Via Fanfulla da Lodi, with its low huts and cracked walls, was of a grainy grandeur, in its extreme smallness; a poor, humble, unknown street, lost under the sun, in a Rome that was not Rome); Casal Bertone and the Quadraro which form the background a Mom Rome; the lungoteveri, with that scent of distant asphalts (the Pincio, Corso Trieste, the Citt Giardino, the southern districts), of rubbish, fragrant herbs and pisciatoi mentioned in the story Glimpses of Roman nightscontained in the volume Al blue-eyed.
And naturally the Idroscalo of Ostia where the most discussed, commented and opposed writer of the twentieth century is killed on November 2, 1975, almost offered to true death, as Pietro Citati wrote the next day in Corriere della Sera, the atrocious and unmotivated death, not the slow and peaceful death that we endure in our polite beds.
The series: 21 issues, every Saturday until July 23rd
A series created by Corriere della Sera in collaboration with Garzanti and Guanda, which offers 21 works by Pier Paolo Pasolini on newsstands: one a week, from Saturday 5 March, the exact day of the centenary of his birth (each issue at € 8.90 in addition to cost of the newspaper). The Pasolini library, inaugurated with the novel Life boysproposed with a text by Emanuele Trevi and a preface by Vincenzo Cerami, continues on Saturday 12 March with the second novel, A violent life, with a preface by Giuseppe De Robertis. The collection will continue proposing every week, until 23 July, many works of Pasolini’s production, with collections of editorials on customs and politics (Saturday 19 March, it will be the turn of the Corsair writingsa collection of articles that Pier Paolo Pasolini published between 1973 and 1975 in the Corriere della Sera, Tempo illustrated, Il Mondo, Nuova Generazione and in the Roman daily newspaper Paese Sera), the famous travel diaries (on the 26th will arrive in news kiosk The smell of India), short stories (the posthumous diptych my love will be available on 9 July with the preface by the poet Attilio Bertolucci) and also collections of reviews (le Lutheran letterson newsstands April 2), poetic syllogs (The ashes of Gramsci will be released on April 16). And then the theater, collections of reviews, political essays, short stories (Al blue-eyedwith an introductory text by Cristina Taglietti, May 14), film scripts (il Gospel according to Matthew will have the preface by Paolo Mereghetti, May 28) and more. All complemented by important prefaces and with the original covers created by Studio XxY.
March 11, 2022 (change March 11, 2022 | 20:29)
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