Every book can be summarized in 6 paragraphs….
- Altamarea Editorial. Edition 2019
- Author: Pier Paolo Pasolini
- Book for interested in: life in the Rome of sweeps and not of postcards.
- What will? Anthology of articles and stories by the Friulian filmmaker about his adopted city, Rome, in the decade of the 50 and 60.
Paragraph 1
"What is Rome? Which of all is rome? Where does Rome end and where does Rome begin? Rome is without a doubt the most beautiful city in Italy, if not from the world. But it is also the ugliest, the most welcoming, the most dramatic, the richest, the most miserable (…) Rome unknown to the tourist, ignored by the well-thought, non-existent on maps, It is a huge city
This paragraph serves to frame this interesting work. The author talks about a city that barely appears in travel books that focus on the city's overwhelming art and history.. But that is a Rome of tourists and postcards, the Rome of the inhabitants is something else that Pasolini dissects in this book.
Paragraph 2
In a pizzeria, while around him the village night of Rome condenses, Some young people order wine and the waiter is ready to let the quarter of an hour necessary for his institutional indifference pass before serving them..
Everyone who has lived in Rome knows that particularity of the Roman character that Pasolini describes. A kind of laziness or neglect, which is sometimes interpreted as bad manners, that has marked the destiny of a dazzling city forgotten by its own neighbors.
Paragraph 3
It reeks of sheets hanging on alley balconies, human excrement on the stairs leading to the bank of the Tiber, to asphalt warmed by spring, but that heart appears and disappears stuck to the bumpers of trams, so far away that poverty and beauty are one thing.
The Tiber remains 50 years later an abandoned river, where in the center you can find drug addict syringes, appliances and garbage thrown on its margins. And none of all that, surprisingly, is capable of ending the spell and beauty of a flow surrounded by history.
Paragraph 4
The Roman countryside is full of suburbs like these, approximately at the height of the ring road. They are suburbs of poor people, but, general, honest and hardworking; very often they are emigrants, or from nearby Lazio or from the central regions, that have brought to the chaos of the capital and the small chaos of its suburbs a habit of seriousness and rural dignity of an ancient province.
That description of Pasolini is 1958. Many of these suburbs have been swallowed up or surrounded today by the immense city., with an illogical extension that takes it from the mountains to the sea having inherited as a city what was the Old Vatican State before Reunification. Those neighborhoods, as the filmmaker pointed out almost seventy years ago, They are towns and they function as such. A peculiarity that was baptized as Caput Mundi (head of the world) It is an absolutely provincial city.
Paragraph 5
The Mandrione is one of these: At the end of via Casilia, shortly before Quadraro, There is an aqueduct under whose arches the road passes (…) These are not human dwellings that line the mud, but rather pens for animals., kennels. Made from rotten planks, chipped deaths, plates, waxed fabrics. As a door they often have just a dirty old curtain. Through the small windows no larger than a span you can see the interiors: two cots, which sleep five or six people, a chair, some jars. The mud also enters the house.
Few images can better summarize Roman duality than the use of the archway of an old medieval aqueduct as substandard housing for thousands of people.. Pasolini, a homosexual intellectual in a conservative and anarchist Rome at the same time, He always places his gaze on that decadent city in which he immersed himself.
Paragraph 6
It is the most ignorant nobility in the world. So it is not even an aesthetic choice.. Maybe it has started to be in recent years: But when it comes to the past, I think it depended on a fact as simple as that they were jerks.: they never read anything, they never wrote anything, they never contributed anything to the culture, they weren't even patrons, which is a way of understanding culture. They dedicated themselves to living from their income, in the most absolute isolation. Mix with the people, in such a state of things, it becomes an exercise in snobbery.
Pasolini was a convinced communist who left disenchanted with a city that he understood was becoming gentrified and losing its working-class character.. At the end of the book, before he was murdered right in the middle of that buried Rome in which he wandered, his disappointment with a city that he does not recognize shines through. The execution he carried out on the Roman nobility, its upper classes, It is also quite current. The Great Beauty movie, by Paolo Sorrentino, he portrays her with the same crudeness with which Pasolini did in June 1973.
| Style | 8,50/10 |
| Content | 9,00/10 |
| Valoración | 8,75/10 |
