"These are not human dwellings that are lined up on the mud, but pens for animals, kennels. Made from rotten planks, chipped walls, plates, waxed fabrics. As a door they often have just a dirty old curtain. Through the windows, no larger than a span, you can see the interiors: two cots that sleep five or six people, a chair, some jars. The mud also enters the house. (…) The door opens, a prostitute throws into the street, between the feet of the children, that they play there in front, the water from a basin, and right behind the client comes out. Some old women scream like bitches. After, suddenly, they laugh when they see a cripple crawling on the ground emerging from a burrow, which is a dump excavated within the thick wall of the aqueduct ".
I end the paragraph again, underlined, and I look up. It must be around here that scene from 1958. The aqueduct is lost towards infinity. In an archway there is an altar behind a padlocked fence. You can see the photos of two deceased, flowers, plants, a prayer that looks like an abracadabra to open the sky and a mirror. It is a box of the dead where not so long ago the living lived. Behind the hollow bricks, some shiny new buildings raised on the rubble. Rotten asphalt, the grass grows in curls. Rome.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was a prophet and a butcher. He understood and gutted a city that only outsiders like him, bolognese, they can decipher. Rome is an enigma for the Romans. They turned their houses and their neighborhoods into trenches, rediles, in which to settle to survive the surname of living in the eternal city. That city, the recognizable in compliments and postcards, is there, distant, the thousands of inhabitants of a ring periphery who contemplate a distant decoration point with their finger. Their poverty is a vice and the vices hide. There are no more barracks, they tiled the misery, but they continue, as alicia, the cobbled path of the old Roman roads that takes them back to their lives from the outskirts. In circle, digging a well.
"That is not Rome. Romans don't go there, that's for tourists. The Rome of the neighborhoods is something else. Romans come and go from work, after two hours of car, to go back to their lives, go down to the tavern ", explains Dino, a friend of a militant romanity, when you hear someone complain about the price of a glass of wine and pasta in a restaurant in the historic center.
They turned their houses and their neighborhoods into trenches, rediles, in which to settle to survive the surname of living in the eternal city
“Pasolini was prophetic in the years 60. He understood the sidereal distance between two cities that do not speak. We are a city of a thousand islands. The Romans, I am fourth generation, we are lazy and walking to another neighborhood seems like a trip ", explains to El Confidencial Irena Ranaldi, urban sociologist and president of the Ottavo Colle Association (eighth hill). The name refers to this eighth hill that is the unknown periphery and that Irene and her association teach to locals and foreigners. “With the pandemic we have made a multitude of views of Romans who, not being able to go elsewhere, have come to know their city. They are surprised to meet her. I often use Pasolini's writings as a reference ", Add.
"What is Rome? Which of all is rome? Where does Rome end and where does Rome begin? Rome is undoubtedly 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 (…) Wealth and misery, the happiness and horror of Rome are parts of a magma, a chaos. For the foreigner and the visitor, Rome is the city contained within its old Renaissance walls: the rest is vague and anonymous periphery not worth seeing. (…) Rome unknown to the tourist, ignored by the well-thought, non-existent on maps, it is an immense city ", collects a report from 1958 made by Pier Paolo Pasolini entitled "Journey through Rome and its surroundings" included in his compilation book The City of God. Is 1958 and could be signed today.
The collection of stories and articles collected in that manuscript, all in between 1950 and 1973, they are a spell in time. Pasolini's Rome, despite the change of skin of the city, despite the final boredom and disenchantment of the filmmaker with a bourgeoisie that threatened the rogue and free soul of the city that he loved to the point of tearing his life apart, still there, current, surviving the condemnation of not being able to raise her voice for the privilege of being buried among marbles.
A poem in jail
Pasolini, since he moved with his mother from Friuli to Rome one morning of the 28 January 1950, running away from an alcoholic father who was left sleeping in bed, lived in a city that was always exploring. "Poorer than a cat in the Colosseum", Pasolini wrote about his arrival in a capital that fascinated him from the first moment. That look at poverty would never leave her. Immersed in it, in that deep Rome, in his cocky dialect, in the townships (neighborhoods) born of that idea of fascism to recover the splendor of the capital of the Roman Empire. "Those neighborhoods are built on fascism. Mussolini wanted a boutique historic center to show off. The old houses are thrown away, the historic city empties, the one of the empire, to show it off. Its inhabitants are sent to the outskirts ", explains Ranaldi. The infection of the miserable Romans is then eradicated from the great Rome. The city is split.
One of those new neighborhoods is Rebibbia, peripheral, to the side of a jail, a poor town embedded on the edge of the city. Pasolini writes in 1966 a poem, Poet of the Ashes, from which comes this fragment that remembers those years:
"We live in a house without a roof and without plaster,
a poor house, in the last suburb, near a prison.
In summer there was a blanket of dust, and a swamp in winter.
But it was italy, a naked and in turmoil Italy,
with his boys, his women,
its smells of jasmine and poor soups,
the sunsets over the Aniene fields, the garbage heaps:
and, about my, my dreams of poetry intact ".
With one foot in hell and the other in a brothel, leaving the stench of the poor as an inheritance to his son
Today remains of that step, in the Piazzeta, a plaque that recalls that house where he lived, next to his father, who came to meet them again, and his mother, Susana, a suffering figure, always on guard, who buried her husband and two unborn children with damn luck. On the terrace of what seems to have been his home there are clothes hanging and the music of some foreigners is playing. Nearby there is a humble bar and two blocks away a flea market. And jail, Today without the screams and desperate voices of mothers who, when the pandemic began, went there to mourn the fate of their children locked up with an unknown virus from which they could not escape. What would Pasolini have narrated of those voices and those torn faces of these times? The prisons in Rome were always out. In Trastevere, then popular neighborhood that the filmmaker loved, there is a jail, Queen Coeli, in which mothers and wives climbed to the nearby and beautiful hill of Gianicolo and shouted communicated with their children and husbands. Roman soundtrack to tear the voice. The legend says that if you have not descended the steps at the entrance of that prison, you are not a true Roman.. "With one foot in hell and the other in a brothel, leaving the stench of the poor as an inheritance to his son ", Pasolini writes about this genetic condemnation. "Where does Trastevere end and where does the boy begin?", he wonders in his story "Boy and Trash".
Pier Paolo was always interested in that, the reverse, the hidden, life in song. A Caravaggio from the 20th century. Both, the Milanese painter and the Bolognese filmmaker, they discovered a city that was not theirs and they portrayed it to the horror of their neighbors. That is why they were rejected in their time, because the Romans suffer Rome in silence, and both decided to portray their miseries, their ugly faces, the cruel instinct of this city full of so much beauty. “When Pasolini portrayed that Rome, they were the years of economic splendor, from the arrival at the houses of televisions and washing machines. People did not want to look at that reality. Yes there is a similarity with Caravaggio ", explains Ranaldi.
The Pigneto: the tattooed genie
After that arcade of Via Mandrione at the beginning of this text, with its hollow aqueduct of life and death, there are some train tracks, and under the tracks a tunnel, dark and dirty, that leads to a neighborhood with a working-class tradition: the Pigneto. It is possible that Pasolini today hated him, that you will not like the certain cool air of its poverty and its repainted taverns, because it is possible that Pasolini's Pigneto no longer exists except in the graffiti on the walls that recall his work. Or not? There is a fine line between confusing a certain progress with a change of essence, in confusing the arrival of air conditioning with the false march of the sweat of the boilers. Sound compatible, in Rome they are compatible. His neighbors, in any case, They tattooed Pasolini on their walls so as not to forget where they came from and remind themselves that here tomorrow only existed when it was past. "They were wonderful days, in which the summer was still very pure, barely emptied a little inside, for his fury. Via Fanfulla from Lodi, in the middle of the Pigneto, with its low huts and cracked walls, it was of grainy grandeur, in its extreme smallness; a poor street, humble, unknown, lost in the sun, in a Rome that was not Rome ", wrote the director of the place where he recorded his first film, Beggar.
El Pigneto was then a poor neighborhood, peripheral, with that misery of that Rome of that time in which sins were exhibited as trophies. Pasolini portrayed him with the smell of chloroform and cheap cologne that permeated his streets full of time traders. Some of that stench remains today of that descent into hell that is the entire work of the Bolognese genius and that is summarized in a quote from the Divine Comedy that he includes in his first film: "And the angel from heaven took me, and the one from hell was screaming: Or you, Why do you deprive me of heaven?”.
The river of death
In the number 178 of Via Ostiense there is a river and a table with a tablecloth, two glasses and a kind of locket. "That night he did not have dinner, Pelosi had dinner. He ordered some spaghetti with garlic and chilli and a chicken and potatoes. Pasolini drank a beer ", Roberto Panzironi explains, the 64 years, the owner of the Al Biondo Tevere restaurant where Pasolini last dined on 1 November 1975 before being killed. He did it with Giuseppe Pelosi, your killer?, at least the culprit in the sentence, that first he said yes he did it and then no, leaving the doubt as to whether the Bolognese genius was murdered for sexual reasons, for a robbery, by homophobia, out of defense or because it is too uncomfortable for an Italian intellectual, close to communism, denounce the miseries of that corrupt and Christian democratic Italy. "He was an affable man, educated. He came with a lot of guys and with his movie staff. He spoke and people listened to him ", he remembers a Roberto who once served him and who played the role of his father, serving him at the last supper, in the Pasolini Movie, in which Willem Dafoe plays the filmmaker and writer. When you came with boys, did you openly show your homosexuality?? “No, in those days that was impossible ", he answers, watching the gray asphalt of the Tevere water pass by. At the end of that flow, Pasolini died, beaten to death, on the beach of Ostia.
Pasolini always loved the river, the Tevere, in the days when that water was a beach, a barn and a road. "Until the early 80 here was life, you saw boats and people bathed and fished under our terrace ", explains Roberto. The river was part of his films, of his stories and his poems: "Stinks of sheets spread on the alley balconies, human excrement on the stairs leading to the bank of the Tiber, to asphalt warmed by spring, but that heart seems and disappears glued to the bumpers of the trams, so far away that poverty and beauty are one ", write the Bolognese.
Today the river is a drain that divides the city. No boats, nor young people who bathe in its nooks. Is there some homeless camp, a vegetation that grows uncontrollably, mud, disused party barges, a peeling cycle track and, out, far from the open-air museum that is Rome at its center, where the Mausoleum of Hadrian is shaded, the Tiber Island or the Ghetto, garbage dumped in dumps.
The historic city gave itself over to a merchant bourgeoisie and a coarse nobility that drinks the city and burps
The historic city gave itself over to a merchant bourgeoisie and a coarse nobility that drinks the city and burps. "The Roman nobility were louts: 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 off their income ", says Pasolini in an interview in Il Messaggero in 1973. Did they dedicate themselves to living off the rents is a sentence applicable to a good part of that Rome that boasts of a city inherited ago 2000 years? What is the soul of Rome? How many Romans are there? Pasolini's, what is Caravaggio's, is there, perennial, full of all those fascinating flaws that the city hides. Nothing equals rome, in its strengths and weaknesses, that's his greatness.
There is a lot of beauty, cubic and bizarre, in neighborhoods like Centocelle, Testaccio, Garbatella, Pigneto, Rebibbia ..., but above all there is a lot of Rome, of a Rome that sees only a memory in the Colosseum or Piazza Navona. Pasolini was disenchanted because he thought it was fading, and maybe that was his only mistake, believe that the soul of this city could be destroyed: "Before the men and women of the suburbs did not feel any inferiority complex (…) They felt the injustice of poverty, but they were not envious of the rich. On the contrary, they considered them almost inferior, unable to adhere to his philosophy ". Rome.
