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 off Piazza Costaguti in the city’s Jewish ghetto. Feelings of alienation, of moral and physical boundaries, were no doubt encouraged in Pasolini by the claustrophobic nature of the 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, to an extent, still is) a world to itself.
From a sexual as well as a literary point of view, Rome proved a revelation. In those post-war years, the city’s outlying districts retained something of the unspoiled, semi-rural atmosphere of “l’Italietta” (Italy’s little homelands). Migrants newly arrived from the South brought with them 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 decisively 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.
Pasolini’s complicated, often polemical relationship with Rome is not easily understood without prior knowledge of the borgate. 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 Pelosi 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.