Vita di Pasolini

Life of Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini was not only a poet, a director, a writer, or an intellectual: he was a unique and unavoidable voice, a restless and rebellious body. It is precisely from that tortured body at the Ostia seaplane base on November 2, 1975, that Enzo Siciliano begins to tell the artistic and human journey of the author of Ragazzi di vita and Le ceneri di Gramsci.
Without yielding to sentimentality, Siciliano — who was a key figure in that unique period of postwar Italian culture and a friend and ally of Pasolini — retraces with clear precision his ideas and battles, his life always “on the tip of the sword”: from his Friulian childhood to the intensity of his Roman years, from the discovery of the subproletariat to his political and cultural engagement, up to the tragic death that still burns like an unhealed collective wound.
Siciliano offers an intimate yet public portrait of a man who was able to interpret and challenge Italy like few others, while also providing a psychological and literary study and a reflection on that crucial period in our country’s history, from the Resistance to the Years of Lead. Those were the years of which Pasolini became both a chronicler and a collective conscience, and ultimately a martyr — because, as Siciliano writes, “his death, perhaps, was the courageous way of asking the world to ‘know’ him, even when it no longer ‘wanted’ to.”
Life of Pasolini is not only a classic by a great author to be rediscovered, but also a book still essential for anyone who truly wants to understand who Pasolini was and why today we should continue to listen to his voice — and let ourselves be challenged by his ideas.