One of 20th-century Italy's foremost intellectuals, Pier Paolo Pasolini was born on the 5th of March 1922; and murdered in mysterious circumstances - perhaps (like Lorca) by fascists - on the 2nd of November 1975.

Although Pasolini was most famous outside Italy as a filmmaker of remarkable persuasiveness and ingenuity, as poet, novelist, anthologist and playwright he was also leader of the literary avante-garde.

The following quotations (which do not do justice to Pasolini's complex and enigmatic personality) come from:

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Siciliano, Enzo. Pasolini - a biography. London.

Bloomsbury Publishing, 1987. (435 pages)

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"In Pasolini the idealistic tension of the teacher was very strong - the sublimated form of a homoerotic drive [...] Pasolini [aged 22] opened a school for a handful of students in his home in Casara. Along with the Italian, Greek and Latin classics, he taught the children how to write Fruilian [dialect] poetry; the pure lyric and the villota. [...] The pupils were very young [...]"

[Page 75]

"There in Versuta [1945], Pier Paolo had met Tonuti Spagnol, a fourteen-year-old boy, the son of peasants. He gave him lessons, taught him to write verses, and Tonuti wrote a few poems. [...] Before Ninetto Davoli, Tonuti was Pier Paolo's true love, a love that was to end in later years when the boy became a man and the 'fragraqnce' of Versuta a painful memory."

[Page 85]

"Nineteen fourty-seven. Valavasone [...] A group photo: secondary school class - boys in short trousers, others in long trousers, gym shoes, sandals, with or without socks, clothing thrown together as was happening everywhere in the impoversihed Italy of the postwar period [...] This is Professor Pasolini's class [he is now 25]

[...details of his unorthodox teaching methods...] Such pedagogy certainly had unconscious, psycho-erotic roots - the teacher-pupil relationship is in any case a relationship imbued with eroticism. [...] Pasolini had an inkling that the narrative fable might help him to escape a tormenting, extremely private obsession. His life was dominated by the unconfessed anguish of knowing himself to be different. His teaching colleagues, like his friends in Bologna, had glimpsed no trace of this difference. The secret was well guarded, but this did not keep it from being demonstrated and expressed. The spring of 1948 brought a happy burst of creativity [...The novel...] 'Amado Mio' is a love story. Desidero, the hero with an all too programmatic name, is consumed with passion (a true case of love at first sight for a young boy, Benito, during a village festival [...more plot details...] Everything is told, represented. Pasolini wrote a true Alexandrian idyll, like something from the 'Palatine Anthology', on which he imprinted the happiness of a season innocently lived among the most complete eros."

[...] "It is the difference in age between the two characters, which Pasolini indicates and narrates, that makes love bitter and difficult. Desiderio is an adult, he is carried away by the innocence of his 'Iasis'; but that innocence, just because it is such, cannot help but defend itself from the threat of its own extinction."

[Pages 106-110]

[In Pasolini's next attempt at a novel] "dated 1948 and 1949, and entitled 'La Meglio Gioventu' [...] the priest, Don Paolo, in his activity as a teacher, conceives a secret homoerotic passion for a boy [...] especially in Don Paolo, a more insidiously biographical element comes to the surface. The priest - in a diary whose entries are interspersed in the narrative - show clearly the extent to which homosexuality was capable of arousing conflict and crisis in Pasolini's mind." [Later in the novel...] the young priest goes over to politcal action. He wants the beauty of these peasant boys to be kept intact. At the climax of the novel, the demonstration, he is killed by a shot fired by the police while sheilding the body of a young demonstrator with his own."

[Pages 119-122]

[Now involved in communist politics, Pasolini's love of boys becomes dangerous...] "Between July and August of that year of 1949 a priest had tried to blackmail Pasolini. The priest had picked up a woman go-between, and told Pasolini that he must give up his political life or his teaching career would be ruined. Pier Paolo's reply, also through the go-between, must have been a harsh one. [...] Pasolini was charged by the magistrate of San Vito al Tagliamento with corrupting minors and with lewd acts in public. [...] The denunciation robbed him of his teaching position. Not only did it disgrace him in his relationship with his pupils, which had been of the fullest and happiest kind, but it also destroyed his economic security."

[Page 137]

[Pasolini is forced to flee from the countryside to the backstreets of Rome...] "The literally transfigured homosexuality of 'Amado Mio' seems to become raw and real in the promiscious Rome of little neighborhood cinemas, the human clusters clinging to the hand rails of buses, the busting vitality of the little shoeshine boys." [...] The buses that cross the centre of Rome from Monteverde to the Termini station, the pissoirs [public toilets] along the Tiber - Pasolini writes of everything: chestnut vendors and kids playing football, boys who go out stealing in order to buy themselves a blue sweater, or who descend under the bridges to play hustler with a 'faggot'. The sun is 'frothy and shining', the hair of boys 'fiercely and softly waved,' little boys run 'lightly, their trousers rubbed by the thirsty air'."

[Page 156]

[1951 sees him teaching once again, thanks to communist contacts...] "in a special secondary school in Campino [...] the ruined school was on the far outskirts of the city, a violent and individualistic world, indifferent to politics. Pier Paolo's pupils were between the ages of eleven and thirteen, children from sub-proletarian families living a hand-to-mouth existence." [Page 163] "Pier Paolo, at the time, had a look of a permature beatnik. In an effort to attract the boys, he was competing with them in his physical appearance. Thier reward was a pizza or a pair of shoes, that was all. And the boys were little rascals, or little monsters, whom he found beautiful. The features they had in common were curls dangling from their foreheads, a 'rogueish' smile, a vitality that sprang suddenly out of torpor - the specific traits that were to be combined, years later, in Ninetto Davoli. The 'beauty' of these boys constituted an infraction of every canon, whether the obviously bourgeois canon or the decadent one. Pasolini's conception of beauty was wholly his own. It was a beauty made up of dirty ears and necks, of coarse and tender movements [...]

[Page 167]

[1963] "For all the despair, there was in Pier Paolo considerable room for the joy of life. This joy became concrete in those years, when he met Ninetto Davoli [then 14-years-old, but very soon 15] In this young boy, with his slight and skinny build, pimples on his face, kinky hair, and incredibly 'merry' eyes, there was a humanity that differed from the cynical and relaxed attitude that constituted the morality of the ordinary shantytown dweller. [...] Pier Paolo fell in love with him. He fell in love as a father, as a friend, sweeping away the ties of competitiveness that occasionally tied him to boys.

[Pages 284-285]

[Davoli inevitably grew up, and eventually got married. He was replaced (in 1972) by Claudio...] "In the village of Chia, Pasolini met a boy, the son of peasants - a curly-haired youth with a pimpled face, almost a new Ninetto. [...]

[Page 383]

ends.