Pigneto

`Pasolini needed to live dangerously in every sense, this passionate, contradictory man. He didn't slum it in the slums - he lived there to learn the vital language of the poor, in order to remind Italian literature of its existence.' Paul Bailey

Pigneto is a small rione in the northwest side of Rome. It has been working class and called "gritty." Artists, immigrants, and also some extremist groups live in Pigneto. It's not far from the center, but it's a bit off the main track (and public transport). It is starting to become gentrified, no surprise.

The poet, novelist, and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini loved this area. Many of his movies were filmed here.

We will visit Pigneto and learn more about this area. The fringe is becoming the center. We'll visit an artists' collective and perhaps tour the Grauco cinema.

Here is the poem Greg Smith mentioned in class last week:

The Tears of the Excavator (Section II)

Poor as a cat in the Coliseum
I lived in a slum of limestone
and dust clouds, far from the city

and from the country, wedged each day
in a wheezing bus:
and every going, every return

was an ordeal of sweat and anxiety.
Long walks in the hot haze,
long dusks in front of my papers

piled on the table, amidst muddy streets,
low walls, small whitewashed shanties,
windowless, with curtains for doors...

The olive seller and ragman passed by,
coming from some other slum,
with dusty goods that seemed

the fruits of theft; and the cruel faces
of youths aged among the vices
of those with hardened and hungry mothers

Renewed by the new world,
free--a blast of heat, an indescribable
breath, gave a sense of serene piety

to that humble and squalid,
confused and immense reality,
swarming in the southern slums.

A soul within me, not merely my own.

a small soul in that boundless world,
grew, fed with the joy

of one who loved, though the love be unrequited.
And everything filled with the light of his love,
perhaps still the heroic love of a young boy.

yet matured by experience,
born at the foot of history.
It was the center of the world, in that world

of sad Bedouin slums,
of yellow prairies scoured
by a relentless, unquiet wind,

that came up form the warm sea of Fiumicino,
or from the plains, where the city
disintegrated amidst the hovels; in that world

that could be dominated only by the square sallow specter
in the sallow haze

of the Penitentiary, punched in by a thousand
identical rows of barred windows,
amidst old fields and sleepy farmhouses.

trash and dust were blindly tossed about by the breeze,
the poor echoless voices

of women come down from the Sabine
hills and the Adriatic, and here
encamped with swarms

of underfed, hardened and shrieking
children in tattered undershirts
and gray, sun-bleached shorts,

in the African sun, the restless rains

that turned the streets into muddy
torrents, the buses mired

at the end of the line in a corner
between a last strip of whitened grass
and some heap of rancid, fermenting garbage...

it was the center of the world,
as my love for it was at the center
of history: and in this

maturity, still growing, there was
love all the same, and everything was
on the verge of becoming clear--it was

clear! That slum, naked in the winds,
not Roman, not southern,
not working class, was life

in its clearest light:
life, and the light of life, full
in the chaos not yet proleterian,

as the rough newspaper of the
cell or the latest waving
of magazine would have it: bone

of daily existence,
pure, because so
close absolute because

all too miserably human.

translated by Patrick Barron, taken from An Anthology of Italian Environmental Literature (and Pier Paolo Pasolini: Selected Poetry), Italica Press: New York, 2003.