My most recent discovery is Belli, and it is certainly one of my greatest, given that it has coincided with my discovery of Rome. It is a discovery I share, not without pride, by analogy (and perhaps due to certain affinities, even if I do not possess a hundredth of his natural abilities) with the portentous Gadda. I identify Belli’s poetry, like Rome, with a certain mixture of facility and violence: In it, he decants the manner of speaking of common people, who express themselves within certain patterns of linguistic forms (which they would never violate, even in their most joyful moments, at the cost of their honor) into a new form of linguistic invention. This invention consists of Belli’s selective treatment of reality, in the dramatic duration, in the style of Caravaggio, of his fourteen hendecasyllabic lines. If someone today attempted to imitate his manner, he would be performing a work of literary criticism rather than one of poetry. Between the common man of 1833–34 and today’s common man lies the entire history of Italy, comprising a radical change in his way of life. It is true that in Rome it is still more accurate to speak of “plebeian folk” (the aristocratic plebe of the Trastevere, of the suburbs, etc.) than of a proletariat, and that many linguistic particularities have remained intact (for example the terms of obscene language within the confines of that conservative linguistic island that is sexual life, which in Rome is anything but secret). Even so, an evolution has taken place. The Bellian types who operate today in Rome (except for people like Mario Dell’Arco, who in attempting to distance themselves from Belli return to him through their gusto for words cut off from their meaning) are practically tone deaf. Belli could hear an infinity of new allocutions among his inhabitants of Trastevere and Borgo Pio, including those who had been forced by the Fascist demolitions to emigrate to the suburbs of Primavalle, Quarticciolo, Tiburtino, and Pietralata, where they formed new linguistic and moral areas, slightly beyond the inflamed modernity of Trastevere and Borgo, and mixed in with the oafs just arrived from Cassino, Puglia, Emilia Romagna, and Sardinia. Given the subversive, exhibitionistic, open nature of the Roman “man of the people,” toughened in his joy, he conforms with a conscientiousness not found in speakers from any other city to the types found in the “commedia romana”:69 the dritto, the malandro, the fijo de na mignotta, the greve, etc.70 Belli must have lifted many of his verses directly from reality, but without violence, referring back to the direct, real interests of his hoarse and slightly liquored up speaker. His skepticism derived from a common, sensual tension. Belli offers no theories; on the other hand, it is easy to perceive the lack of realism of the hendecasyllabic verse reproduced by Cesare Pascarella from the account of the patriot Mancini71 (in Il Gandolin’s72 Gli uomini che ho conosciuto73 he writes: the enemy was so close that “quasi je potemio sputà in faccia.”74). These are unreal, dangerously rhetorical words, in part because Pascarella’s speaker no longer fits into the “common” forms, attracted by a petit bourgeois temptation, but most of all because Pascarella has violated, beforehand, the “common speech” which he employed according to the teachings of Belli, by rendering it absurdly high-minded and nationalistic. He preserved its “common” qualities only in order to provide a superficial crust of color, revealing the errors of a quite unimaginative lack of historical perspective. The truth is that Pascarella did not have a good ear for the speech of his time, early twentieth-century Italy. He started off with Bellian notions (an ahistorical Belli, frozen in time, who had not evolved along with his people) and achieved an epic form of petit bourgeois tastes, drastically reducing the infinite variations of speech of the common folk, which can only be free if it is completely real. The “patriotic” function of the inhabitant of the Trastevere in Pascarella is an extremely dangerous limitation. If we wanted to bring the Bellian “method” (giving total freedom to the speaker) into the present, what results would we obtain? Contemporary Bellians (if they exist, after the mistreatments of Pascarella and Trilussa—only Zanazzo, a good, minor example, is in the Bellian tradition) are pure academics; they do not realize that “social” consciousness has also reached the Roman masses, providing their satire with new subjects and tonalities. They do not see the potential for poetry in this fact, blinded perhaps by the contrast between the nascent proletariat among these masses and the ancient, poetic “common folk.” They do not see that corruption, vice, delinquency, are much more generalized today, especially in the outlying neighborhoods; in the Trastevere, crime has a certain classical, aristocratic quality. Or that the jargon has changed, acquiring an infinity of new turns of phrase, expressions, and allusions. It has discovered new outlets for emotion and lexical techniques for wheedling and cajoling, for expressing an existence which is conducted on the knife’s edge of the most extreme modernity (best manifested by dritteria75), lying somewhere between the Sunday afternoon stabbing and the Regina Coeli prison.
The weakening influence of Catholicism and the papacy on the Roman masses—now, in the outlying neighborhoods, which are completely unbelieving, the level of superstition is much slighter than in the Rome of the past—has perhaps caused the baroque archetype of the joyful Roman populace (with its dark background, its Caravaggesque chiaroscuri) to fade, and replaced them with an atmosphere that one could call “picaresque,” especially after the recent German and Anglo-Saxon occupations. The language has a drier, more novelesque air. Here are a few verses by some of the most modern of speakers: I was riding my bike on the Prenestina, when a nine-year-old kid yells out “A moré,76 give me a ride?” “Sure, kid, get on,” I say. He’s headed to the soup kitchen in Quarticciolo, to fill his pot with soup. “Where are you headed?” he asks me. “Vado a spasso,”77 I say. And here is his surprised, ten-syllable answer: “A spasso se va la domenica.”78 And here are two five-syllable lines by Alfredo Fileni, at a dance at the Communist Party headquarters in the Giordiani neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome: “Va avanti a forza / de vaffanculo.”79 (He was giving me a piece of advice: I wasn’t moving quickly enough to ask the girls to dance. In fact, as there were few girls in attendance, I wanted to give the other young men a chance.) And what about Begalone’s hendecasyllabic line,80 as he relaxed on the bank of the Aniene River: “Ciò na fame che me c…sotto.”81
Orazio, Rome, IV, numbers 6–9, June–September, 1952.
The last part of the text, which includes the “verses by the most modern of speakers,” corresponds to chapter X of the “Appunti per un poema popolare” (“Notes for a poem of the people,” in Alì of the Blue Eyes). In that version, the final hendecasyllabic line, which is somewhat forced here, is more regular: “Se dorme bene, eh?, a Largo Arenula!” (“It’s comfortable here, eh, sleeping at Largo Arenula!”)
69 Literally, “Roman Comedy,” a reference to the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte, translated to the Roman context.
70 The sly fox, the crook, the bastard (mignotta means whore in Roman dialect), and the lout.
71 Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, a leader of the Risorgimento.
72 Pen name of Luigi Arnaldo Vassallo, a famous nineteenth-century journalist.
73 The Men I’ve Known, a collection of the writings of Vassallo.
74 In Roman dialect: “we could almost spit in his face.” The line has 11 syllables, like the hendecasyllabic period of Dante’s verses.
75 Slyness.
76 Abbreviation of “moretto,” which is a diminutive of “moro.”
77 “Just cruising.”
78 “Sundays are for cruising.” In other words, don’t you have anything better to do?
79 “You only get things if you say fuck off!” In other words, you’ve got to fight to get ahead.
80 A line of 11 syllables, which is the form used in most Italian epic poetry, for example in The Divine Comedy.
81 “I’m so hungry I could s…myself.”