Walter Siti is a Professor of Italian Literature at L’Aquila University. His best known works concern Neo-Realist poetry and the twentieth-century novel. He also wrote two novels, Scuola di nudo, in 1994, and Un dolore normale, in 1999. He is the editor of the complete prose works of Pier Paolo Pasolini for Mondadori and of his poetry for Garzanti.
The stories, essays, articles, and reportages collected in this volume are “Roman” in at least two ways: in the sense that they were written after Pasolini’s arrival in Rome (and mostly in the early years after his arrival, when he was metabolizing his encounter with this seductive and shocking city), and in the sense that Rome is their frame of reference. (A partial exception is “Terracina.”)
Almost all the stories were published in newspapers and magazines, but this does not help us in classifying and describing them. The distribution of the texts in Pasolini’s archive (now at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence) is more illustrative. These files were organized by Pasolini himself with file names written by him. One of them, entitled (Articles, essays, etc.) and Little Roman stories 1950, contains “Trastevere Boy,” “The Drink,” “The Passion of the Lupin-Seller,” “Chestnuts and Chrysanthemums,” and “From Monteverde Down to the Altieri Theater.” In these stories the desire to “read into the thoughts” of young people is strongest; they are characterized by a lyrical, introspective tension like such stories from the Friulian period as “The Speakers,” and they are shaped as artistic prose.
In another file, entitled The Ferrobedò (and other notes and stories, some of which were included in “The Ragazzi”) (1950–1951), we find the manuscripts of “The Dogfish,” “The Passion of the Lupin-Seller,” “Sunday at the Collina Volpi,” “Santino on the Beach at Ostia,” and “Terracina.” These are the most extroverted and narrative stories, in which action and adventure prevail over introspection. The “realist” style is less consciously “artistic.” (“The Passion of the Lupin-Seller” is the only story that is in both files, and it represents a midpoint between these two tendencies.)
It should be noted that, while the stories in the first file were conceived from the beginning as autonomous stories, those in the second file form part of a narrative whole, a kind of ur-Ragazzi in three parts: “The Ferrobedò,” “Li Belli Pischelli,” and “Terracina.”
“Terracina” is, as we haved pointed out, a special case. It was conceived originally as a digression within the ur-Ragazzi: the protagonists, Lucià and Marcè, tired of their messy lives in Rome, decide to escape by going to stay with Marcè’s country relatives. The story was probably conceived as a possible ending to the novel, and concludes with the death of Lucià.
In 1950, a literary competition was held in Taranto for an unpublished story with the sea as “protagonist or setting or background.” Pasolini submitted “Terracina.” The story did not win the competition, but was commended by the jury and an excerpt from it was published the following year in the paper Voce del Popolo, in Taranto, in five parts from July 7 to August 4. An editorial note included with the second excerpt pointed out that the “excessive length and crude language render unwise the publication of the full work.”
It has been impossible to find the story in the form in which Pasolini sent it to the literary competition; we have presented here the excerpt published in The Roman paper Il Quotidiano under the title “Santino on the beach at Ostia” as well as all of the typescript entitled “Terracina,” which contains the remaining Voce del Popolo excerpts, integrating and completing them. Two of these were slightly reworked by Pasolini for Il Quotidiano and were published on April 19 and June 8, 1951, with the titles “Night over the Sea at Terracina” and “Dissolve over the Sea of the Circeo.”
The reportages included in this volume are certainly more fragmented and “servile.” But underneath a certain routine quality and the superficial verve (worthy of the crime pages), we find the drive to combine emotion and clarity, the attempt to use poetry as a political instrument, which foreshadows Pasolini’s later extraordinary journalistic style.
Because of their Roman theme, we have included two drafts of screenplays, Roman Deaths and (Ri)cotta Cheese, keeping in mind that Pasolini’s film drafts were usually a genre unto themselves, a sub-genre of narrative.
We decided to close the book with a 1973 interview in which Pasolini declares his disgust with Rome, which has been rendered unrecognizable by urbanistic destruction and cultural genocide. Here his love story with Rome ends, with the announcement of painful separation.
Let me talk for a moment about the reason we chose the title Stories of the City of God. This title can be found in one of Pasolini’s manuscripts dating from sometime in the mid-fifties. This manuscript contains a list of possible titles for his Roman works. Beyond the obvious Augustinian connotations, Voci nella Città di Dio—Voices from the City of God—is the title of a book by Danilo Dolci, which Pasolini reviewed in 1951. The notion of identifying Rome with the phrase “city of God” is perhaps inspired by the fact that 1950 was a Jubilee year, and is expressed not only in the list of possible titles but also in his wish (expressed in “The Periphery of My Mind”) to give this title to his third Roman novel, which he never wrote. Once this project was abandoned, the phrase reappeared in the second chapter of the first section of A Violent Life, which is entitled “Night in the City of God.”
In two cases (“The Drink,” and “The Passion of the Lupin-Seller”) we have published the earliest version of the text, because a later version written ten years later seems more calculated. The author augmented the number of phrases in dialect, muting the immediacy and freshness of the story.
The stories contained in this volume were all checked against typescripts, and certain sections that had been eliminated at publication were reintroduced; subtitles added at publication were also eliminated.
The author’s inconsistent transcriptions of dialect were also respected.
At the bottom of each piece we have indicated where that piece was first published (or, in the case of unpublished pieces, the folder of the Archive in which it was kept).
In general there is no discrepancy between the date of composition and the date of publication of each text. Because of this, we have only indicated the date of composition in the case of unpublished pieces, or when the piece was published after the death of the author (dates indicated by the author are in parentheses; conjectural dates are in brackets).
Walter Siti, Rome, 1995