Name: Ragazzi di vita
Rating: 3.625 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9788811688358

P. Paolo Pasolini

Het leven van arme straatjongens uit de krottenwijken van Rome in de jaren '40 en '50.

Ragazzi di vita

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Vincenzo Cerami

Edwin Lang

At some point in every boy’s life he becomes a man. It’s generally not a pleasant transition. Pier Paolo Pasolini describes the journey of a bunch of kids, for the most unemotionally and non-judgmentally, although in one chapter he refers to Tolstoy’s ‘the people are a wild savage in the midst of society’. The story begins in post-war Rome, in the late 1940’s, and these kids seem to be the collateral damage of Italy’s recovery from Mussolini, war, occupation by the Germans, the sense of defeat on all fronts and all-embracing poverty. It’s not just the poverty one feels in reading Pasolini’s work (which he explicitly has a key character acknowledge with some dismay ‘fuck poverty, fuck it’ well into the book) but the aimlessness and shallowness of these lost lives. This is Rome of the great Roman Empire and in the word that Pasolini uses at least twice it’s become a ‘Shanghai’ of drunkenness and wife-beating husbands, of ‘whores and faggots’, of soul crushing living conditions, of mothers beyond despair. Pasolini has us sense that there is a life out there, of ugly fat wealthy ladies, of power-hungry politicians but that these kids and their families live well outside the perimeter of “Piazza San Pietro” and the lucky people that inhabit the Piazza and well outside all that is holy and decent. Pasolini died at 53, an enemy of the Italian state I am sure - prominent leftists were often attacked or killed by neo-fascists working with the secret services - only to be posthumously recognized as a great writer. He fled to Rome from Northern Italy – from a town bordering on Slovenia and the Adriatic, with his mother, in the 1950’s, after what seemed a scandal involving ‘three boys’ and published The Street Kids in 1955 under the title ‘Ragazzi di vita’ (hustlers) soon after and when he was 33. The book was republished only 33 years later in 1988, well after his death in 1975. In reading Street Kids I was reminded of the advice: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer: when your friends (and enemies) are in your circle of love it’s hard for them to raise a voice of protest, to say for example, that what you are doing is wrong. But being marginalized, even impoverished or in the 1950’s for being homosexual (and perhaps, alas, a pedophile), certainly leaves one outside those bonds and one can say what sometimes needs to be said. I got the sense that Pasolini was in that outer lonely circle and that what he saw of the post-war living conditions on moving to Rome appalled him. Because we live now in the Brexit world and Trump era The Street Kids seems a significant book in the sense that these two movements have, like this book, given voice to the voiceless. If I have for example a criticism of my country, Canada, is that we love too much, are too tolerant, are too embracing, and therefore are quite ironically effectively silenced because we feel we can’t rock the boat, aren’t permitted to say what’s really on our minds. For example our presumably free Press rarely publishes the views of one of this country’s prominent politicians, Elizabeth May, because her stance on the environment, on the economy, on poverty, on childcare is too beyond the mainstream: it’s frankly upsetting and hurts our quite liberal sensitivities – we have after all a Prime Minister who cries at public funerals – and hurts the image we maintain of ourselves. This love helps us to, for example, ignore the 20% of our own kids who live well below the poverty line. Pasolini’s world view is described as part Love (sex, its allure, was everywhere in Street Kids, but then again these albeit poor were afterall teenaged boys; part Marxist; and, part Catholic. One of the Catholic Popes (Benedict 16th) in a 2005) commented on the role of charity and the Marxist view that ‘the poor do not need charity but justice (because) works of charity—almsgiving—are in effect a way for the rich to shirk their obligation to work for justice and (use it) as a means of soothing their consciences while preserving their own status, of maintaining the status quo and robbing the poor of their rights. We need instead to build a just social order in which all receive their share of the world's goods and no longer have to depend on charity’. As Jyette Jensen, curator of MOMA said of Pasolini in her 2013 retrospective of him: he was always searching, completely open to new ways of looking at things’. I am sure with Street Kids Pasolini upset a lot of people but he may have been Italy’s Trump / Brexit moment, although it only bore fruit in the late 80’s well after his death. Pier Paolo made The Gospel of St. Matthew after attending a seminar at a Franciscan monastery in Assisi: although an atheist, a Marxist and homosexual, he had nonetheless received an invitation in 1962 after Pope John XXIII called for a new dialogue with non-Catholic artists - Pasolini dedicated the film "to the beloved, joyous, familiar memory’ of this Pope, a man he admired for his principles and for leading the Church into the 20th Century. The Catholic Church (although belatedly – it initially had Pasolini arrested on blasphemy) recognizes the film as a faithful depiction of Jesus. The Catholic Church has historically had trouble with its saints, especially those like Pasolini not in alignment with mainstream Catholic orthodoxy but a pauperist, which finds that even Christ and the Virgin depicted as lowlifes as quite plausible. Riccetto – the name apparently symbolic of Rome as a ‘refuge’ and a key character is Street Kids – whose real name is, we learn late in the book, Claudio Mastracca, is no Christ but I suspect he is someone with whom a Christ would have dinner with, maybe even call as a disciple. The book is such that it makes one take sides: if one understands and perhaps resonates with Pasolini’s worldview, then probably Pope Francis’ Laudato Si might resonate too, given Pasolini’s opinion that ‘the Church could be the guide of all those who refuse the new power of consumption’, or, alternately if it doesn’t then that Pier Paolo Pasolini was indeed murdered by a ‘rent boy’ might seem reasonable too. Edwin

Anna 

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Alice Bevilacqua

An unsentimental depiction of the poverty and chaos of life in the slums of 1950s postwar Rome, this novel follows Ricetto, an Italian youth, and his gang who survive by their wits, their cruelty, and their instincts for survival. Their lives are shaped by hunger, theft, betrayal, and prostitution, and they celebrate their triumphs with brutal abandon and die bleak deaths.

Ragazzi di vita

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