"Pagine
corsare"
Pier Paolo
Pasolini. His life
.
Pasolini in Friuli
.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
was born on the 5th
of March 1922 in Bologna. He was the eldest son of
the infantry lieutenant Alberto Pasolini and Susanna Colussi, a
school-teacher. His father, from an old family in Ravenna, spent
the family's patrimony. He married Susanna in 1921 in Casarsa
before the couple moved to Bologna.
"I was born in a
family representative of Italian society: the product of a genuine
cultural mixing and Italian unity. My father descended from an
ancient noble family of Romagna. On the other hand my mother comes
from a family of Friulian farmers who have become, step by step,
lower middle-class people. The relatives of my mother's father were
distillers. The mother of my mother was Piedmontese, but that
didn't prevent her from having contacts with Sicily and the Rome
region."(1)
The Pasolinis
didn't stay in Bologna for long; they moved to Parma, Conegliano,
Belluno, Sacile, Idria, Cremona, Bologna again, and other towns of
North Italy.
"They have made a
nomad of me. I passed from one camp to another. I never had a fixed
abode".
In 1925, in Belluno, the second
born-son, Guido, was born.
Considering the
family's constant relocation, the only landmark for the Pasolinis
was Casarsa.
Pier Paolo's
relationship with his mother remained friendly while the conflicts
with his father increased.
"Every evening I
dreaded dinner time, because I knew that he would have done one of
his scenes... Then came my initial separation from my mother which
created a childhood neurosis. That neurosis made me restless, a
restlessness in which I perpetually questioned my own being (...).
When my mother was going to bear, I began to suffer from burning
eyes. My father immobilized me on the table of the kitchen, opened
my eyes with his fingers and poured in collyrium. After that
symbolic event I was no longer able to love my father."
(2)
Referring to his
mother:
"She told me
stories, fables, she read them to me. My mother was like Socrates
to me. She had and has a terribly idealistic and idealized
vision of the world. She really believes in heroism, in
charity, in piety, in generosity. I have adopted all that almost in
a pathologic way." (3)
He enjoyed a close
relationship with his brother Guido. Guido had a kind of veneration
for his older brother, who was good in his studies and in games
with the other boys. That admiration continued to the
end.
During the boys'
early school years the family moved often but these moves failed to
impede Pier Paolo's progress. He entered elementary school a year
early. In 1928 there was the poetical exordium: Pier Paolo filled a
little notebook with a series of pictures. That little note-book
was followed by others. It would ultimately be lost during the
war.
He passed from
elementary school to the grammar school of
Conegliano.
In those years he
wrote a passage known as Teta veleta, that Pasolini later
explained:
"It was in Belluno,
I was a little more than 3 years old. As the boys played in the
public gardens in front of my house what struck me most of all was
their legs, particularly the internal convex part of the knee,
where the tendons stretch out while running. I saw in those quick
tendons a symbol of life that I hadn't yet attained. That image of
the running boy for me represented the grown-up being. Now I know
that it was a distinctly sensual sentiment.
If I re-feel it I feel
with exactness in my bowels the tenderness, the sorrowfulness and
the violence of the desire. It was the sense of the
unreachableness, of the carnal - a sense for which a name hasn't
yet been invented. I invented it that time and it was "teta
veleta". Seeing those legs bent in their furious game I told myself
that it felt "teta veleta," something like a tickle, a seduction, a
humiliation." (4)
Pasolini indeed
stated:
"My infancy ended
when I was 13. For all of us 13 is infancy's old age so it's a time
of great wisdom. It was a happy period of my life. I had been the
cleverest in school. As the Summer of '34 began, a period of my
life had finished. I had ended one experience and I was ready to
start another. The days leading up to the Summer of '34 were some
of the nicest and most glorious of my life". (5)
Pier Paolo finished
high school when he was 17 and matriculated in Literature at the
University of Bologna. During his high school years he created,
together with Luciano Serra, Franco Farolfi, Ermes Parmi (whose
name was borrowed by Guido Pasolini during his partisan activities
in Osoppo), Fabio Mauri, a literary group of the GIL of Bologna.
During this period Pasolini wrote poems in Italian and Friulian
that were gathered in a first volume, Poesie a Casarsa.
Pasolini contributed to a magazine, Stroligut and together
with other literary male friends he created the Academiuta di
lenga furlana ["little Academy of Friulian language", t.n.].
Dialect represented a sort of opposition to fascist
power:
"Fascism didn't
tolerate dialects, signs / of the irrational unity of this Country
were I was born / inadmissible and imprudent relatives in the heart
of the Nazis." (6)
The use of dialect also
represented an attempt to deprive the Church of its cultural
hegemony over the underdeveloped masses. In fact the Left preferred
to use the Italian language and excluding the sporadical cases of
Jacobinism, the use of dialect has been a clerical prerogative.
Pasolini attempted to bring to the Left a deepening of the culture
of dialect.
The return to
Casarsa during his university years represented the return to a
happy place for Pasolini. He wrote to Silvana Ottieri in a letter
of April '47:
"The fact that it
was Holy Saturday didn't matter at all. If you had seen the colours
of the horizon and of the countryside! When the train stopped to
Sacile, in a very dense silence, like the last Tule, I listened
again to the bells. There, behind the railway station of Sacile
was, heading into the country, a road. I had either run along it
during my infancy or I had dreamed of
it..."
____________________
(1) P.P. Pasolini,
Il sogno del centauro, by Jean Duflot, Editori Riuniti, Rome
1983.
(2) Interview to Dacia
Maraini in "Vogue", May 1971.
(3)
Ibidem.
(4) Pier Paolo
Pasolini, in Nico Naldini, Cronistoria.
(5) Pier Paolo
Pasolini, in AA.VV., Pasolini, una vita futura, Ass. Fondo
Pasolini, Garzanti, Milan, 1985.
(6) Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Il poeta delle ceneri, by Enzo Siciliano, in
"Nuovi Argomenti" nn. 67-68, Rome, July-December
1980.
|



His
life

Alive in the
memory
Pasolini's
works

The Pier Paolo
Pasolini
Study
Center
in Casarsa della
Delizia
(Italy)

Books and VHS
tapes;
a
complete
bibliography in
Usa;
a
filmography

Salò or The
120 Days of Sodom,
The Institute of
Contemporary Arts
in London hosted a
two-day event
around
Salò, with screenings and
discussion about the
film

Intelligence will
never
have much
value...

Books

Pasolini's Photo
Gallery
|