Enzo Siciliano’s biography, in which Pasolini and his setting are inseparable, brings it all back to me. Rome in the early Sixties: the spectacular kitsch of Bernini’s Piazza Navona and of his St. Theresa in sexual ecstasy; the drumhead Castello St. Angelo looming like thunder across the Tiber, with its dungeons and its topside angel; Fellini getting endless takes of his Swedish Venus rising from the foam in the Fontana di Trevi; the torpid afternoons and the endless, mindless evenings; the pizza capricciosa gatherings on Saturday nights, to which the anti-American Italians were always late and the Americans didn’t mind because, to a man, they believed that every German was responsible for Hitler, no Italian was responsible for Mussolini. And the chatter-chatter-chatter in the trattorias: the onstage smile, the mistrust under the skin, the want of saving courtesy, the fanatical aversion...

 

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