\u201cI chose Sabaudia as a spiritual retreat for my enforced rest and my anxieties about future work, furious dreams that keep me anchored to the world.\u201d With these words, in the documentary La forma della citt\u00e0 (The Form of the City), Pier Paolo Pasolini recounted his relationship with Sabaudia, where he had bought a house together with Alberto Moravia. A square building on the seafront, a few kilometres from the rationalist city built by Mussolini as part of his project to reclaim the Pontine Marshes. Once a symbol of the regime’s enterprise, the city became a few years later the favourite haunt of the Italian intelligentsia: one could meet Moravia shopping at the local fish market, Bernardo Bertolucci and Ian McEwan discussing the script of a film that was never made, Laura Betti walking with Dario Bellezza and Renzo Paris, Jean Genet collecting signatures for a petition for Palestine… But it was not only intellectuals who chose the area for their holidays. Soon, the coast became a holiday destination for the Roman bourgeoisie too: Sabaudia and Circeo were featured in the society pages of gossip magazines but, above all, they became the dark theatre of one of the most heinous crimes of the second half of the 20th century, destined to leave its mark on the country’s conscience. Paolo Massari has a privileged point of view in the history of this city: his great-uncle was the founder of the city’s library, he met the leading actors and conversed with them under the porticoes of Bar Italia. Guided by archival documents and novels, and aided by the words of illustrious witnesses such as Dacia Maraini, Alain Elkann and Edoardo Albinati, Massari reconstructs the moment when Sabaudia became one of the avant-garde centres of Italian art, cinema and literature, a Platonic school and a literary circle: the focal point from which to observe the cultural history of the post-war period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2996,"parent":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"anno-di-presentazione":[85],"sezione-libri":[80,45],"class_list":["post-2995","libro","type-libro","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","anno-di-presentazione-85","sezione-libri-festival","sezione-libri-scuole"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n