Pasolini laid bare, at odds with his own time \u2013 and ours. Ascanio Celestini takes on Pasolini in a head-
to-head battle with history. The result is a book that is urgent, necessary and uncomfortable.
Unvarnished. Unapologetic.
if you take Pasolini\u2019s entire body of work, from his first childhood poem to the very last frame of
\u2018Sal\u00f2\u2019, you get the portrait of Italian history from the end of fascism to the mid-1970s. Vincenzo
Cerami had understood this, but Ascanio Celestini takes it a step further: let\u2019s turn it into a game. A
real game, a dangerous gamble, which forces us to face up to our contradictions.
1964: Italy\u2019s economic boom is already crumbling, a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat is being plotted, and what does
Pasolini do? He makes \u201cThe Gospel According to Matthew\u201d. Provocation? Escapism? Or a vision so
lucid it can see two millennia of history all at once?
March 1968, Valle Giulia: students clash with the police, and Pasolini dares to write, \u2018I sympathised
with the police\u2019. And a few lines later, \u2018We are, of course, in agreement against the institution of the
police\u2019. Betrayal? Madness? Or the only Italian intellectual who had the courage to reject the truisms
of his own time? The challenge, then, is to place Pasolini back in his own time. A time that was brief
yet full of life. And which today we can view in its entirety, from start to finish. Let\u2019s put an end to
pointless questions such as \u2018I wonder what Pasolini would say today\u2019 about the destruction of Gaza,
state capitalism in China or the war in Ukraine, the internet and social media! Instead, let\u2019s tell the
story of Pasolini\u00b4s many facets: the Friulian poet and the Roman filmmaker, the rogue intellectual
and the fragile man, the prophet of consumer society and the victim of violence in one of the great
Italian mysteries. Ascanio Celestini seeks to rediscover the poet\u2019s gaze. Only in this way does Pasolini
remain a living presence, essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contradictions of
the present. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3735,"parent":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"anno-di-presentazione":[110],"sezione-libri":[80],"class_list":["post-3736","libro","type-libro","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","anno-di-presentazione-110","sezione-libri-festival"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n