Pasolini’s Rome

Ian Thomson has written a fascinating piece on Pier Paolo Pasolini for the Times Online, on the occasion of the publication of two books on the Italian filmmaker-writer-poet: John David Rhodes’s new study of Pasolini’s Rome, Stupendous, Miserable City, and a reissue of a volume of Pasolini’s journalism from the 1970s, Descrizioni di Descrizioni. Thomson uses Pasolini’s 1952 epic poem in honor of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, “The Ashes of Gramsci,” as an entryway to understanding the artist, his relationship to his adopted city and God, and his eventual brutal death, which nearly coincided with the release of Salò.