Review: “Stories From the City of God”

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s collection of stories, sketches and scripts of Rome is a stark, dialectical reminder of a long-forgotten city.

A postwar city, a city of dust and concrete, a city of wounds. Pasolini’s writings cover Rome and Italy emerging into the world from 1950 to 1966. From when he first moved to the infernal city to when he left, murdered in his car by the kind of shameless young hustler he wrote about in his first novel. Murdered by the future.

Pasolini arrived in Rome with his mother in 1950. A city of ruins and laughter, of innocent boys glowing like lucciole, like fireflies in the Roman dusk. He reports on the squalor and languor in the dialect of the poor. For Pasolini, it’s the only true language, unspoiled by bourgeois hypocrisy, blessed by the sacred.

To read these stories is to see Rome not as a city of saints, but of boys and men and women alive, of laughter that resists the night, of poetry as desire - erratic, elusive, and incandescent before the devouring dark.

Before all the devils, all the gods.

All the living, all the dead.