Abstract: The painful dialogue with the instance of Power emerges in Pasolini’s poetic conscience in the form of a meditation on Evil from the first Friulian works, when his “troppo grande amore, / nel cuore, per il mondo [his too great a love, / in the heart, for the world]” is experienced by the poet with a deep sense of sinful perdition. But the turning point thanks to which Pasolini, in his poetic exploration, realizes that perdition is not inside but outside himself, is in Rome, the “stupenda e misera città [stupendous and miserable city]” that welcomes everything without scandal, despite the exile inflicted on him by the cynicism of those whom Leopardi called “le classi superiori d’Italia [the superior classes of Italy]”–that is, “una [a]” certain Italy, that petty bourgeoisie that persecutes him in the courts and in right-wing newspapers. In Rome, Evil is clearly revealed to him in the devilish grin of the borghesia, a Dantesque monster which with his “bava [drool]” reduces humanity to a “cosa ripugnante, nuda, come nei sogni, [repugnant thing, naked as in dreams]” suffocating the “tanti modi di essere uomini [many ways of being human].” The humanist Pasolini has only poetry to go against this impious Power: Dante’s weapon par excellence against the drift of reification.
Keywords: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Power, bourgeoisie, St. Augustine, Dante, Leopardi, Gramsci, Oscar Wilde, empiricism.
