PASSOLINI PROPHET AND MARTYR

I HAD a writer's block. It's that "writer's block" that prevents you from pedaling when you're riding on the keys of the computer. And out of that impasse came the memory of those Pier Polo Passolini films that I watched in an art-house cinema on Fulham Road. They are memories of the days of wine and roses.

I was never freer and happier than in those London days of my youth that I long for now in my old age. Well, those films by this impressive Italian creator "Bocaccio", "Canterbury Tales" "The Passion According to St. Matthew" filled me with enthusiasm for life, the Middle Ages and the spirituality with which the Italian author portrays Christ. No one has told us in such an expressive way what those centuries before the Renaissance were like: the pilgrimages, the sermons of some furious Dominican, the tricks and tricks of the brothel (that poor Sicilian maracucho, good shoes, good stocking, good bag with money, coins jingling in his fly, represented by a Moroccan whose night of love in which he dreamed after having met a "princess" ends up plunged into a private - pardon this - shit in a toilet, or the revenge of those two young men who, to avenge the rape of their sister, cut off the head of the lover and bury it in a flowerpot. The flowerpot eventually blooms. As well as many other adventures of a picaresque or religious mystical tone that show what life was like in the convents.

Let us not lose sight of that gardener who pretends to be mute and whom two ardent and sexless little sisters take into a cabin in middle of the garden.

They did not know that from the heights of the atrium the whole community was watching the hustle and bustle, the nuns leaning out of the windows and even the mother abbess leading the gardener to the garden, but lo and behold, the mute man, faced with so much work, exclaims: I can't take it anymore and the others who were watching the scene, hearing the mute speak, exclaim: miracle... miracle. A magnificent story by Bocaccio.

The great Italian writer, filmmaker and poet, for this and many other reasons, such as his homosexuality, was the target of the hatred of the curia. It is said that his murder was a trap set by the Vatican, who arranged for him to meet an ephebe who killed him.

Passolini always declared himself a friend of peace, of non-violence. All his work is a song to love and a criticism of hypocrisy, ignorance, and the stubbornness of a society that lives in turbulent times.

A book of yours, “Corsair Writings”, has fallen into my hands, bringing back memories of my youth in London. It is a cry for tolerance, forgiveness, compassion, a condemnation of fascism, which is the seven-headed serpent that sheds its skin to perpetuate itself in power, and seems to be in force half a century after the death of Paolo, who was a martyr and prophet. He was killed by the priests using the murderous hand of Christian democracy.

San Piero Paolo Passolini, may you be in heaven, ora pro nobis

Tuesday, July 2, 2024