ABSTRACT
Pasolini's Petrolio is a complex, problematic text, an opera aperta, according to Eco's definition: a literary work understood as an open, internally dynamic, and psychologically engaged field of meaning. In his posthumous unfinished novel, Pasolini intended to share the summa of his knowledge with his readers — his intellectual and biopolitical legacy — in the form of a contemporary narrative, inclusive of many different genres and media (from film documentary to radio and TV interviews). Pasolini's Petrolio and Morante's Aracoeli can be read assuming that a deep posthumous dialogue exists between these two texts, like the dialogue between Morante's Il mondo salvato dai ragazziniand La Storia — both quoted in Petrolio — and despite the significant differences between the two authors. ENI is at the very heart of Petrolio's structure as a novel, since its protagonist is in fact an ENI engineer and (as Mattei was) a left-wing Christian Democrat.
