ABSTRACT
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s growing acquaintance with the city of Rome, its past and present, its centre and periphery, can be traced through the appearance, at different times between 1946 and 1966, of its areas and districts in his letters, poetry, short stories, novels and films. In this chapter I shall reconstruct, phase by phase, Pasolini’s encounter over time with successive ‘layers’ of Rome, until the onset of his disaffection with its lower-class areas and inhabitants, which he came to see in his later writings as being absorbed into a homogenized petty bourgeoisie. My purpose in tracing this process in detail is to explore the particular meanings Pasolini grafted onto these layers. I shall draw attention also to a hitherto neglected aspect of his encounter with the capital, namely his knowledge of and interest in its middle-class residential areas, besides the poor districts and shantytowns that feature so prominently in his novels Ragazzi di vita (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959) and his films Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962).
