Pier Paolo Pasolini
Il Decameron

Pasolini is one of those ultra-refined minds that present-day Italy, torn apart by pseudo-intellectuals enlisted left and right for cathode-ray shows, by arrogant professors in government, and by pseudo-progressives with their noses in the air, would seriously need; a man far too ahead for the most recent contemporaneity, let alone for the era in which he found himself forced to operate. Versatile, avant-garde, almost prescient, an abhorrer of ancient and modern bel paese squalor, Pasolini, after fusing in the multiplicity of his artistic carousel the culmination of Neorealism and the post-war "feeling" and having produced high-caliber epics (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Medea), decided to steer towards the source of life, full freedom in displaying human corporal physiognomy, the source of evil and good, intrigue and pleasure, death and resurrection. And so came to light the "Trilogy," the celebrated trio of film adaptations of as many masterpieces of medieval "social" literature, significant in revealing the impudent and dirty arcane secrets of a people psychotically obsessed with the Transcendental - and the various Bibles drafted by anonymous characters of dubious existence - who meanwhile broke every obligation imposed by others or by themselves, plunging headlong into the least pure rituals par excellence. From the highly erotic philopapist Italy of the Decameron to wallowing in the hottest brothels of the ancient British empire in the Canterbury Tales, up to the Arab kamasutra master colleagues of One Thousand and One Nights, Pasolini's reflection had one, great objective: to show contemporaries that their love arts didn't even come close in intensity, vigor, and "experimentation" to those of the Guelf, Ghibelline, and Bedouin ancestors of several centuries earlier.

Pasolini thus began with the Boccaccian Decameron, partly due to the intention to debut with his native cultural and social Italianity and partly for the desire to season with such sexual-erotic verve the extreme proximity to the caste of the much more visceral and tainted Cupolone than its subjects. However, the first chapter of the "trilogy of life" was not reduced to a bland semi-pornographic feature film on the most intimate medieval whims: he summoned the best of his team of actors with whom he had climbed the Olympus of post-war prestige culture (Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli and even one of the most popular vamps of the time, Silvana Mangano), Pasolini shifted the geographical (and not only) background of the film from the Florence of the novel to Naples, a choice the director himself justified with the firm desire to detach himself from Italian conformism not inclined to local niches; then, dissatisfied with the translation made, he erased from the dialogues the "purity" of the standard Italian that had just imposed itself with television and Mike Bongiorno-type quizzes, replacing it with the most typical and incomprehensible Neapolitan. Thus, in the rich selection of novellas chosen for the occasion, Pasolini threw to the wind the pre-Renaissance Florentine refinement, mother of modern Italian, refused to wash the clothes in Arno, and immersed them instead in the less cultured but equally interesting Gulf of the mandolin.

Pasolini's Naples is a melting pot of intrigue, wit, cunning, gags, and tricks, and the comedic humor that already fed the Florentine nature of Boccaccio is further enriched by the masks, moods, playful spitefulness, and ambiguous, enigmatic, and mischievous character of the Neapolitans, traits still today distinctive in framing the minds of the Campanian capital. Right among the alleys of the center, this "divine bounty" of true Neapolitan nature is nestled: virginal young women who deceive naive noblemen by inventing non-existent relatives for them only to steal their wealth and expel them with the hypocritical approval of the neighbors, nuns with joined hands and songs to the Lord queueing up to lie with a handsome mute (who miraculously heals shortly after seeing the less striking physique of the eldest woman as disposed to the same treatment as her colleagues), little girls determined to sleep on the terrace to secretly welcome young lovers. And again: women, witches, and fake magicians who can even consummate adulterous relationships in front of dazed spouses, sinners of the worst kind turned into true saints (the well-known novella of Ser Ciappelletto), betrayed friendships, and so on, in a whirl of the profane, nudism, open sexual activities (and outdoors), sordid malignities, and heinous intrigues.

Needless to say, the Pasolinian masterpiece, perhaps the jewel in the trilogy's crown, fell into the clutches of Italy's little gentle censorship system in the early seventies and inaugurated the last, tormented, disputes between the director-writer and (pseudo) justice, disputes that culminated posthumously with the seizure and denial of his cinematic twilight, the chilling Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, an unforgettable hymn to that indelible yet invisible filth that Pasolini and a few others knew how to identify, represent, and hyperbolize as never before. A filth that nonetheless has not been washed away by the successors (or at least by the majority) and which unfortunately increasingly nests in a peninsula torn apart by institutionalized silliness that is scandalized in front of a naked body and then dares to demystify it in the halls of various villas and the various mental and corporeal brothels scattered throughout our beloved country.