Pier Paolo Pasolini
La Recessione

THE REVIEW

"We will see patched pants; red sunsets on villages empty of engines and full of young vagabonds returning from Turin or Germany.

The old folks will be masters of their walls as if they were senator's chairs; the children will know that soup is scarce, and the value of a piece of bread.

The evening will be as black as the end of the world, at night only crickets or thunder will be heard; and perhaps, perhaps, some young person (one of the few good young ones returning to the nest)

will pull out a mandolin. The air will smell of wet rags. Everything will be distant. Trains and coaches will pass by from time to time as if in a sleep.

Large cities like worlds will be full of people walking, with gray clothes and in their eyes a question, a question that is, 

perhaps, for a bit of money, a small help, and instead, it is only for love. The ancient palaces will be like mountains of stone, alone and closed, as they once were.

The small factories at the most beautiful part of a green field, in the bend of a river, in the heart of an old oak forest, will crumble

a bit each evening, wall by wall, sheet metal by sheet metal. The bandits (the young ones returned home from the world so different from how they left)

will have the faces of yore, with short hair and the eyes of their mother, full of the black of moonlit nights - and they will only be armed with a knife.

The horse's hoof will touch the ground, light as a butterfly, and it will remember what the world was, in silence, and what it will be."

The splendid version sung by Alice back in 1992, was truly needed these days.