Pasolini (1958), Viaggio per Roma e dintorni: suburbs, cinema and cartography

Abstract

Pier Paolo Pasolini turned the habitat of the Roman lumpenproletariat of the 50s and 60s into a central argument of his work. His varied and extensive production –not only his films and scripts, or his novels and poems, but also his interviews and articles– deserves to be considered part of an interdisciplinary, open, and articulated history of Rome (like the Pasolinian dynamics itself). Accordingly, this paper tackles an analysis of Viaggio per Roma e dintorni (1958), an article that Pasolini wrote for the magazine Vie Nuove, repeatedly overshadowed despite being one of the clearest and most descriptive writings of the author about the marginal Rome that he knew firsthand. This paper concludes with a series of cartographic compositions in which text, cinema, and urban form are intertwined to visualize that city “unknown to the tourist, ignored by the right-thinking, non-existent on maps”.