The ‘dream’ is communism, with which Pasolini, as an artist, a genuine, freethinking radical and practising homosexual, had a very difficult relationship. The book returns to his youth in the peasant world of Friuli in North-East Italy. With tender lyricism he recounts its life of dances, fairs and wine-drunken expeditions. In the title story a small group of left-wing peasant youths set out for neighbouring Yugoslavia to taste for themselves the benefits of communist rule. The hungry, hopeless time they have there supplies an interesting and realistic vignette of post-war life.


To read the book today is to inhale the convivial beauty of Italian peasant life; the beauty of a world swallowed up by its transformation into a consumer society, a process Pasolini bitterly lamented.

‘It was the evening of Epiphany and it was an evening of great excitement in the Faedis’ byre among the women who were there spinning.

There was a special air of merriment, partly because they had visitors — a young wife and the Owl, that chatterbox with her little girl’s voice which no one could silence, who had come from nearby cottages. For two hours there was nothing but talk, laughter, noise, so much so that although the little boys might have been dying of sleep they did not intend to lose a word of this evening of merriment.’ p106