The Ragazzi (‘the lads’) is a unique, cruel but convincing picture of post-war Italy seen from the bottom. The young Pasolini had found himself exiled to the outskirts of Rome after a politico-sexual scandal back home in the rural and conservative North—Eastern province of Friuli. The book kicks off with a pair of delinquents stealing pennies from a blind beggar; its itinerary continues with visits to brothels, reminiscences of nights spent under the Tiber bridges of Ponte Sisto and Ponte Garibaldi, days spent in the Regina Coeli (‘Queen of Heaven’) prison and in the terminal wards of hospitals. As ever in Pasolini’s work there is a magnificent, highly sexual sense of human vitality.

‘The heat...was like a warm hand laid on the light breeze, on the yellowish walls of the district...on the broken sidewalks and along colossal ruined walls with lines of hovels at their bases. There were young men racing on their motor scooters, Lambrettas, Ducatis, or Mondials, half-crocked, their greasy jumpers open on their hairy chests, or else dressed to kill as if they’d just stepped out of a show-window on the Piazza Vittorio. There was a great encirclement of Rome and of the countryside around about on the part of hundreds of thousands of human beings, swarming among their blocks of dwellings, their squatters’ shacks, or their skyscrapers.’ p195