The Arts - Rome - page 704

McCollough's Masters of Rome series, which centres on the doomed love triangle
between Octavian, Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
Into this historical genre you can add a further sub-genre - the ancient thriller. Good ex-
amples include Martha Marks' feminist-tinged mystery, Rubies of the Viper (2010), and
Vestal Virgin: Suspense in Ancient Rome (2011), a dark tale of secret passions by Suzanne
Tyrpak.
Literature & Fascism
A controversial figure, Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863−1938) was the most flamboyant Itali-
an writer of the early 20th century. A WWI fighter pilot and ardent nationalist, he was
born in Pescara and settled in Rome in 1881. Forever associated with fascism, he wrote
prolifically, both poetry and novels. Of his books, perhaps the most revealing is Il Fuoco
(The Flame of Life; 1900), a passionate romance in which he portrays himself as a Nietz-
schean superman born to command.
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI, MASTER OF CONTROVERSY
Poet, novelist and film-maker, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922−75) was one of Italy's most important and controversial
20th-century intellectuals. His works, which are complex, unsentimental and provocative, provide a scathing por-
trait of Italy's postwar social transformation.
Although he spent much of his adult life in Rome, he had a peripatetic childhood. He was born in Bologna but
moved around frequently and rarely spent more than a few years in any one place. He did, however, form a last-
ing emotional attachment to Friuli, the mountainous region in northeastern Italy where his mother was from and
where he spent the latter half of WWII. Much of his early poetry, collected and published in 1954 as La meglio
gioventù, was written in Friulano dialect.
Politically, he was a communist, but he never played a part in Italy's left-wing establishment. In 1949 he was
expelled from the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI; Italian Communist Party) after a gay sex scandal and for the
rest of his career he remained a sharp critic of the party. His most famous outburst came in the poem Il PCI ai
giovani, in which he dismisses left-wing students as bourgeois and sympathises with the police, whom he de-
scribes as ' figli di poveri' (sons of the poor). In the context of 1968 Italy, a year marked by widespread student
agitation, this was a highly incendiary position to take.
Pasolini was no stranger to controversy. His first novel Ragazzi di Vita (The Ragazzi), set in the squalor of
Rome's forgotten suburbs, earned him success and a court case for obscenity. Similarly, his early films - Accat-
tone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962) - provoked righteous outrage with their relentlessly bleak depiction of life
in the Roman underbelly.
True to the scandalous nature of his art, Pasolini was murdered in 1975. It was originally thought that his death
was linked to events in the gay underworld but revelations in 2005 hinted that it might, in fact, have been a polit-
ically motivated killing.