The Ragazzi

Read The Ragazzi Storyline:

The "ragazzi" are the children of the streets of Rome, the children who grow up in the bombed-out ruins, the desolate housing developments, the clutter of the markets, the age-old streets and squares standing like monuments to the past. Pasolini’s novel—which aroused a storm of controversy when it first appeared in Italy—relates the story of Riccetto and his friends, the ragazzi of the title. When the book opens, they are nine or ten years old, and the German soldiers are straggling out of Rome as the Americans arrive; it ends when they are sixteen or seventeen, as the "new prosperity" is beginning to dawn. They get their education in the Roman streets: perpetually hungry, they steal from everyone in sight —blind men, beggars, each other; they are in and out of jail; and, for sport, they have only an occasional swim in the filthy Aniene river. In the background are the shadows of the larger tragedies of the times: women rioting for food and trampling each other to death; a jerry-built slum building collapsing to rubble on one of the boys; a police search for a gang of youngsters who have tied a boy to a stake and set him on fire; the unrelenting rumble of tanks on maneuvers. The author, who is well known in this country for his films, has brilliantly captured and recreated the blunt, bitter actuality of being poor— a poverty that has made these children relentlessly cynical, yet passionate; grotesquely cruel, yet often ingratiatingly innocent. Unparalleled in the fiction of this stark postwar period, closely related to the neo-realism of such Italian films as Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Paisan, and Open City, this novel is a bold portrayal of the awfulness of deep poverty.