Twilight in Italy

Enzo Siciliano Pasolini: A Biography.
Translated from the Italian by John Shepley.
Random House, 435 pages, $20

Pier Paolo Pasolini Poems.
Selected and translated from the Italian by Norman MacAfee, with Luciano Martinengo.
Foreword by Enzo Siciliano.
Random House, 231 pages, $10.50

Enzo Siciliano’s biography, in which Pasolini and his setting are inseparable, brings it all back to me. Rome in the early Sixties: the spectacular kitsch of Bernini’s Piazza Navona and of his St. Theresa in sexual ecstasy; the drumhead Castello St. Angelo looming like thunder across the Tiber, with its dungeons and its topside angel; Fellini getting endless takes of his Swedish Venus rising from the foam in the Fontana di Trevi; the torpid afternoons and the endless, mindless evenings; the pizza capricciosa gatherings on Saturday nights, to which the...