A Dream of Something [antikvár]

Introduction Friuli is part of that region of Italy which borders on Yugoslavia and Austria. It is traversed by the Tagliamento river which from the Carnic Alps in the north runs down through the battlefields of World War I to the Adriatic. The setting of much of A Dream of Something is the countryside on the right bank of the Tagliamento. Of its peasant inhabitants Pasolini wrote that their destiny for five centuries had been 'to work, pray, suffer and die'. Here Pasolini's mother, to whom he was bound by an obsessive love, was born into a family established for hundreds of years in the little town of Casarsa. It was here that he and his mother — his father, whom he detested, was a British prisoner-of-war in Kenya — lived as evacuees during World War II; here that he had his first sexual experiences with local boys; here that he produced his first published work, a volume of verse in the dialect of Friuli, which caused an academic scandal because it employed — as he put it — words which 'in all the centuries of their use had never been written'. It was to Casarsa that he returned after the armistice of September 1943 and the disbandment of the Italian army, in which he had served for only a week. In Casarsa he lived under Mussolini's puppet Republic of Said (which would give its name to his last, terrifying film) and saw his younger brother leave to join the partisans in the mountains and die in the internecine quarrels between rebel bands of different political loyalties. Pasolini himself took no active part in the Resistance. His political ideas were still forming. Catholicism continued to v