A unique chance to explore Pier Paolo Pasolini's youth through the voice and the body of his direct cousin, writer and poet Nico Naldini.
The poet and director Domenico (Nico) Naldini, one of the most controversial and problematic homosexual intellectuals of the twentieth century died on September 9, 2020 in Treviso, Italy, at the age of 91. Friulian by birth, Treviso by adoption and cousin of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Among his literary interests Friulian poetry – but also that in Veneto and Italian – and the work of recovery of the work and biography of Pasolini (Poesie e pagine ritrovata di Pasolini, edited in 1980 with Andrea Zanzotto), the biography of Giovanni Comisso (Vita di Giovanni Comisso, finalist of the Premio Strega in 1986) and that of Filippo De Pisis (De Pisis, Vita solitaria di un poeta pittore, published in 1990). One of his last editorial works, Come non ci si difende dai ricordi, published by Cargo in 2005, is an autobiographical volume hinged on the interweaving of his memories and fragments of life shared with his cousin Pasolini.
The problematic nature of his homosexual dimension lay in the way he related to the historical memory of the movement and to the demands with which he was in declared and blatant contrast, despite never having made a mystery of his sexual orientation. In an interview with the Tribuna di Treviso in 2007, for example, referring to demonstrations aimed at recognizing the rights of LGBT + people such as Pride, he said: "We are faced with exaggerated demonstrations, exaggerated affectations that cannot please because they are phenomena in which what prevails is the shame of oneself, disguised as theatricality with ostrich feathers covering her ass."
In the same interview, moreover, confessing his "aggressive boredom" towards the political debate on same-sex unions – in 2007, before the debate on civil unions, he reflected on forms such as the Pacs and the Dico – he added: "Already a man and a woman, who are naturally made to penetrate each other in a way and with purposes that nature has defined, They hardly hold their relationship over time. All the more reason I consider it impossible for a homosexual couple."
Luca Baldoni, poet and essayist, in the introduction to his book Le parole tra gli uomini. Anthology of Italian gay poetry from the twentieth century to today (Robin, 2012), about Naldini writes: «We are ultimately faced with a paradoxical fact: the distance, if not open aversion, of some of the most important exponents of the canon of Italian homoerotic poetry (Bona, Pasolini, Naldini, Bellezza) towards contemporary homosexuality, towards everything that at the level of identity of the individual, of type of interpersonal relationships, of cultural and political production, we identify with the word gay. This makes the fruition of our tradition difficult, as it cannot be traced back to a unitary movement, or at least a majority».
In short, as Baldoni himself notes in an article of 2011, despite the homosexual desire is repeatedly the protagonist of Naldini's poetry, both in the initial production in dialect of the 40s and 50s and in the production inaugurated in the mid-90s by the volume Better the ancient punishments, the intellectual has always accompanied the memorial recovery, even in verse, With a critical and polemical attitude, we would say almost of rejection, towards the temperatures of contemporary claims, convinced of the fact that the emancipation process had substantially inhibited a freer and more joyful sensuality, the one that could be lived, secretly and in secret, between urinals and parking lots, even with heterosexuals, until the 50s and 60s. Not surprisingly, in the last volumes of verse, Naldini, who often spent long periods in Tunisia, dreams exclusively of Maghreb loves.
Directors
Francesco Costabile, Federico Savonitto
