“I hope that Pasolini’s glasses, which are always modern even after so many decades, will help us to read the difficult contemporaneity, giving a balanced critical judgment: because the questions he posed yesterday, from the environment to the war, are the same questions of today”. The President of the Senate, Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, has thus apderrto the twenty-first appointment of «Senato & Cultura» dedicated to the great Italian artist and intellectual, Pier Paolo Pasolini. The event organized in collaboration with Rai was introduced by the notes of the Italian Anthem, performed by the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Andrea Morricone. In the hemicycle of the Senate various artists gave voice to passages taken from various works by Pasolini: the actors Luca Bastianello and Giovanni Scifoni, the students of the National Academy of Dramatic Art “Silvio d’Amico”, the singer Giuliano Sangiorgi. The president of the Senate addressed, among others, the writer Dacia Maraini to whom she addressed a special thanks: «you have dedicated your latest literary effort to your friend and artist. She too will help us understand her life and his art. ” During the event, an excerpt from his book “Caro Pier Paolo” was read by the actress Milena Vukotic.
«Today the Senate Chamber pays homage to an excellence of Italian culture, one hundred years after its birth. Pasolini was a multifaceted figure. His entire artistic career oscillates between two opposites: on the one hand, the nostalgia for a happiness that he places in the period of childhood and adolescence in his region, in his Friuli. On the other, the disappointment for the weaknesses of the contemporary world, which goes from consumerism to capitalism that he sees as a form of totalitarianism. In the middle there is the figure of a man who has been able to transform his solitude, often desperate, into that universal language that only art can give us »Maria Elisabetta Alberto Caselleti who then invited us to use the lenses of the” glasses “of artist and intellectual to “read the complexity of our history and see it with the right critical spirit” because, after all, “his questions, ranging from the environment to the war, are our same questions today”.