I want to write about someone who in my opinion is one of the greatest artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century, that is Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, 5 March 1922 – Rome, 2 November 1975). He was an Italian poet, screenwriter, actor, director, writer and playwright. Contemporary art, especially in the sixties and seventies, was characterized by movements of revelation of the social fragmentation of expressive forms that declined the extreme consequences of the coexistence of power and culture, causing a critique of social ideology to explode. Pasolini was a keen observer of the changes in Italian society from the second post-war period to the mid-1970s. His is a charismatic and discussed presence, which is part of an often angular and controversial context, in a context of admiration of the nascent movement of the Sixty-eight, and of judgment especially in the bourgeois circles of the time. Participating in the experimental climate, but far from avant-garde tensions, Pasolini through his writing wants to constantly confront the world and its transformations, a confrontation and an active intervention in society that take place every time with different linguistic tools and forms. A figure, therefore, who through his verses and his scenographic works remains indelible in today’s society; and it is with admiration that I write to you about an author from our region, namely Rocco Taliano Grasso, writer and poet who is writing a short and significant essay, linked to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work on the pedagogical vision. Grasso lives in Cariati, a seaside town in Calabria, has published several collections of poems such as: “Infinite stagioni” (1985), “Orfeo del silenzio” (1991), “Madama la Levriera” e “Sigillerei le labbra” (1996), “Amor de Lhon” (2002), “La fiaccola di Ewald”(2014). He is also present in various anthologies, and is the author of the novel “Della Notte e Sospiri” (2000). In the theatrical field he wrote “Ultima lettera a Theo” (2000). In 1995 he won the Eugenio Montale International Prize, but it is with the publication of “La Visione Pedagogica di Pasolini” that attracts my attention. The author updates Pasolini’s thinking especially on the critique of modernity, his vision of a society homologated by consumerism continues to be more and more dramatically current; how not to mention his words on television during an interview: “Television is not just a place through which messages pass, but it is a message processing center. It is the place where a mentality becomes concrete that otherwise one would not know where to place. It is through the spirit of television that the spirit of the new power is concretely manifested”. Rocco Taliano Grasso, through pedagogical and intellectualistic action, is the bearer of the prophetic and cathartic thought of one of the major pillars of the culture of our time.
