“A poet who is not also a heretic,” Aldo tells me as I lean forward to catch his words, “is not a poet.” As for the miller Menocchio and for Pasolini, heresy was connatured to Federico’s persona not a mere intellectual exercise. For Pasolini and Federico, furthermore, it was no longer only about the Catholic Church. It had to do, instead, with their inability and unwillingness to participate in the reigning ideologies of their time: petty bourgeois propriety, at first, and the hedonism that crept behind the countercultural movements of the ’60s and ’70s, later, when capitalist power needed “a new kind of subject,” in the words of Pasolini.
Italy marks the 60th anniversary of the Vajont Dam disaster which claimed the lives of almost 2,000 people in the northern Piave valley on 9 October 1963.
For the fathers of the dam, a masterpiece of Italy’s rapid post-war industrialization, Paolini stated that there is an eerie sense that the mountain collapsed, but the dam sculpted to a morbid perfection survived the ensuing landslide. Casting a great shadow into the ravine, Vajont now stands as a tomb to the megalomania of hydropower engineering.
For the fathers of the dam, a masterpiece of Italy’s rapid post-war industrialization, Paolini stated that there is an eerie sense that the mountain collapsed, but the dam sculpted to a morbid perfection survived the ensuing landslide. Casting a great shadow into the ravine, Vajont now stands as a tomb to the megalomania of hydropower engineering.