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This article challenges the established reading of Atti impuri and Amado mio, Pasolini’s early unfinished novels about young homosexual love, as diaristic. Previous accounts of the Friulan novels have largely ignored the fact that their final redactions were drawn up in Rome, where the author had fled from Friuli in January 1950 in the wake of a sexually tinged scandal. The present analysis suggests that the novels’ relationship to their setting should be read as nostalgic, and compares them to the poetic works on Friuli that Pasolini wrote in Rome in the early 1950s. This poetics of absence provides the backdrop for a reflection on the practice of realist authorship that engages with contemporary neorealist narrative from a position of paradoxical outsiderhood.

Concentrates on the brief period of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s career between 1966 and 1969 when he dedicated a significant portion of his energy to the theater. Argues that these years contain Pasolini’s most direct engagement with bourgeois Italian culture: he largely drops his use of dialect in favor of Standard Italian, he sets his plays in modern urban Italy or in places related to it by analogy or allegory, and he explicitly envisages a public made up of the "advanced groups of the bourgeoisie." Once this theatrical period closes, Pasolini’s narrative works tend to create their own hermetic environment in which to play themselves out.