Stanza 4

In the 1950s, during the golden age of Italian cabaret, Laura Betti (née Trombetti) stood out as a singular and unconventional artist, gaining a certain fame for the unmistakable hoarse timbre of her voice, for her shameless and nonconformist ways, for her bad temper and feline stride, which earned her the nickname “Giaguara” (female jaguar). Laura had opened her house in Via del Babuino to writers, poets and journalists: Pasolini also arrived there around 1958, “dragged along”, as Betti herself recalls, by Goffredo Parise. An increasingly frequent meeting between the two led to a lasting human and professional relationship. As Arbasino and Alberto Moravia had already done, Pasolini wrote several songs for her, defending her way of doing theatre, halfway between singing and acting, calling her the “most conscious and compromised” theatre artist. The director called on her five times to act in his films, in very different roles: from the haughty and snobbish young diva in La Ricotta (1963), to the heavy and lustful woman of Bath in I Racconti di Canterbury(1972).
The other ideal pole of Pasolini’s affections, in the same years, was Ninetto Davoli. A typical 15-year-old boy from the bourgeoisie, a carefree and reckless urchin, Ninetto had gone with some friends to look around on the set of La Ricotta. There, Pasolini noticed him and immediately made him his irreplaceable muse, the subject of a series of portraits, an inseparable friend, the recipient of his most beautiful poems and the actor chosen for ten films (from Il Vangelo secondo Matteo in 1964 to Il fiore delle mille e una notte in 1974). A glance at the drawings presented here, made with felt-tip pens, ink or coloured crayons, reveals the complexity of the relationship between the two and the different projections of Pasolini’s imagination on the figure of his Ninetto: a bit of an innocent child, a bit of a rough bourgeois, a bit of a tender lover.

Room 3

With the “sketch” published in Il Verri, The Engineer’s grandchildren and the De Feo house cat (1960), Alberto Arbasino coined an expression that succinctly conveys the complexity of a series of human and literary relationships that linked the “twenty-year-olds of the 1950s” to the writer Carlo Emilio Gadda. The three grandchildren who “came out more or less together around 1955, all hatching from Paragone” are Pasolini, Giovanni Testori and Arbasino himself. At that date Gadda “was already over sixty years old, had been writing for over thirty and had not yet published a volume of Il Pasticciaccio” and was considered by them to be “the greatest Italian author of the half century, to the immense spite of all the others”. In a vertical direction, Arbasino points to the debt owed to Gadda by his own generation who found in him the authorisation to follow their own linguistic experimentation in a literature freed from “every subjection and complex towards high ‘orders’ or ‘spheres’ in order to restore its dignity as an absolute linguistic operation”. It is, however, an indirect descent, not least because Gadda, an “elephant determined to die solitary”, never cared for his grandchildren – not sons – who were “cumbersome, obstinate to make him a sign of devotion” at times even “persecutory”. On the other hand, a shared “frenetic and imprudent vitality, always at risk” unites, in a horizontal sense, Pasolini to Testori and Arbasino: a “devouring obsession” that is a search for a language capable of rendering on the page the “most unleashed and experienced human passions”. This option of a relationship with reality that imprudently excludes censorship, “putting everything back into play, as if they were all going to die tomorrow”, leads them to choose a linguistic expressionism that takes into account different registers of writing, drafting and lexicon. 
Reconsidering the three authors in this broader perspective of linguistic expressionism, it became clear how true is what Pasolini wrote about Gadda: “the problems that his language proposes on the page are not exhausted: they tend to become general. One cannot think of Gadda without thinking of the whole of the literary 20th century, nor of this without the particular 19th century that it potentially contains”. 
And so it is that, moving even more freely in time, Mario Mondo constructs a large puzzle of writers who, to date, have chosen, in Contini’s words, a “very rich multilingual experience”. The first edition of Gadda’s Pasticciaccio (1957) and the Glossaries from Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta find their place in this enlarged perspective: a list of dialectal expressions, some of which then became commonly used.

Room 2

Following a complaint for corruption of minors and indecent exposure, in 1950 Pasolini fled to Rome with his mother Susanna, after being expelled from the PCI in Udine and losing his job in Valvasone, where he had been teaching since 1948. In the capital, he supported himself by doing occasional work at Cinecittà, while writing his first pages set in Rome, studying the Roman dialect live, thanks also to a young painter he met on the banks of the Aniene: Sergio Citti. At the same time, he began to frequent a large group of friends and intellectuals, including Sandro Penna, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Giorgio Caproni and Attilio Bertolucci. In 1951 he was hired at a secondary school in Ciampino and began his collaboration with Paragone, the magazine founded the previous year by Roberto Longhi. At the centre of Pasolini’s days and reflections in these years are the suburbs: squalid, abandoned, full of rubbish, closer to the Brazilian favelas than to the grey industrial suburbs of northern Italy. Amidst these ruins of abandoned factories, unfinished and already old houses, move a series of characters with picturesque names, whose elementary interiority is revealed in the action, rather than in the psychological depths. This led to the novels Ragazzi di Vita (1955), Una vita violenta (1959), and Il Rio della Grana, later merged in Alì dagli occhi azzurri (1965), which “I thought about simultaneously […] in the same months, in the same years, and together I matured and elaborated them”.
The already cinematographic eye of the writer Pasolini follows the parables of Riccetto, Tommasino and Piattoletta with a deep empathic realism, which translates into the search for a language as faithful as possible to that of his protagonists: a rough, dirty dialect, learned from “speakers” very distant from him.
It was this need to “maintain contact with reality, a physical, carnal contact, I would say almost of a sensual order” that led Pasolini to the expressive medium of the camera: “approaching cinema was therefore approaching a new technique that I had already been working on for some time in my literature”.
The study of and dedication to the cinematographic image seems to replace purely graphic and artistic expression in these years: the passages from the Roman novels find their ideal iconography in the frames of Accattone (1961), reproduced here from the pages of the first edition of the screenplay.

There is much evidence of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s long association with drawing, which has been intertwined with his first poetic experiments since he was a child. In the years of his childhood and youth, Pasolini lived with his family in various provincial towns, following the transfers of his father, an army officer: “They made me a nomad”. A fixed point in his wanderings were the summers spent in his mother Susanna’s birthplace, Casarsa della Delizia, in Friuli.
In 1939, he completed his classical high school in Bologna and, at the age of seventeen, enrolled in the Faculty of Arts, where he deepened the passions he had developed at school: poetry, romance philology, the figurative arts, but also football and cycling. In the academic year 1941-1942, he received the famous “figurative fulguration” during the course on the Facts of Masolino and Masaccio held by Roberto Longhi. Between Bologna and Friuli he wrote the verses that were later collected in his first book: Poesie a Casarsa(1942), compositions in Friulian that were also noted by Gianfranco Contini. At the same time, he drew and painted, using Filippo De Pisis’ drawings of kids as a model. After the war, Pasolini settled definitively in Casarsa: studying his graphic and pictorial production means tiptoeing into the extraordinary workshop of these years.
The series of drawings from 1942 exhibited here is made on thin, fragile cellulose film, which the artist himself calls “cellophane”. The paint, squeezed directly from the tube, is processed with the fingers or the back of the brush directly on the transparent support, so that it is painting and drawing at the same time. The cellophane depicts familiar characters, such as his brother Guido, with his face peeking out in fear from the sheet on his hospital bed, where he had been hospitalised after defending his brother Pier Paolo in a fight.

Bonvesin de la Riva act two. Following numerous requests, Casa Testori has reopened the doors of the exhibition on Bonvesin de la Riva. Requests coming from the public and, in particular, from schools, who saw in the exhibition an opportunity to work, in an original way, on the themes launched by Expo 2015.
TICTIG reopened on 22 May 2015, for another two months, but in a renewed version. 
The first of all the novelties was the presence of two large sculptures designed by Olimpia Zagnoli, a leading illustrator on the Italian and international scene, a leading figure in the New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME, La Repubblica, Marie Claire, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone and Monocle.
The sculptures, displayed in the garden of the House, were a further tribute to Bonvesin’s Milan, a city of zero kilometre where even pears and apples had found suitable soil to grow. 
Olimpia Zagnoli’s presence completed the panel of all the illustrators involved in this original project proposed by Casa Testori: to make a fascinating book written over seven centuries ago current and engaging.
Other great novelties were present in the exhibition bookshop: from the posters of the knights by Giacomo Bagnara to the large map of Milan by Davide Mottes, as well as the bag designed by Francesco Poroli.

On 12 June 2015, designers Alessandro Mendini and Fabio Novembre visited the exhibition TICTIG. The wonderful Milan of Bonvesin de la Riva and met the artists.

Bonvesin’s page dedicated to the fruits with which Milan was rich is an exuberant page of flavours and colours.
«The verdant orchards… Are often full of excellent fruits of almost every kind, offering the human palate the pleasure of a good taste».Bonvesin, as is his custom, is precise and detailed. He says that «plums, white, reddish, yellow and damask» are produced in «almost endless abundance». Then he assures that «pears and summer apples also appear in overabundance». As for apples, he specifies that Milan is also rich in «winter apples», «quince apples» and «pomegranate apples, good especially for those who are ill» (a pomegranate plant was also present in the garden of Casa Testori).
The list goes on to mention «figs that are called fioroni»; «domestic hazelnuts, then cornelian cherries, more suitable for women». And then even almonds («although few in number», writes Bonvesin). The lines dedicated to walnuts are particularly beautiful.
«Walnuts in unbelievable abundance, which the townspeople, who like this, use to eat throughout the year at the end of every meal. They also grind them up and mix them with eggs and Cacio cheese and pepper, making a stuffing for meat in the winter season. They also make oil from walnuts, which is widely used here».

Luca Font’s decisive line interpreted the slaughterhouse and narrated the multitude of cattle through which the city was fed.

«Bread and wine and tasty meat of all kinds of quadrupeds flow into the city, as to a hold of all temporal goods. And it is to be noted, as I have diligently reckoned with some butchers, that on the days when Christians are allowed to eat meat, about seventy oxen are slaughtered in the city alone. How many pigs, sheep, rams, lambs, goats, and other four-legged animals, both wild and domestic, are slaughtered by the butchers, I think I shall be able to tell to those who have told me the number of leaves and blades of grass. There is also a great deal of wild and domesticated bipedal meat in the city: capons, hens, geese, ducks, peacocks, doves, pheasants, wild hens, turtle-doves, wild ducks, larks, partridges, quails, blackbirds and other birds, which satisfy the appetites of men at the table».

«The forests and woods and riverbanks produce hardwoods of various qualities, suitable for building and many other uses, and also the indispensable firewood: such is the abundance of firewood that in the city alone it is absolutely certain that more than fifty thousand wagons are burned each year».

Giordano Poloni created a cartoon to narrate the theme of the wood that the city continually supplies and that comes to it from the surrounding forests, transported along the waterways. The result was a narrative with a strong visual impact, nourished by clear references to the history of art, particularly Henri Rousseau, and in which every detail shows care and richness.