Among the bicycles of Pier Paolo Pasolini

“He always pedaled against the wind”, the problem was that “the thicker the wind, the more he found pleasure. And the pleasure sometimes distracts ”. He knew what Indro Montanelli was saying while he was saying this, he knew it because he had cycled there on a bicycle, they had all cycled in those years, because he had followed the Giro d’Italia and because he was talking to us with Pier Paolo Pasolini, even about cycling. He was Pier Paolo Pasolini always pedaling against the wind, he occasionally gets distracted in the pleasure of doing it.

There was not only football in the life of the writer and journalist, there were many bicycles, those pedaled, observed, dreamed of. Like the Bianchi one, which belonged to Fausto Coppi, and which Pier Paolo Pasolini “tried in every way to buy, but I didn’t give up, I kept it, I take Fausto Coppi’s bicycle to my grave”, he said in 2018 while who writes was looking for stories for a book on the centenary of the Heron. Giano had worked in a bicycle workshop in the Esquiline, then he had learned the trade from Lazzeretti in via Bergamo, and finally, after a few months at Peppino Draghi’s school, he had started his own business. The bicycle that Giano said had belonged to Fausto Coppi did not enter the tomb, yet he had placed it in his will. Who knows where that bicycle is now that Pier Paolo Pasolini would have liked so much to have.

Because there is a pedal wire that follows, silent as only a bicycle can be, the shadow of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Even now, after a hundred years, since his birth. A thread that will be retraced on Sunday 6 November 2022 at 12.30 in “Pasolini by bike” in Rome at the Bocciofilo Center in via Giuseppe Barellai 60 / B, organized by the cultural association Ti con Zero. A pedaling and cycled Pasolini from the stories of Marco Pastonesi, from the readings by Gabriele Benedetti (in Italian and Friulian), set to music by the accordion of Alessandro D’Alessandro. A literary tour among those lands that tasted of pedals and tires from “The dream of a thing”, “A country of storms and primroses”, edited by Nico Naldini and from the collection of poems in Friulian “The new Youth”.

Bicycles that are literary training because “I started writing to satisfy my infinite need to tell myself stories. All the ones I had in my head. Then came cycling, which is a kind of serial novel with one hundred thousand different characters. The fans, the cyclists. A choral novel, one of those you would never want to finish reading, ”she wrote.

Bicycles that are a novel of life, the one seen on the roadside, read in the newspapers, the one that “I liked coming here because cycling is a sport that I love very much and have loved it since I was a kid. I don’t know, for example, do you know who Canavesi was? ”Pasolini said to Vittorio Adorni at the trial stage at the 1969 Giro d’Italia. Or pedaled as in that summer of 1940, at the age of eighteen. Departure from Bologna, first stop in Venice for the Biennale in the company of his friend Ermes known as Paria: 135 kilometers. Then from Venice to San Vito di Cadore for the summer holidays: 140 kilometers. Finally from the mountains to Casarsa della Delizia, in his Friuli: 130 kilometers. Or when he got in the wake of Egidio Feruglio and Giodano Cottur, Wilier riders, and didn’t leave their wheel for kilometers and kilometers, only to burst.

There is nothing better than a bicycle for imagining stories. The bicycle itself is a great story.