Friday, January 6, 2023

Rome Journal: Confessions of a Film Buff

off shoot Via Appia Antica (photo: FLevy)

Take the Via Appia Antica. It’s approachable with the 118 bus. If you don’t have a bus pass you’ll take a cab to the Catacombs of St. Sebastián thinking it’s a way to get into the Parco regionale de l'Appia antica. You'd read on a site that Pasolini had filmed La Ricotta (1963) there, not realizing that the park at 4580 hectares is the second largest urban park in Europe.  As in some absurdist play, there’s lots of land and no way in. Checking further you find a hint. You’re getting closer coming to the Via della Cafferella. It’s a bike path. The good thing is you’re off the Appia Antica which has no shoulder. Trying to negotiate this highway is a little like walking on some interstate and hoping you won’t get hit by a truck. You may have had the experience after getting a flat and trying to make it from the highway to an exit where there’s a gas station. But you’ve nevertheless survived providing you can get back to “land” before it grows dark. You might never have been one for bikes, but you look enviously at the cyclists as they smugly pass you by. BTW Orson Welles, fresh from The Trial (1962), plays the director in this film which is an indictment of capitalist exploitation.You try to make it all work and you think maybe this is what it’s like to suffer on your way back to the Minerve, The luxury hotel in back of the Pantheon where you will take a hot bath. 

read "Rome Journal: Pier Pasolini's Mamma Roma is An Iconography" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and watch the trailer of Erotomania



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