The article focuses on the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini and examines the relationship between his artistic expressions and spatial and environmental themes, such as architecture and landscape. Specifically, it analyses how Pasolini conceived space as a human and social representation. The essay explores Pasolini’s art through a novel connection between his creative output, thoughts, and the territorial and landscape contexts he described, depicted, and perceived. Pasolini gave particular attention to the Friulian locations, especially Casarsa della Delizia in the province of Pordenone (northeast of Italy), where he had deep ties with his mother and spent the intense years of World War II, and its immediately subsequent years, from 1943 to 1949. From these early years, Pasolini’s commitment to promoting a democratic vision of space became evident. A space that he reads not only as a physical entity but also as a field of political, social, and cultural interaction. 

Pasolini’s work is one of the most thoroughly studied in contemporary Italian culture, with many publications covering multiple themes. This body of research saw renewed interest during the centenary of his birth in 2022, with comprehensive reprints and anthologies. In Pasolini’s work, landscape and architecture are constant elements of his poetics, worldview, and representation of contemporary society. However, despite numerous studies that address these themes episodically, focusing on specific and limited topics, a systematic reflection examining the relationship between space, architecture, and democracy in Pasolini’s work in a comprehensive manner is still lacking. 

Several studies delve deeply into the Roman periphery,¹ while others concentrate on the architecture represented in individual works ² or the relationship with specific geographical areas.³ Nonetheless, there is a gap in research that considers categories of thought related to space across the many architectures and landscapes that populated Pasolini’s life and work, from the rural landscapes of Friuli that shaped his youth to his move to the Roman peripheries and finally to his discovery of the Third World through his travels and documentaries in India, the Middle East, and Africa. In this context, the places connected to Pasolini’s youth offer a fertile ground for exploring the idea of democratic space, drawing insights from his discourse – which, in contemporary terms, we could describe as “pre-multimedia” – on how to conceptualize space about the broad concept of democracy. 

In Casarsa della Delizia, a small town in the province of Pordenone, stands the Loggia of San Giovanni, a civic structure located in the main square, piazza Vittoria (Fig. 1). This small gothic loggia, adorned with Venetian-style windows and dating back to the fourteenth century, once served as a meeting place for civic debates and a marketplace. It functioned as the seat of the local government until the mid-nineteenth century, after which its political role diminished. However, this space is deeply tied to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s political activity during his years in Casarsa, where he served as the secretary of the local Italian Communist Party. In the area under the loggia, Pasolini posted political manifestos and community news written in Italian and Friulian. Some of these original writings are now preserved in the Pier Paolo Pasolini Study Centre archive in Casarsa. Thus, the loggia became a symbol of active political participation and dissent, where alternative voices to established power could be physically and symbolically expressed in the heart of the community. 

This case, much like the earlier example of Nivola’s square, invites reflection on how the memory of spaces affects their democratic function over time. The physical preservation of a building can protect its history, but without cultural and social engagement, the space risks losing its democratic potential. The Loggia of San Giovanni is not only a space tied to numerous collective memories – its medieval origins as the central civic location, Pasolini’s political activism frame, and a place where revolts occurred during local movements in 1948 ⁸ – but also represents a broader challenge in how democratic spaces survive through time. Although the loggia is open, accessible, and rich in historical significance, its current use does not stimulate public debate or serve any meaningful civic function. 

In this context, concepts like openness and public use, while significant, do not suffice to classify a space as genuinely democratic. What is missing is the active, living memory that engages with the present (Fig. 3). Instead, the memory that prevails is distant, focused on the building’s medieval past, which fosters a superficial mythification of the space. The loggia’s front façade is aesthetically appealing, yet its rear is modest and unremarkable, marked by technical installations. This aestheticization, muting the building’s historical conflicts and aligning it with contemporary notions of decorum, neutralizes its potential for dissent and limits its capacity to serve as a democratic space in the present: 

Capitalism is now at the center of a great internal revolution: it is evolving, in a revolutionary way, into neo-capitalism. Faced with this revolutionary, progressive, and unifying neo-capitalism, one experiences unprecedented world unity. [...] Nationalisms tend to be levelled by this naturally international neo-capitalism shortly. Thus, the unity of the world (now only faintly perceptible) will become a concrete unity of culture, social forms, goods, and consumption.⁹

The theme of the vocality of a building or public space conceptually connects to another recurring theme, that of ruin. The ruin represents a “speaking sign,” which, even in its state of decay – contrary to the completeness and aesthetic of a restored historical building, but mute, like the Loggia di San Giovanni – continues to convey an underlying meaning and trace a path. As has been noted, this aspect is evident in the poem Disperata Vitalità [desperate vitality] where, referring to the bestione papalino, [Vatican beast] a ruined castle that symbolically represents Pasolini himself, one can read the following passage: 

Death is not

in the inability to communicate

but in the inability to be understood anymore.¹⁰

Thus, the idea of death without resurrection, understood as the impossibility of renewing a cycle or reiterating a meaning – a recurring theme in Pasolini’s later works – finds its metaphorical expression in a ruined castle but is quickly reconsidered outside the metaphor. For Pasolini, the value of tradition and vernacular culture encapsulates this concept. The expressive power of even the most straightforward and anonymous objects indicates a resistance against capitalism’s homogenization and destructive advance. This idea applies to ruin, especially when contrasted with a restored historical artifact, restructured and emptied of its meanings, provided that the ruin can still be understood. In this sense, his view on the preservation, safeguarding, and protection of all architectures and landscapes should not be interpreted as “sterile and immobilizing nostalgia” ¹¹ but rather as the preservation of the capacity of things to cyclically reiterate their meaning and reaffirm the values connected to them, values which, in this sense, are democratic. 

This road we walk on, with its uneven and ancient pavement, is nothing, almost nothing – it is a humble thing. It cannot even be compared to certain works of art, magnificent and authored, from the Italian tradition. Yet, I believe that this modest little road, so humble, should be defended with the same tenacity, goodwill, and rigor with which one would defend a great work of art by a renowned artist.¹²

This concept, which identifies the recovery of the past and tradition as a crucial element, updated and integrated into the present as the foundation of a democratic process, also finds expression in the 1970 film Appunti per un’Orestiade africana. The documentary, filmed as a series of notes or collected fragments, is a travel diary documenting the hypothetical intention to shoot a version of the Aeschylus’ Oresteia reimagined in the African context. At the heart of the work is an analogy between the democratization process taking place in Africa and the narrative of Orestes, who, after killing his mother, is judged by a tribunal of his peers – constituted in the Areopagus, the first symbolic form of democracy in the Athenian sense: 

All educated people agree […] that archaic civilization – superficially called folklore – must not be forgotten, despised and betrayed. However, it must be taken up within the new civilization, integrating the latter and making it specific, concrete, and historical. The terrible and fantastic divinities of African prehistory must undergo the same process as the Erinyes: to become Eumenides.¹³

Democratic space is therefore born from the “rationalization” of the archaic or an updated reading of its past, its history, and its tradition, and finds its place in the model where debate, dialectical conflict, and dissent are the very foundation of the reason why that space exists: the court. Pasolini identified a compelling parallel between Orestes’ “discovery” of democracy and the condition of many African states that had gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s. His location scouting became a documentary capturing this transformation, consistently focusing the camera on the stark dualism between the presence of an archaic culture (dances, traditional costumes, rural areas) and the onset of modernity (cities, industries, schools). The school itself embodies this dialectical tension between democratic culture and modernity. The Temple of Apollo, the locus of reason toward which Orestes moves, is identified by Pasolini in the university complex of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. This institution, he observes, “[…] when seen from a distance, it immediately reveals unmistakable signs of resembling the typical Anglo-Saxon, neo-capitalist universities.” ¹⁴ 

Regarding the schools, another especially noteworthy sequence centers on the education theme. Pasolini interviews a group of African students at Sapienza University in Rome, arranged in a classroom as if seated in a parliamentary assembly. He engages them in a discussion, soliciting their perspectives on his ideas for the film, the Orestes-Africa parallel, and the conditions of change across the African continent. The entire sequence takes the form of an open debate that is often highly critical of Pasolini’s points of view. It represents the enacting of the democratic process. This is a meta-dialogue that, at its core, embodies the concept of education as a staged representation of the democratic process itself. The setting – a university lecture hall – functions as a backdrop or scenography, closely resembling a parliamentary assembly or, in keeping with the Oresteia theme, the courtroom jury deliberations. 

This connection between education and dissent is fascinating in defining the public school as a democratic space. Education promotes critical awareness and political participation, and historically, schools and universities have represented privileged spaces for youth contestation. Numerous examples of student occupations in universities and public spaces can be cited from recent times, both in Western democracies and in dictatorships, demonstrating how the physical space of education often becomes the center of political demonstrations and social claims. Therefore, the school is not only a building where knowledge transmission takes place but also a space of dissent, where dialectical relationships between teachers and students argue and where youth can express opposition to the existing social and political system. Unsurprisingly, Pasolini combined political activity and teaching, represented by the Loggia of San Giovanni sites and the Casello di Versutta. The role of the school as a space of dissent reflects the capacity of educational spaces to become incubators of social change and catalysts of political protest. If the public open space is where democracy must manifest itself in dissent, the school is the public building where the democratic spirit forms. (Fig. 5.)

In Casarsa, we can count one last element corresponding to the concept we have outlined of democratic space: the tomb of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Fig. 6). At the behest of his mother, Susanna Colussi Pasolini, the project was entrusted to Gino Valle (1923–2003), one of the greatest Italian architects who shared the artist’s Friulian origins and was part, together with other intellectuals from Friuli, of his circle of friends. Valle’s project resumes, through three minimal elements, the tragic essence of being a poet, which Pasolini was mainly during his Casarsa period. Inside the city cemetery, the Municipal Administration allowed a small strip of land for the burial of the body leaning against the boundary wall. This element becomes, perhaps completely involuntarily, emblematic. Pasolini is permanently, even after death, a personality who places himself at the limit, on the edge of a space, be it ideal or real, that has yet to find a solution but is open, public, and above all, belongs to everyone. It is democratic. 

Therefore, the “empty place” concept refers not solely to a physical void but also to an institutional and symbolic void that allows for new democratic practices. In this sense, democratic space can accommodate plurality, contestation, and transformation. It is not a space filled with fixed symbols or predetermined uses but a dynamic place where relationships between individuals, memories, and institutions are constructed and transformed through participation and dialectic – also conflictual.