Maria Seccardi, Pasolini’s secret woman

To throw new light on the biography of the intellectual is the book “Pier Paolo Pasolini. Letters to Maria Seccardi” (Ronzani Editore, pages 88, € 18; edited by Antonella Giordano and with a preface by Franco Zabagli): collects fifteen letters and a telegram written by Pier Paolo between 1948 and 1959 to the girl whose name had remained unknown to the Biographies and two letters of her. An intense and passionate bond, which has remained hidden for decades, now emerges by the will of the Pasolini Study Center of Casarsa, which had an active and proactive role in the realization of this project, promoting the publication of the volume through a path made of multiple meetings and insights.

The epistolary exchange had a troubled editorial affair. In 1986, when Nico Naldini, Pasolini’s cousin, took care of the first volume of the “letters” Maria Seccardi refused to make them public. Only after his disappearance, which took place in March 2022, did his daughter Valentina decided to respect the maternal will and entrust the material to the Pasolini Study Center, allowing its publication. “An act of sentimental understanding between Mary and Pasolini who today turns into a work of great documentary value”, explains the Pasolini center.

As the Pasolinian Card scholar Franco Zabagli points out in the preface, this correspondence adds a fundamental piece to Pasolini’s complex personality, telling an intertwining of affections that crosses the youth years in Friuli until his affirmation in cinema with “Accattone”. The meeting between Pasolini and Maria took place on the festive days and the dances narrated in “The dream of one thing”: together they were walking, went by bicycle, they spoke for hours, he gave her books, she was enchanted and read everything.

Their relationship continued even after the clamor aroused by the so -called ramuscelle events in August 1949 at the Santa Sabina festival (Pasolini paid three minors for masturbation relationships). Pasolini was reported for corruption of minors and obscene acts in a public place, broke out the scandal and – even before the trial and the condemnation – Pasolini abandoned teaching, was expelled from the PCI for “moral unworthiness” and in January 1950 he left with his mother for Rome. Their relationship turned into a written dialogue, in which Mary, although choosing a life apparently distant from that bond, becoming a teacher in the meantime, retained its memory as a silent and deep wound. Despite the distance and the events that marked his life, Pasolini maintained an intense correspondence with Mary until the end of the 1950s.

The relationship between Mary and Pier Paolo is pure and tormented, with him who shows himself affectionate and spends himself in intimate confidences. It tells of the escape from Friuli to the capital, of the trial, of the “people who surrounded me, enemy both on the right and on the left”; of intense life in Rome (“one hour in Rome corresponds to twelve hours from Friulian”); of the absence of nostalgia for Friuli, who now represents “all the finite, the dead of my existence”. Pasolini tells of his literary projects, of the books he is writing and comes to tell her that “you have been the more poet of me”. The correspondence has its dramatic culmination in the letter of 30 October 1957 in which Pasolini confesses to Maria his diversity: “I don’t know how you did and do not feel or somehow understand that it is physically impossible for me to have a relationship with a woman: Nico will have explained it to you several times, and I think you have read Freud. It is an invincible childhood trauma. Inverted to the boys: since the female sex, in my unconscious, which is a chaos, is simply my mother’s sex, which I have loved and lovesly, so as to determine all my life, to give life a single sense. From then on, the letters change tone, they become more formal. Up to a telegram of a single line of September 29, 1959 to cancel an appointment: “No more Venice. Affectionate greetings. Pier Paolo”.