He was a poet, novelist, screenwriter, film director, heretical communist and the most brilliant, provocative political publicist of his generation in Italy: Pier Paolo Pasolini.

And also, as he said himself, "a football fanatic".

It is not known that he slept in red and blue bed linen.

But at his mother's house in Casarsa della Delizia, where he spent the school holidays, the walls of his room were striped in the colors of "my heart club".

When the property was acquired by the Friuli Region in 1993 after a long period of vacancy in order to set up a study center here, they came to light under several layers of plaster.

The room can be visited in the Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Andreas Rossmann

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

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The privateer Pasolini was a supporter of FC Bologna all his life, but not, as he explained, because he was born in the university city, but because he had his football initiation here: As a high school student and student, he played on the fields of Caprara in the north-west the city.

He later described these afternoons as the best of his life.

Not just a passionate tifoso

The red-blue (“Rosso-Blu”) have their “golden days”: Between 1929 and 1941, FC Bologna won the championship four times, and when the team took part in the 1937 football tournament at the World Exhibition in Paris, where they defeated FC Chelsea 4th in the final :1, returns home and is received in the station forecourt, Pasolini skips school.

"Only once did I see him really pissed off," remembers Franco Citti, who stars in Pasolini's film Accattone: "It was when we went to the Olympic Stadium for the AS Roma vs Bologna match and his club 4: lost 1."

But Pasolini is not only a passionate Tifoso, his connections with football are diverse.

The journalist Valerio Curcio, born in 1992, meticulously traces them in his book "The top scorer has gone among the poets", which is now being published to mark Pasolini's hundredth birthday.

In addition to the football fan, he introduces the football player, the football storyteller, the football reporter and the football philosopher Pasolini: a five-chapter mosaic that does not remain in the past but also reflects, like the harsh critic of consumer society today, almost fifty years after his (not conclusively clarified) murder in Ostia in 1975, would probably stand for the total commercialization of football.

After starting out in Bolognese, Pasolini's career as a player took him to a youth team in Casarsa, where he wanted to found an association for art and sport, and on to Rome, where he played football with the teenagers on the gravel pitches of the shantytowns on the outskirts of the city.

With the "Nazionale dello spettacolo", the national team of film and theater people, for which he appears as a left winger with the number eleven on his back, the virtuoso dribbler travels all over Italy and plays in 1971 in the Stadio Flaminio against a veteran selection from AS Roma and Lazio.

In 1975 he leads his film team from “The 120 Days of Sodom” against the cast of Bernardo Bertolucci's “1900”.

Contempt for many intellectuals

As intensively as football accompanies Pasolini's life, it only appears marginally in his literary and film work.

In the novels "Ragazzi di vita" and "Una vita violenta" he is part of the everyday life of suburban boys, whose physical play is also a demonstration and expression of eroticism, "a", according to Dacia Maraini, who was a close friend of his, " symbolic lovemaking with the boys who cast a spell on him".

Pasolini only appeared twice as a sports reporter: in 1957 he reported on the Derby AS against Lazio for “L'Unità”, in 1960 the Olympic Games (and how they were received by society) were the topic of his column in a weekly newspaper.

Pasolini vehemently opposes the contempt of many intellectuals, who dismiss football as fleeting entertainment that dumbs down the masses and misdirects their revolutionary energies: “The two hours of shared excitement (aggression and fraternization) in the stadium are liberating: even if from a political point of view In one of the interviews, when asked what “all in all fascinates him about football” Pasolini answers: “Football is the last sacred spectacle of our time.

It may be a distraction, but at its core it is a rite.

While other sacred spectacles, even church services, are already in decline, football is the only one left.

He has taken the place of the theater.”

The literature about Pasolini fills shelves, in Germany alone, almost a meter is added to the hundredth birthday.

This little book shows him from a new perspective.