ROMAN EVENING by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Where are you going through the streets of Rome
in buses or trolleys
full of people going home,
hurried and preoccupied
as if routine work were waiting for you,
work from which others are now returning?
It is right after supper,
when the wind smells of warm familial misery
lost in a thousand kitchens,
in the long, illuminated streets
spied on by brighter stars.
In the bourgeois quarter there's a peace
which makes everyone contented,
vilely happy,
a contentment everyone wants
their lives to be full of,
every evening,
Ah, to be different--in a world which
is indeed guilty--that is, not at all innocent. . .
Go, down the dark crooked street
to Trastevere:
There, motionless and disordered,
as if dug from the mud of other eras--
to be enjoyed by those who can steal
one more day from death and grief--
there you have all Rome at your feet. . .

I get off and cross the Garibaldi bridge,
keeping to the parapet
with my knuckles following
the worn edge of the stone,
hard in the warmth
that the night tenderly exhales
onto the arcades of
warm plane trees.
On the opposite bank
flat, lead-colored attics of ochre buildings
fill the washed-out sky
like paving-stones in a row.
Walking along the broken bone-like pavement
I see, or rather smell,
at once excited and prosaic--
dotted with aged stars and loud windows--
the big family neighborhood:
the dark, dank summer gilds it
with the stench
which the wind raining down
from Roman meadows
sheds on trolley tracks and facades.

And how the embankment smells
in a heat so pervasive
as to be itself a space:
from the Sublicio bridge to the Gianicolo
the stench blends with the intoxication
of the life that isn't life.
Impure signs that old drunks, ancient whores,
gangs of abandoned boys
have passed by here:
impure human traces,
humanly infected,
here to reveal these men,
violent and quiet,
their innocent low delights,
their miserable ends.

-translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Francesca Valente