Ragazzi di vita

Ragazzi di vita is a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, published in 1955. The title, literally "boys of life", is used idiomatically in Italian to mean street kids or hustlers. Pasolini wrote it at a time when his interest in the marginal communities of Rome was taking shape, and the book is set in the poor outskirts of the city, where young people live without prospects or plans.

The story follows Riccetto, a street urchin introduced during his confirmation and First Communion. Soon afterwards he is stealing from a blind beggar and from a convent, and over the following years he moves from robbery to scams and then to prostitution, drifting constantly around the city. Many of his companions are killed or die off, and immorality is a constant presence. After trying to steal iron to buy his fiancée an engagement ring, he is jailed, and once released he returns to the same way of life. Pasolini portrays these young people as wanderers by nature, without life plans or goals, and sees them as a class that, detached from modernity and from the party politics of postwar Italy, retains a rebelliousness that predates any ideology.

The book is written in lowbrow language and the slang of the real lumpen proletariat, which made it hard going for the middle-class readers Pasolini opposed. The narrator offers no background for unfamiliar readers and does not narrate from above; he stands on the same level as his characters. The novel is part of Pasolini's search for a realism of his own, which in his films, such as Mamma Roma, went further than the neorealism of Rossellini by turning toward the most marginalized.

On publication the novel was sharply criticized and heavily censored. The Christian Democrat government condemned it as obscene, and the Communists rejected it for its supposed lack of positive heroes and political perspective.