Pasolini was a poet, writer, journalist, philosopher, playwright, painter and political figure but above all he is considered a controversial personality. Pasolini was born in Bologna, but he lived the first part of his life in the north of Italy. After some family troubles in 1950 he moved to Rome with his mother and went to live in Rebibbia, at that time, a formless and chaotic slum on the outskirts of Rome.

Pasolini’s relationship with Rome was a controversial love story marked by mixed feeling.  The outskirts of Rome (called Borgate- slums) are the settings of the most part of his novels and here he met the main characters of his stories. The writer describes, squalid suburbs. An unsentimental depiction of the poverty and chaos of life in the slums of 1950s postwar Rome where a humanity made of poor people coming from all over Italy lived in shacks without electricity and water. All that fascinated Pasolini. The "life-boys" who lived in the borgate nevertheless were pure boys untouched by consumerism and this according to the writer would have allowed them to save Italy, but he was wrong, it didn’t happen.