Between June and August 1959, the magazine Successo commissioned Pier Paolo Pasolini to take a “tour of Italy” along its most outermost border; a journey along the coastline of the peninsula. In a Fiat 1100, Pasolini travelled from Ventimiglia to Palmi, from north to south, to the islands and back. The report was published in three parts and is a light and unique moment in Pasolini’s career.
Transformed into a theatrical event – on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the writer and director, celebrated this year – and extrapolated from its journalistic context, La lunga strada di sabbia offers one of those rare moments of “Pasolinian happiness”; the author, removed from the melancholic and at times tragic air of his work, and in a certain sense enjoying a holiday from himself, abandons himself to what he defines as his “Mozartian soul”. More than a form of reportage, his is a meandering exploration of the same Italy that would soon announce his decline and his death; the light, rather than solemn, celebration of an Italy in the very first and invisible moment of the economic boom, seen from the point of view of a poet whose style is of an almost infantile vitality and euphoria, joie de vivre and sensuality; a “voyage through Italy” that is also a eulogy for a lost world.