Not far from the splendour of tourist Rome are the slum suburbs. Here immigrants from village and countryside, lured to the capital by promises of work, gather and make a painful accommodation with the modern world. A new generation emerges, full of unreal hopes, wily and resourceful, brutal and vulnerable. A Violent Life, first published in Italy in 1959, is the story of that generation. Written by the renowned film maker, poet, polemicist and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini, A Violent Life is an uncanny fictional chronicle of the author's death foretold.

It is the story of Tommaso Puzzilli, a street hood and survivor, one of the ragazzi di vita born of the shanty-town and resorting to crime and prostitution to get what he wants. When a flood ravages the slums, he becomes an unexpected hero.

Pasolini is a legend whose brutal murder at the hand of one of the ragazzi di vita remains a major unsolved mystery.