`Pasolini needed to live dangerously in every sense, this passionate, contradictory man. He didn't slum it in the slums - he lived there to learn the vital language of the poor, in order to remind Italian literature of its existence.'

                                    Paul Bailey

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 shantytown 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.