4 ideas
As a young boy, Riccetto dives into the Tiber to rescue a drowning swallow. Years later, now older and hardened by hustling and a spell in prison, he watches the younger boy Genesio drown in the Aniene. He does nothing, then walks away so he won't be implicated. The two river scenes frame the novel and show slum life gradually replacing a spontaneous impulse to help with self-protective indifference.
Pasolini writes the boys' speech in raw Roman romanesco rather than standard literary Italian. Translating them into the national language would filter their experience through bourgeois norms and make them legible only as objects of pity or reform. Keeping their slang, obscenities and rhythms lets the subproletariat appear on its own terms, and that unfiltered presence is what the obscenity prosecution treated as offensive.
The borgate boys belong neither to the organized working class of Marxist politics nor to the moral order of Catholic Italy. They live in an amoral present of appetite, theft, play and cunning. Seeing them this way reframes petty crime as a survival economy and a form of vitality, not as individual delinquency awaiting correction, and it shows that neither progressive nor religious frameworks have a place for them.
The novel has no rising plot. It moves through loose episodes of scams, swims, hunger and arrests. Deaths such as the collapse of a building housing displaced families arrive abruptly and are quickly left behind. The structure enacts its content: where lives are precarious and cheap, events do not build toward meaning or advancement, and the narrative refuses the consoling arc of redemption or tragedy.