Dario Bellezza (1944–1996)

Bellezza was one of Pasolini's discoveries and protégés, and did some clerical and creative work for him. He seems to have been best known as a poet. Angelo is one of his few prose works, a novel about the decline of a young gay man who becomes hooked on drugs. The story is told in the first person by a protagonist named Dario (like the author), impressionistically, in long incoherent ramblings which create a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity about what happened or who's who. There is an show more older woman, Elisa, a legendary author, who Dario insists is his only love, but who cruelly rejected him after a quick seduction. The thing becomes clearer--maybe too clear--if one interprets "Elisa" not as a human being but allegory for Literature, capital letter, as befits the heightened, baroque rhetoric of the novel. Dario's misery is caused by his incapacity to serve his art, torn as he is by his revulsion over his homosexuality and destroyed by self-hating addiction.

Bellezza died of AIDS at 52, in abject poverty, but I saw just now this is the year they are finally issuing his complete poetry so maybe some posthumous fame will come his way. show less