"The Ragazzi" comes from the same vivid and violent world as Pasolini's great films. In the poverty and chaos of postwar Rome, Ricetto and his gang survive by their wits, their cruelty and their instincts for survival. Their lives are shaped by hunger, theft, betrayal and prostitution; they celebrate their triumphs with brutal abandon and die bleak deaths. Pasolini writes of this harsh world with an understanding that there is humanity and even humour here. "The Ragazzi" caused a scandal on its first publication in 1955. Pasolini's unsentimental depiction of young masculinity adrift in a hard and amoral society still resonates powerfully today.

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

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 and spent his childhood in the Friuli region of northeast Italy. In 1950 he moved to Rome, where he saw first hand the horrendous living conditions of its suburbs' immigrant inhabitants. Already a major poet, novelist and polemicist, he started working in the film industry in 1957, and during the 1960s and early 70s established a reputation as a daring and skilled director. He was murdered in 1975, although controversy continues to surround the circumstances of his death.