Love Meetings

In 1963, Pier Paolo Pasolini and producer Alfredo Bini traveled around Italy to find locations and faces for the Friulian director's new film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. But for some time Pasolini has had a fixation: to know the opinions of Italians on sexuality, love and morality and to see how the morals of his country have changed in recent years.

It is therefore decided to combine the two things and Pasolini enters the field, microphone in hand, to talk to the Italians of "inverted", "first time", "prostitutes" and "divorce".

What emerges is a contradictory portrait of the country, a cross-section of an Italy at different speeds, a disconcerting picture that alternates between a faux-loose-lipped openness in the North and ancestral rigidity in the South.

The film also includes the authoritative opinions of Pasolini's "friends" such as Alberto Moravia, Cesare Musatti, Adele Cambria, Camilla Cederna, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Oriana Fallaci. The impression that one gets from this extraordinary film-investigation is that of a great, widespread ignorance even in the most cultured strata of the population, of a profound backwardness and of the fear of the average Italian to face without shame a confrontation linked to the theme of sexuality.