ENJOY THE GAME

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI, BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, AND A FOOTBALL MATCH THAT CHANGED ITALIAN CINEMA

LORENZO BALESTRINI

December 9, 2025

Long before their names became pillars of Italian cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci stepped onto a dusty Roman pitch for a casual game of football. What unfolded that afternoon reveals more about influence, rivalry, and artistic inheritance than any archival document ever could.

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On the afternoon of October 12, 1965, on a dusty municipal pitch on the edge of Monteverde Vecchio in Rome, two teams took to the field wearing mismatched jerseys borrowed from a local club. On one side stood Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, director, football addict, and captain of a team cobbled together from actors and non-actors. On the other side, head lowered slightly as though adjusting to the idea of leadership, was Bernardo Bertolucci, then twenty-four years old and still digesting the fact that his former mentor had become, in certain cultural circles, his rival.

Could that be them? The now-canonical team photograph, circled figures marking Pasolini and Bertolucci as if for forensic analysis, though it remains unclear whether the men in question were actually them, or simply convenient stand-ins history decided not to correct.

There are a few known photographs of the opening minutes, and they show Pasolini moving forward with an urgency that seems disproportionate to the friendly nature of the match. His right foot, frozen mid-stride, appears to be chasing a ball at the very edge of the frame. Two players, unidentified, pull back nervously, as if aware that they are witnessing not merely a kickoff, but a symbolic contest between two emerging configurations of postwar Italian culture. Bertolucci appears in the far background, shading his eyes from the sun. If one did not know the context, one might mistake him for a spectator.

That this football match took place at all seems improbable now, so firmly has it receded behind the grandeur of both men’s achievements. And yet, within Italian film lore, it has become a kind of hinge moment: modest in scale, nearly undocumented, but formative, a tableau in which the tensions, sympathies, and divergences between two generations of filmmakers played themselves out not in political essays or cinematic innovations, but in forty-five-minute halves on a wavering pitch.

In the few eyewitness testimonies that survive, the match is described with an odd mixture of precision and dreaminess, as though everyone present felt they were participating in something both trivial and monumental. The light that day, several recalled, was “strangely silver,” like the light on a set before the cameras roll. And yet the ball was real, the sweat real, the quarrels over fouls real. The match at Monteverde was more than a metaphor. It was football: earthy, chaotic, rhythmic, unembarrassed by significance.

And yet significance leaked in.

Pasolini arrived an hour before anyone else. This, too, is corroborated by more than one witness. He walked the length of the pitch twice, then paced the touchline as though contemplating tactical arrangements with all the earnestness of a man preparing for a European Cup final. Football was not a diversion for him, but a form of intelligence, a system as articulate as language.

The day before the match: Pasolini preferred to warm up in a suit, claiming it kept his prose sharp. Witnesses insist this was the moment he first demonstrated the “Roman dribble,” a maneuver later described as half football technique, half sociological inquiry.

Pasolini once wrote that football is “the last sacred ritual of our time,” a ceremony in which bodies speak without mediation. His relationship to the sport veered toward the mystical. He claimed to see patterns invisible to others: diagonal passing lanes, the moral architecture of a well-timed tackle, the tragic waste of a poorly executed counterattack. On set, he was known to interrupt rehearsals to describe an extraordinary goal he had witnessed the previous weekend, using the vocabulary of structural linguistics rather than the jargon of football commentary.

Thus, it was entirely logical, to him at least, that a match should precede the next stage of a film production. Football sharpened his senses. It clarified his instinct for improvisation. It restored, if only temporarily, the innocence of physical pleasure that he feared was being eroded by consumer capitalism and television culture.

At Monteverde, he wore a red jersey too large for his thin shoulders, the collar sagging slightly. Beneath his shorts were white athletic socks rolled down to the ankle. When the caretaker arrived to open the changing area, Pasolini waved him away; he preferred to change outside, in the air.

A little after two o’clock, as the first players began to trickle in—some from Cinecittà, some from the Università di Roma, one from an amateur theater troupe—Pasolini started warming up alone, tapping the ball with the outside of his foot, then collecting it again with the inside, moving in circles like a ritual dance.

People who played with him often recall the same paradox: Pasolini was not physically imposing, but he played with an intensity that made him seem larger than he was. He rarely smiled on the pitch. On this particular day, he looked almost severe.

“È importante” (It matters), he said when asked the reason for the match.

If Pasolini’s team was scrappy but willing, Bertolucci’s side looked, by all accounts, somewhat bewildered. Several of his players had never met each other before. One was a young assistant cameraman with little football experience but a deep desire to please. Another was a poet from Parma who had been promised a drink afterward. A third was a philosophy student who claimed he had twisted his ankle the night before but agreed to serve as goalkeeper.

Half-time. Bertoluci insisted he wasn’t tired; he was “reconsidering realism.” Passolini, beside him, reconsidered cigarettes.

Bertolucci himself cut an ambiguous figure. He respected Pasolini profoundly—had revered him, in fact, long before working under him. But the admiration had shifted in recent years into something more difficult to articulate: gratitude mixed with embarrassment, deference combined with resistance. Their politics were growing apart. Their aesthetics were diverging. And yet the bond remained, tinged with something like sorrow.

When Bertolucci walked onto the field, wearing a borrowed blue jersey and long black goalkeeper shorts (despite not playing in goal), he looked both eager and hesitant. Those present remember him sweeping his hair back compulsively, then adjusting his socks as though delaying the moment when he would have to confront Pasolini directly.

Bertolucci greeted Pasolini politely, even shyly. Pasolini returned the greeting with brusque affection. Their handshake lasted an instant too long, as though each man was trying to read in the other’s face a message that words could not deliver.

The early phase of the match belonged entirely to Pasolini. From the kickoff, he surged forward in a swift diagonal run that caught Bertolucci’s defenders off guard. His movements were rhythmic and choreographed as though by a director who understood the dramaturgy of acceleration. He dribbled past the first player, then the second, then the third, releasing a shot that curved just wide of the post.

A cameraman named Gianni, playing on Pasolini’s team, later said the opening ten minutes were “terrifying,” not because Pasolini was dangerous but because he made danger look like an aesthetic principle.

Bertolucci’s team attempted a counterattack, but coordination was lacking. The poet from Parma misread a pass and allowed the ball to roll under his foot. The philosophy student, wearing gardening gloves instead of proper goalkeeper gloves, misjudged a rebound and fell backward into the net. All the while, Bertolucci shouted encouragement in a soft, tentative voice.

The score remained 0–0, though not by design.

Then, in the fourteenth minute, according to one witness who kept time on her wristwatch, Pasolini struck. Receiving the ball from an actor who had appeared in one of Pasolini’s earlier movies, he sliced through a gap between two defenders and fired a low shot into the corner. The poet-goalkeeper lunged in the wrong direction by a margin so wide it elicited a sympathetic groan from the sidelines.

“What would you have liked to be besides a filmmaker and writer?” “A good football player, nothing more and nothing less.”

Pasolini did not celebrate. He merely jogged back to midfield, eyes lowered, as though the goal had been an inevitability rather than an achievement.

One participant recalls hearing him mutter: “Il cinema non concede regali” (Cinema offers no gifts). Whether the remark referred to the goal or to Bertolucci is a matter of interpretation.

What transformed the match from an informal game into a minor legend was not the goals, but a single moment midway through the second half. Bertolucci, who until then had remained on the left flank, drifting between the roles of winger and observer, suddenly intercepted a loose ball. He trapped it awkwardly, nearly stumbled, then carried it forward several meters. Those watching recall that the transformation was sudden: For a brief instant, he looked unrecognizable, possessed by the exhilaration of someone discovering, unexpectedly, that they possess a talent previously denied them.

Pasolini approached to tackle. Bertolucci feinted, clumsily but successfully, and slipped past him.

There was an audible gasp. Some swear Pasolini stopped moving for a full second, stunned by the audacity of the gesture. Others claim he smiled, a rarity on the pitch. One version has him laughing. Another insists he looked wounded.

Bertolucci kept going, weaving through two defenders who seemed too astonished to intervene. Reaching the edge of the box, he attempted a shot. It floated upward, weak, slow, almost apologetic, but it reached the goal. The philosophy student leapt, glove flapping, but the ball passed over his fingertips and brushed the underside of the crossbar.

The score was now 2–1.

Bertolucci raised his arms in triumph, but only halfway, as if unsure whether celebration was permitted. Pasolini approached him, rested a hand on his shoulder, and said something that no witness could hear.

Later, in interviews, Bertolucci would never mention the match directly. But once, in a conversation about Pasolini, he said: “There are moments when the student surpasses the master, not because he is better, but because he is free of the master’s expectations.”

Some have interpreted this cryptically as an allusion to his surprise goal at Monteverde.

What does it mean that two of the most influential figures in Italian cinema once enacted their creative tensions on a football field? Film historians often treat the match as a symbolic prefiguration of the political divisions that would later widen between Pasolini and Bertolucci. Pasolini increasingly embraced a tragic, solitary critique of late-capitalist Italy; Bertolucci drifted away from Marxist dialectics, toward international cinema, toward lush formalism.

In this interpretation, the match becomes a kind of rehearsal for their intellectual divergence. Pasolini’s early dominance on the field mirrors his role as mentor, moral conscience, and poetic force. Bertolucci’s awkward, improvised goal becomes a metaphor for his ability to escape Pasolini’s shadow and locate a cinematic language of his own.

Pasolini breaking into what witnesses later called “the auteur’s run”—a stride that critics insist foreshadowed the third act, even if no one agrees on which film.

Another reading suggests that the match reveals something about the physicality of Italian cinema at the time: its muscular relation to the world, its proximity to the body, its capacity for collisions—ideological, erotic, and generational.

And there is a third, quieter reading: The match simply shows that these men, later monumentalized, were once young enough to quarrel over fouls, proud enough to compete, tender enough to apologize.

A fragment of testimony survives from a sound technician who played the final ten minutes on Pasolini’s team. He claims that after Bertolucci’s goal, Pasolini whispered: “Bravo, Bernardo.” And that Bertolucci replied: “Only because you let me pass.” Pasolini shook his head. “No,” he said. “It was your moment.”

The technician insists this exchange really happened. Others disagree. But in the contested space between fact and memory, myths germinate.

In any case, all agree that around this point, fatigue set in. The ball began moving more slowly; players stumbled; the poetry student removed his glasses, which had fogged over. Pasolini pressed forward relentlessly, as though the integrity of his worldview depended on one more goal.

He scored again in the seventy-first minute, a left-footed shot that deflected off a defender and rolled past the goalkeeper. Bertolucci, exhausted, shifted to midfield and attempted to reorganize his side, but cohesion eluded them.

In the post-match interview, Pasolini insisted the decisive moment wasn’t the goal but “the moral temperature of the midfield,” prompting journalists to nod as if this clarified anything.

The final goal, sealing a 6–3 or 5–2 (accounts vary) victory for Pasolini’s team, came from a chaotic rebound. Witness accounts differ about who struck it; some say Pasolini himself, others a quiet cinematographer named Aldo. In any case, the ball crossed the line without grace.

Moments later, the whistle blew.

Pasolini shook Bertolucci’s hand firmly, with something like melancholy. Someone produced a camera and suggested a group photo, but Bertolucci demurred; he was sweating heavily and said he preferred to change first. Pasolini agreed and walked toward the touchline. The images are now presented in film archives as curiosities, footnotes to a moment when Italian cinema expressed its anxieties not in manifestos, but in movement.

In the following weeks, the match was discussed occasionally, then less so, then not at all. It became one more episode in the informal chronicles of Pasolini’s footballing life, overshadowed by his political essays, his polemics against mass media, his increasingly severe warnings about Italy’s cultural future.

Bertolucci never referred to it explicitly. Not once.

And yet, as decades passed, the match at Monteverde acquired a faint glow in the margins of film history. It came to symbolize, in miniature, a transition: from the neorealist inheritance of the 1950s to the more global, more stylized, more bourgeois cinema of the 1970s. Pasolini embodied the former, Bertolucci the latter. Their encounter on the pitch became a metaphor, a parable, shorthand. Film scholars treated it as emblematic of the tension between physical and intellectual approaches to cinema. Critics invoked it when discussing generational inheritance. Students mentioned it as a charming anecdote illustrating the unpredictability of artistic mentorship.

The evening after the game, the fight was not forgotten but reinterpreted: Bertolucci said he’d been fouled, Pasolini claimed it was an homage to neorealism, and both agreed the lighting had been perfect.

In some retellings, the match grew grander, more dramatic, laden with symbolic gestures. In others, it shrank to the scale of an amusing footnote. But it always stuck, like a half-remembered scene from a film no one can find a print of.

When, in later years, Pasolini spoke about football as a “grammar of desire,” people retroactively interpreted the match as evidence of this theory. When Bertolucci spoke of the burden of influence, listeners imagined him remembering the moment he slipped past Pasolini and scored.

Over time, the story became self-sustaining. Even those who doubted its importance did not doubt its occurrence.

And now, at the end, after tracing the trajectory of an afternoon that shaped two towering figures of Italian cinema, it must be said—quietly, reluctantly, with the respect due to beautiful inventions—that the match at Monteverde never happened. No such game is recorded in any diary, archive, or production log. Photographs show Pasolini playing football, yes, but never with Bertolucci. The testimonies contradict one another because none are primary; they are reconstructions born of admiration, longing, and the irresistible desire for stories that reveal truths even when they are not themselves true. What persists is not an event but a myth—and perhaps, like all good myths, it persists because it explains something essential that history alone cannot contain.

Lorenzo Balestrini (b. 1963 in Ventimiglia) spent a brief and entirely undistinguished stint at Cinecittà toting cables before deciding it was safer to chase footballs than directors. He went on to play in Serie B throughout the 1980s, with Perugia and Catania, where his passing was admired chiefly for its optimism. A knee injury ended his professional career, nudging him—some say mercifully—into coaching. He now oversees youth teams in Perugia. In recent years, he has begun writing about the game’s overlooked myths, perhaps because he knows just how easily they begin.

Cover image: Pasolini’s legendary run down the left wing, later described by Bertolucci as “faster than any dolly shot we could afford.”