Persians on the river Tagliamento: Pasolini’s The Turks in Friuli between Aeschylus and Thespis

Abstract

I Turcs tal Friùl (The Turks in Friuli) is the sole “Greek” tragedy composed by Pasolini in the Friulian dialect of Casarsa; it was chiefly inspired by the last Turkish assault on the north-eastern regions of Italy that occurred during the fifteenth century (1499), and it both hints at the Nazi-Fascist occupation of Friuli, in the course of which the drama was written (1944), and even more sublty alludes to the second Persian invasion of Greece: beginning from a recent mise en scène on the river Tagliamento the paper tries to explain the relationship between this play and one of its main hypotexts, namely Aeschylus’ Persians