Pier Paolo Pasolini, filmmaker, writer, essayist, and poet. Pasolini romantico starts from Pasolini's "blinded, childlike, and pragmatic love for reality" and the resulting dream of an immediate artistic expression unmediated by artificial systems of signs. The impossibility of realizing this dream gives rise to the characteristic dual movement of mythologization and desecration that structures his complete works. The total and sacred access to reality sets Pasolini apart from neorealism and aligns him with a "limitless realism" and a "progressive universal poetry," as postulated by the early Romantics. Pasolini romantico examines Pasolini's relationships with Italian and European, particularly German, Romanticism. The reception of Romanticism is traced and analyzed throughout his entire oeuvre in terms of its continuities, genealogies, transformations, and ruptures. This reveals how the romantic impulses manifest their own poetic-constructive and critical-reflexive effectiveness in various phases and media. Pasolini romantico shapes the concept of "romantic regression" and substantiates how the "regressive impulses," within the tension between conservatism and progress, condition and determine the progression of his work. A way of thinking emerges that makes recourse—understood as "archaism" and "regression" in Freudian terms—a fundamental strategy against the loss of reality.