Pasolini in Mamma Roma 1962 is the most protean figure than anyone else in the cinematic world Pasolini nevertheless chose Anna Magnani for the role of Mamma Roma because she had been identified with Rome since her appearance in Roma, città aperta (Roberto Rossellini, 1945).Pasolini said that “the key by which I conceived Il vangelo secondo MatteoThe Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)” and “that drove me to make it, was Jesus’ sentence in the Gospel that he has come ‘not to bring peace on earth… but to bring division, a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’ (Matt. 10:34).” Pasolini’s first major essay on film, Il Cinema di poesia (1965), provided a theoretical map of his view of cinema and the poetic intuitions that marked his work.