Earlier this year, I read Pier Paolo Pasolini’s newly translated first novel, Boys Alive. It follows a cast of young boys who steal manhole covers for scrap metal to sell, rob beggars, and blow what little money they have on sex workers and gambling. These kids, who fall out with one another, die, and grow up, aren’t really the novel’s protagonists. Rome, and the lawlessness of the years immediately preceding and following the close of World War II, is.