Winged Pigs

Line one of Chapter 1 consists of three of the Italian language's least printable words, strung together in a scatological drumbeat. The chapter then depicts Antonia, the 16-year-old heroine of the story, masturbating as she falls asleep. In the course of the next 185 pages, she and Rocco, her 17-year-old boy friend, sample a farrago of sex, including sodomy and homosexual affairs. But sex is only one of the reasons that the novel Winged Pig* has become a sensational bestseller in Italy.

Subtitled The Sexo-Political Diary of Two Adolescents, the paperback has been acclaimed--even by reviewers who disliked its lurid sex--for its fascinating insights into the political and social attitudes of Italy's far-left youth. Written by Lidia Ravera, 25, a journalist for a counterculture magazine called Muzak, and Marco Lombardo-Radice, 27, a psychologist who specializes in working with teenagers, Winged Pigs shows that today's students are rebelling against '60s rhetoric and radicalism. Although Rocco and Antonia belong to a student collective, Antonia confesses that she is "sick of all this revolutionary talk that doesn't mean anything." Tired of total sexual freedom, the lovers settle down together for a while, thus typifying a trend that Italian sociologists have labeled "a return to the steady couple."

Massive Search. Behind Rocco's oft-expressed contempt for the Communists, says Author Ravera, is Italian youth's rebellion against all authoritarian patterns, including those of the left. Teenagers, she says, see the Communist Party as "practically in the government now and stressing all the old-fashioned bourgeois values." The young couple is equally scornful of sexual absolutes. "Twenty years ago," explains Ravera, "a girl had to arrive at marriage a virgin. Now she has to arrive not a virgin. Both are authoritarian."

Although the government recently banned Winged Pigs on the grounds of obscenity, the book promises to remain a minor Italian industry. It has already sold 250,000 copies and will be published in a dozen languages. A movie is also under way. The script has already been written, and thousands of students have responded to a massive talent search for what Editor Dino Audino calls "the 'he' and 'she' of the ultra-revolutionary left." Perhaps the movie title should be changed to Gone With the Winged Pigs.

* From a Lewis Carroll "nonsense" poem, and apparently meant to imply that while all people are pigs, the most imaginative can fly.

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