Around 1960, Pier Paolo Pasolini was describing the life of Rome’s new urban periphery, with its big apartment blocks right up against age-old nature and inhabited by a lumpenproletariat that seemed to hold the memory of a certain classical grandeur in its very DNA. At the same time the sculptor Giuseppe Uncini, just over thirty years old, was developing a personal poetics that in many aspects paralleled Pasolini’s, using bare, rough, unadorned reinforced concrete as the symbol of a new aesthetic, a modernity that had to be reckoned with, for better or worse. Uncini’s “Cementarmati” (Reinforced