Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial works and his complex personality still have an important role in contemporary Italian society.
In his home country Pasolini is still an agnostic, atheist and heretic, a man of many contradictions and scandals who wrote against capitalism and neocapitalism, bourgeoisie, mass society and fascism.
Born in 1922 in Bologna, Pier Paolo Pasolini spent the first years of his life in the Friuli region.
His first love was poetry as the book Poesie a Casarsa (Poems in Casarsa, 1942) - written in his mother’s Friulian dialect and published when he was 20 and taught in a primary school - proves.
In the late ‘40s, after a priest exposed him for his homosexuality, Pasolini was arrested for corruption of a minor in a case involving a 16-year-old boy. He was acquitted but found guilty of lewd acts and fined; as a consequence he was expelled from the Communist Party.
Soon after, Pasolini moved to Rome where, in 1955, he published, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi), a novel about a group of young men - hustlers, pimps and thieves - leading a life of expedients in the outskirts of Rome.
When the novel came out Pasolini was accused of publishing obscene material, the book was seized by the police, and eventually returned to the shops six months later.
Another novel, Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959) that follows the life of Tommaso Puzzilli - one of the ragazzi di vita resorting to crime and prostitution to get what he wants, who unexpectedly assurges to the role of hero - and two books of poetry – Le ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci, 1957) and La religione del mio tempo (The Religion of My Time, 1959) – established Pasolini among the best writers of his times.
As his interests were manifold, Pasolini also started writing for the theatre and working as a director: his first film was Accattone (1961), the story of an underclass pimp, starring Sergio Citti; his second Mamma Roma (1962), about a Roman prostitute and her son, starring Anna Magnani.
More films followed, often starring amateur actors with little or no acting experience, among them Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964), Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and The Sparrows, 1966), Teorema (Theorem, 1968); Medea (1969); Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971), I Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972) and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974).
In 1975 Pasolini was found dead near a seaplane base in Ostia, Rome. Giuseppe Pelosi, a 17-year-old known as “Pino the Frog”, confessed he had killed him and, after a trial that didn’t analyse Pelosi’s revelations, Pasolini’s case was closed, labelled as a homosexual assassination.
But, in May 2005, Pelosi stated in an interview that Pasolini was actually killed by a gang of three men in their 40s who surprised him and the writer having sex.
There were many hypothesis behind the assassination: before being killed Pasolini was shooting the controversial Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom, 1976), in which he transposed episodes from the Marquis de Sade to the fascist Salo Republic that Mussolini established in the North of Italy after being deposed in Rome by the king and Marshal Pietro Badoglio.
Some of the film reels had been stolen and there are those who say Pasolini went to Ostia that night to meet somebody who was supposed to give him back the reels.
Others say that behind Pasolini’s assassination there is a political crime: he had indeed started writing what he considered as his magnum opus, the unfinished novel Petrolio (Oil), that would have featured "an enormous quantity of historical documents” and the history of ENI, the Italian state oil company, on which some say he had acquired secret information.
Besides Pasolini had stated in his article “Il romanzo delle stragi” (The Story of the Multiple Murders), written for the daily Corriere della Sera, that he knew the names of those who were responsible for the ‘60s and ‘70s slaughters that marked Italian history, that he knew the names of "important individuals who are behind the tragic youngsters who have opted for the suicidal Fascist atrocities and the common criminals, Sicilian and others, who have made themselves available as hitmen or killers.”
Even though he didn’t have any tangible proof or clues, Pasolini claimed he knew the names because he was “a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on (…) who pieces together the disorganised fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."
There are talks at the moment in Italy to reopen Pier Paolo Pasolini’s case since the science and technology available today may help finding new truths about what happened that night in 1975.
There is also something else prompting the reopening of the inquiry, the mystery surrounding a lost chapter of Petrolio.
Senator Marcello Dell’Utri, a long-time business and political associate of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and accused of association with the Mafia, stated he read a 70-page manuscript linked with Pasolini and Petrolio.
According to Dell'Utri, the manuscript contains clues to Pasolini’s death, the vicissitudes about Eni, the death of Enrico Mattei, head of Italian oil company Agip Petroli, and the role of Eugenio Cefis, Mattei's assistant who succeeded him at Eni's helm after his death.
It remains a mystery how Dell’Utri managed to get the manuscript and how it was taken away from Pasolini’s house.
I’m not so sure they will ever find the truth about the case as there is an impenetrable web of lies surrounding many murders, Pasolini's included, in Italy, but I always felt that Pasolini was killed because he was considered as a dangerous man.
There are those who wonder what Pasolini would have written - if he were still alive - about contemporary issues such as globalisation, war, the media, censorship, neofascism in modern Italy and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Prophetic Pasolini probably left the answers to these modern questions scattered in his writings, buried between the lines of his articles and essays, and in the 500 pages he left us of Petrolio. "He knew”: that’s perhaps why he was killed.
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