The left-wing intellectual, author and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally murdered on November 2nd 1975. Now former Mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni has written to Justice Minister Angelino Alfano to request the reopening of the case.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna in 1922. His father, Carlo Alberto, famously saved Mussolini from a would-be assassin while on duty as a member of the dictator’s security squad. The family moved a lot during Pasoloini’s youth and this unsettled him. He began writing poetry early and found peace in the rural setting of Casarsa della Delizia [Fruili-Venezia Giulia].
Pasolini graduated in 1939 and, during that era, also became interested in film. At first he did not question the Fascist régime but soon became critical of it and he began to write in the Fruilian dialect – something which the régime would not tolerate. By 1941 Pasolini had published a collection of poems in Fruilian and had begun to make films.
Called up in 1943, Pasolini was captured by the Germans. He escaped and found his way back to Casarsa where he joined a group of campaigners for the Fruilian dialect. At this time, he was struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. In 1945 his brother Guido was killed while fighting for the Partisans, an event which affected Pasolini deeply.
Politically Pasolini became more and more left-wing, eventually becoming a Communist. Meanwhile, he had accepted his homosexuality. In 1949 he was charged with corruption of minors and with performing obscene acts in public places. As a result he was expelled from the Udine Communist Party and lost his job as a teacher. At this point he moved to Rome with his mother.
He began working for state radio and on films with Fellini. However, because of his homosexuality and communism, he was always a target for the press. During the student protests of the late 1960s and 1970s, Pasolini once famously sided with the police, saying that the students were too “middle class” to achieve a revolution.
On 2nd November 1975 Pasolini was run over several times by his own car. He died on the beach at Ostia. A seventeen-year-old male prostitute called Giuseppe Pelosi made a full confession but thirty years later, in 2005, he retracted it, saying that he had confessed under the threat of violence to his family. He also wrote a book about the murder, “Io, angelo nero”. The case was reopened after Pelosi’s retraction but judges decided that there was not enough new evidence to proceed.
At the time of his death, Pasolini was working on a novel, “Petrolio” [“Oil”] in which he referred to the murder of ENI President Enrico Mattei and, although he called the possible perpetrators by fictitious names, they would have been recognisable to anyone with an in-depth knowledge of Italian business and politics. There is also a theory that Pasolini was murdered by a blackmailer.
Walter Veltroni wants the case reopened because he believes that new investigation techniques could at last lead to the truth about the murder. You can read the full text of his letter, in English, here:
http://www.corriere.it/International/english/articoli/2010/03/22/pier_pa...
Pasolini was buried in his beloved Casarta.
