Half a century ago, all of Italy and the so-called “Western world” were shocked by a crime that made the front pages of all the newspapers. On the night of November 2, 1975, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini appeared in a field near the port of Ostia. They had murdered him brutally: his face was disfigured, he had multiple fractures and his testicles were destroyed by beatings; The body was partially burned because they doused it with gasoline and set it on fire after killing it. Writer, film director, essayist and philosopher, at 53 years old Pasolini was considered – and rightly so – one of the most important figures of Italian culture and intellectuality of the second half of the 20th century. And not only that, because its double condition of Catholic and Marxisthis open homosexuality and his provocative positions had also made him an emblem of the struggles against the system. He was both a cultural icon and the embodiment of scandal.
With his death, the director of cult films such as “The Gospel of Saint Matthew”, “The Decameron”, “Oedipus, Son of Fortune” and “Saló or the 120 Days of the City of Sodom”, among others, and of novels such as “Boys of the Brook” and “A Violent Life”, left an invaluable cultural legacy, but also a enigma, that of his murder – its authors and their motives -, which for decades sought answers and has only partially found them.
If you review the news of those days, the case seemed resolved in a few hours. Giuseppe “Pino” Pelosi, a young man 17 year old taxi boy He was detained by the police while driving Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo. The alleged murderer first said he had robbed it, but two hours later, when the body was discovered, he also confessed to the crime. He assured that it had been in self defensethat Pasolini had wanted to force him to have sex and that he resisted, that the director of “Teorema” attacked him and he responded, that he hit him and then, when he escaped, hit him with the car passing over him. In the journalistic jargon of those times, it was a “crime of passion.”
From the perspective of the police investigation, matter over. And for the Italian justice too: Pelosi was condemned as perpetrator of the homicide. However, there were many things that were not clear: no one could explain how that young weakling had been able to kill the athletic Pasolini, it was difficult to believe that he had acted alone; Furthermore, Pino had almost no blood stains on his clothes, which was not consistent with the brutality of the murder, and the perpetrator could not be identified either. owner of a sweater – which was neither the victim nor the confessed criminal – what was found in the car; Finally, Pasolini was about to publish a new book where, he promised, he would reveal a scandalous plot of business and death at the top of the economic power and politician of the country, so it was likely that there were many powerful people who would benefit from silencing him.
There were then those who began to investigate on their own. One of the first to do so was the journalist Oriana Fallaci – the same one that a few years later interviewed and put the Argentine dictator Leopoldo Galtieri on the ropes -, for whom the official story and the judicial process covered up a much darker plot. In a newspaper column L’Europeo wrote that after investigating it thoroughly he had come to the conclusion that the murder was planned and that it was the work of three or more people.
Falacci’s hypothesis did not go down well with the government of Christian Democrat Aldo Moro nor with the justice system that had declared the case resolved. The theory of the “crime of passion” avoided any scandal to power and, furthermore, It fit with one of the most questioned sides of Pasolini’s personality by Catholic Italian society: his habit of making appointments or picking up very young men who were prostitutes directly from the street.
Giuseppe Pelosi’s confession fit like a glove in that sense. He said that he had arranged with the filmmaker to have dinner together at the restaurant Biondo Tevere, near the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, that there they had eaten spaghetti, which Pasolini accompanied with beer, and that they left the premises around 11:30 p.m. to go to a secluded place near the port of Ostia to “fiddle a little,” a service for which Pino would receive twenty thousand lire.
In Pelosi’s story, everything had been going smoothly until they reached a place near the seawhere Pasolini stopped his Alfa Romeo and proposed to him have sex right there. That was what was agreed upon, but – always in accordance with that first confession – the situation got out of hand because Pasolini wanted to use a wooden stick in the act, it was not clear whether so that Pino could sodomize him or the other way around. Pelosi refused and got out of the car. Then the director came out after him and chased him brandishing the stick and started hitting him. Pino told the police that at that moment he was able to grab a club to defend himself and He ended up knocking down his attacker “in self-defense”who ran to the car to escape and in doing so unintentionally ran over Pasolini and ran over him with his wheels, crushing it.
That was what he said and, strikingly, no one – neither the justice system nor the police – asked him where he got the club from. Nor could he coherently recount the fight, much less explain why Pasolini’s body was partially burned. However, based on that confession and without any other evidence, the high court convicted Pelosi of “collaborative homicide” – without specifying in collaboration with whom – a nine and a half years in prison. A relatively short sentence that was due to the fact that the accused was a minor at the time of committing the murder.
The justice system closed the case, the media moved on to something else and Pelosi locked herself in a silence that would last decades. Until he spoke.
The confessed murderer of Pier Paolo Pasolini served his sentence and upon leaving prison he refused again and again to return to the matter until in 2005, when thirty years after death of the director, gave an interview to RAI 3. There he said that there lied for fear of reprisals against his family and radically changed his version of the events of the night of November 2, 1975.
He then said that after having oral sex with Pasolini, he got out of the car and walked a few meters away to urinate. According to this new version, at that precise moment three unknown men appeared, “45 or 46 years old, with a Calabrian or Sicilian accent,” who began to insult them and They beat the filmmaker to death while they yelled at him ‘faggot, dirty communist’.
He also said that he had pleaded guilty to the crime because the murderers They had threatened to kill him and his family if he dared to reveal what had happened, and that was why he had lied in his initial confession. He preferred to go to jail to avoid the death of himself and his loved ones. He acknowledged, however, that he had passed over Pasolini’s body when, frightened, he fled in the car.
Faced with this new account of the crime, the family of the director of “Teorema” demanded the reopening of the summary, which was augmented by the testimony of his friend Sergio Citti, who stated that Pasolini attended the meeting with Pino because he was the victim of a blackmail for the theft of some rolls of his film “Saló”.
Pelosi was summoned to testify again and this time he was much more precise: “Pasolini was murdered by three people. They beat him in cold blood before my very eyes. They were Romans. Two were the Borsellino brothers (Franco and Giuseppe). He was the victim of an ambush studied in detail (…) They convinced him to go to Ostia with the excuse of negotiate the sale of the tapes from the movie ‘Saló’, stolen some time ago. He had the money with him, it was an excuse to ambush him,” he said before the prosecutor.
The Italian scientific police spent several years investigating new leads and conducting interrogations, but were unable to attribute the traces of DNA found in the car to anyone, leading to the case being closed again in 2015. Pelosi died shortly afterwards, at the age of 59, taking part, if not all, of the truth to the grave.
The hypothesis about the existence of a political conspiracy to assassinate Pasolini had been circulating since before Pelosi’s death. It was known that Pasolini intended to reveal in the book he was writing, “Oil,” the name of the culprit of the alleged homicide – disguised as an accident – by the industrialist Enrico Matteipresident of the Italian oil company Eni. Those who support this theory suspect that Pasolini’s murder was a political crime that was sought to be covered up by passing it off as a fight between homosexuals.
The one who insisted the most with this theory was the filmmaker Federico Brunowho thoroughly investigated the life of his murdered colleague to make a film about his life and work. “Today, in Italy they continue to say that it was a casual homicide, but no investigation was carried out in the process. It was a plot between the secret services, the Church and the politicians. An atmosphere had been created that Pasolini was a dangerous man that was damaging to Italian society and democracy. It is absolutely unfair how a figure like Pasolini has been erased from Italy’s memory. He was a witness of his time who He dedicated himself to denouncing poverty, corruption and misery. With his cinema he completely broke the aesthetic schemes of the time,” he said.
A process was then opened in the Italian Parliament to try to find the truth, but in October 2023 the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission produced a report in which Pasolini’s death was described as a “unsolved crime and demanded, once again, the reopening of the investigation. Two years later the Toma Prosecutor’s Office still does not comment on the request.
As 50 years have passed since that tragic night of November 2, 1975, the mystery surrounding the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini is far from being completely revealed. Nor has the hope that the director of “El Decameron” expressed in his last interview been fulfilled: “It is understood that I long for the pure and direct revolution of the oppressed people whose only objective is to be free and master of themselves. I imagine that a moment like this can still come in the life of Italy and the world,” he told a journalist from La Stampa.
In that same interview, conducted the day before his murder, Pier Paolo Pasolini said something that, in the light – or darkness – of the facts, can be read as a terrible premonition: “I go down to hell and I know things that do not disturb the peace of others. But we have to be careful. Hell is rising and the desire and need to hit, to attack and to kill is strong and general.”
