On the evening of All Saints’ Day, the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of Europe’s greatest cinema figures, begins a search for sex. Near Rome’s main train station, he picks up a young male sex worker named Giuseppe Pelosi. By the banks of the Tiber they dine at the Trattoria “Al Biondo Tevere.” Then they drive Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo about 30 kilometers farther east to Ostia by the sea. The following morning, a walker on the beach finds a severely mutilated corpse.
On Sunday (November 2) it will be exactly 50 years since Pasolini was killed. In Italy, the case is once again a major topic. The murder of PPP — as the initials are still widely understood — is one of the most sensational crimes in the country’s history: comparable to the 1978 murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades or the lethal Mafia attacks on judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
Hardly anyone still believes it was the work of a lone actor
What remains undisputed is that in Pasolini’s case no one still knows who was truly behind it. The celebrated director (“The Hawks and the Sparrows,” “The 120 Days of Sodom”) is believed — in a fit of passion — to have been killed by a 17-year-old sex worker. The verdict against the presumed lone offender — nine-and-a-half years for manslaughter — is now regarded as a flawed judgment. There are too many inconsistencies, too many new pieces of evidence.
Pelosi was picked up by police at 1:30 a.m., before the body was discovered: he had sped, without a license, in Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo in the wrong direction along a coastal road. Later, a ring belonging to him was found at the scene. The sex worker claimed that the director had tried to force him into certain sexual practices. In the ensuing argument, the much older — Pasolini was 53 — and fit man with a street sign was beaten. In the chaos, he is said to have beaten his assailant with the sign, then fled and ran the body over with the car.
In the first trial, a court concluded that Pelosi — nicknamed “la rana,” the frog, for his wide mouth — must have had accomplices. Subsequent courts, however, established his sole guilt. Yet even at that time there were rumors of a possible plot. Italy’s best-known journalist, Oriana Fallaci, wrote shortly after Pasolini’s death that he had been slain by a fascist gang.
Italy in the 1970s was marked by intense political violence
Indeed, the 1970s in Italy saw a wave of deadly political violence from both the left and the right. Pasolini — a lifelong Communist since his youth, though expelled from the party because of his homosexuality — repeatedly spoke out on political issues. He was regarded as a difficult intellectual. He was also researching, in the weeks before his death, a novel (“Petrolio”) about Italy’s oil industry.
The man who killed him, after his release years later, said nothing for a long time about all the suspicions. In a 2005 TV interview, Pelosi presented a completely new version of the events that had nothing to do with a sex dispute. He claimed Pasolini had been beaten to death by three Sicilian-speaking men with sticks and iron chains. He justified his silence by saying he and his family had received threats of murder. Everything was in play: the perpetrators, the victim, the witness, the scapegoat.
Hints of a right-wing milieu
You don’t have to believe Pelosi’s version. But over the years, new investigations have produced DNA traces on the evidence linking to at least five men. Pelosi, for his part, left no blood traces in the Alfa Romeo, though he had claimed there was blood dripping after the struggle. In addition, a police informant said two Sicilian brothers in Rome’s right-wing circle boasted of their involvement in the murder. Still, investigations were closed in 2015.
Today there is little chance of fully solving the case. Pelosi died in 2017, at 59, from cancer. The Sicilian brothers have since died as well. In March 2023, Italian justice rejected a bid to reopen the case.
Pasolini’s case for Italy “like a restless ghost”
All the more, newspapers are scrolling through every thread of the case again in these days. There are new TV documentaries and books. The newspaper La Repubblica writes: “The tragic end of PPP haunts our collective memory like a restless ghost, to which truth and justice are denied.”
Most people probably know now more about Pasolini as a murder victim than they know about even some of his two dozen films. At the site of the crime stands a small memorial to one of Italy’s great 20th-century intellectuals: a bird flying skyward. When there isn’t a anniversary, not many people stop by.
