Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a poet, novelist, journalist and film director who spent thirty years attacking the Italy that had produced him, and was murdered on a beach at Ostia in November 1975. He was born in Bologna to a Fascist army officer and a Friulian schoolteacher, and wrote his first poems in Friulian dialect, a language the regime discouraged. His younger brother was killed as a partisan in 1945, by a rival Communist band rather than by Germans. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1949 after a scandal over his homosexuality and moved to the Roman borgate, the shanty suburbs, which gave him the material for the novels Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta and for Accattone, his first film. He cast non-professionals, including a fruit-seller as Christ in The Gospel According to St Matthew, a film the Vatican praised and the left found puzzling. His later work moved from the medieval storytelling of the Trilogy of Life to Salo, an adaptation of Sade set in the last months of the Italian Social Republic, which is still banned or restricted in several countries. He was tried more than thirty times, mostly for obscenity or blasphemy, and acquitted in almost every case. His journalism in the Corriere della Sera argued that consumer capitalism had done in twenty years what Fascism had failed to do in twenty, which was to destroy Italy's peasant cultures and produce a genuinely uniform society. He wrote that he knew the names of those behind the bombings of the strategy of tension but lacked the proof. A seventeen-year-old, Giuseppe Pelosi, confessed to killing him and served nine years, then retracted in 2005 and said three men with southern accents had done it; the case was reopened and closed again without a different answer.

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