Pasolini in Friuli

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born on the 5th of March 1922 in Bologna. He was the eldest son of the infantry lieutenant Alberto Pasolini and Susanna Colussi, a school-teacher. His father, from an old family in Ravenna, spent the family's patrimony. He married Susanna in 1921 in Casarsa before the couple moved to Bologna.
"I was born in a family representative of Italian society: the product of a genuine cultural mixing and Italian unity. My father descended from an ancient noble family of Romagna. On the other hand my mother comes from a family of Friulian farmers who have become, step by step, lower middle-class people. The relatives of my mother's father were distillers. The mother of my mother was Piedmontese, but that didn't prevent her from having contacts with Sicily and the Rome region."(1)

The Pasolinis didn't stay in Bologna for long; they moved to Parma, Conegliano, Belluno, Sacile, Idria, Cremona, Bologna again, and other towns of North Italy.

"They have made a nomad of me. I passed from one camp to another. I never had a fixed abode".

In 1925, in Belluno, the second born-son, Guido, was born.
Considering the family's constant relocation, the only landmark for the Pasolinis was Casarsa.

Pier Paolo's relationship with his mother remained friendly while the conflicts with his father increased.

"Every evening I dreaded dinner time, because I knew that he would have done one of his scenes... Then came my initial separation from my mother which created a childhood neurosis. That neurosis made me restless, a restlessness in which I perpetually questioned my own being (...). When my mother was going to bear, I began to suffer from burning eyes. My father immobilized me on the table of the kitchen, opened my eyes with his fingers and poured in collyrium. After that symbolic event I was no longer able to love my father." (2)

Referring to his mother:

"She told me stories, fables, she read them to me. My mother was like Socrates to me. She had and has a terribly idealistic and idealized vision of the world. She really believes in heroism, in charity, in piety, in generosity. I have adopted all that almost in a pathologic way." (3)

He enjoyed a close relationship with his brother Guido. Guido had a kind of veneration for his older brother, who was good in his studies and in games with the other boys. That admiration continued to the end.

During the boys' early school years the family moved often but these moves failed to impede Pier Paolo's progress. He entered elementary school a year early. In 1928 there was the poetical exordium: Pier Paolo filled a little notebook with a series of pictures. That little note-book was followed by others. It would ultimately be lost during the war.

He passed from elementary school to the grammar school of Conegliano.

In those years he wrote a passage known as Teta veleta, that Pasolini later explained:

"It was in Belluno, I was a little more than 3 years old. As the boys played in the public gardens in front of my house what struck me most of all was their legs, particularly the internal convex part of the knee, where the tendons stretch out while running. I saw in those quick tendons a symbol of life that I hadn't yet attained. That image of the running boy for me represented the grown-up being. Now I know that it was a distinctly sensual sentiment.
If I re-feel it I feel with exactness in my bowels the tenderness, the sorrowfulness and the violence of the desire. It was the sense of the unreachableness, of the carnal - a sense for which a name hasn't yet been invented. I invented it that time and it was "teta veleta". Seeing those legs bent in their furious game I told myself that it felt "teta veleta," something like a tickle, a seduction, a humiliation." (4)

Pasolini indeed stated:

"My infancy ended when I was 13. For all of us 13 is infancy's old age so it's a time of great wisdom. It was a happy period of my life. I had been the cleverest in school. As the Summer of'34 began, a period of my life had finished. I had ended one experience and I was ready to start another. The days leading up to the Summer of'34 were some of the nicest and most glorious of my life". (5)

Pier Paolo finished high school when he was 17 and matriculated in Literature at the University of Bologna. During his high school years he created, together with Luciano Serra, Franco Farolfi, Ermes Parmi (whose name was borrowed by Guido Pasolini during his partisan activities in Osoppo), Fabio Mauri, a literary group of the GIL of Bologna. During this period Pasolini wrote poems in Italian and Friulian that were gathered in a first volume, Poesie a Casarsa. Pasolini contributed to a magazine, Stroligut and together with other literary male friends he created the Academiuta di lenga furlana ["little Academy of Friulian language", t.n.]. Dialect represented a sort of opposition to fascist power:

"Fascism didn't tolerate dialects, signs / of the irrational unity of this Country were I was born / inadmissible and imprudent relatives in the heart of the Nazis." (6)

The use of dialect also represented an attempt to deprive the Church of its cultural hegemony over the underdeveloped masses. In fact the Left preferred to use the Italian language and excluding the sporadical cases of Jacobinism, the use of dialect has been a clerical prerogative. Pasolini attempted to bring to the Left a deepening of the culture of dialect.

The return to Casarsa during his university years represented the return to a happy place for Pasolini. He wrote to Silvana Ottieri in a letter of April'47:

"The fact that it was Holy Saturday didn't matter at all. If you had seen the colours of the horizon and of the countryside! When the train stopped to Sacile, in a very dense silence, like the last Tule, I listened again to the bells. There, behind the railway station of Sacile was, heading into the country, a road. I had either run along it during my infancy or I had dreamed of it..."


The second world war.
His brother Guido's death.
Pasolini between 1945 and 1949

The second world war was for Pasolini an extremely hard period. One can gauge his state of mind from the contents of his letters:

"As to my health, it's not bad, indeed it is just fine. So is my morale, when all is quiet, which is rarely. Otherwise, I'm very afraid. I fear for my skin, do you understand Rico? And not only for mine, also for the others. We are so exposed to destiny; poor naked men." (7)

"I don't know if we'll see each other again, all smacks of death, of end, of shooting..., everything is disgusting, if one thinks of those fellows shitting on this earth. I would like to spit on the earth while at the same time little leaves of green grass poke out along with yellow-and sky-blue flowers, and jewels on the trees..." (8)

Pasolini was conscripted into the army in Livorno, in 1943. The day after the 8th of September he disobeyed an order to deliver his arms to the Germans and fled. After moving around Italy he returned to Casarsa. The Pasolini family decided to go to Versutta, a place less exposed to Allied bombing and German siege. Here he taught boys in their early years of high school.

But the main event of those years was his brother Guido's death. Guido refused to stay hidden in Versutta and decided to join the partisans in their fight. Pier Paolo took Guido to the railway station after buying a ticket for Bologna so as to divert suspicion. From Spilimbergo Guido reached Pielungo where he joined the Osoppo partisan division. He used the war-name of Ermes, the given name of Parini, one of Pier Paolo's friends who was lost in the Russian campaign.
Internal conflicts developed between the various groups of the anti-fascist resistance. The Communists of the "Garibaldian" brigades brought pressure to bear for the annexation of Friuli to Titoist Yugoslavia, while the Osoppo brigade was for the Italianization of Friuli. Guido wrote about this to Pier Paolo, because he wanted his brother to advocate the Osoppo position in his articles. Pasolini never wrote those articles.

In February 1945 Guido, together with the entire command of the Osoppo division was massacred in Porzus malga [shepherd's shut in the Alps, t.n.]. A hundred "Garibaldian" men approached the division, pretending to have disbanded. After capturing the Osoppo men they executed them. Guido, although wounded, succeeded in fleeing and a country woman gave him sanctuary. He was ultimately found by the "Garibaldian" men, dragged out and executed. The Pasolini family learned about the death and its circumstances only at the end of the war. Pasolini wrote:

"I often think about the section of road between Musi and Porzus, running along side my brother on that frightful day and my imagination becomes bright through an unexplaining burning whiteness of snow, a clearness of sky. And the presence of Guido is so alive".

In the 15 September 1971 Vie Nuove, a communist periodical, Pasolini answered a reader's request that he address the matter of Guido's death:

"The facts can be recounted in a few words: my mother, my brother and myself were evacuated from Bologna to Friuli in Casarsa. My brother continued his studies in Pordenone: he attended to "liceo scientifico" [high school, t.n.]. At 19 he immediately entered the Resistance. I, who was not much older than he was, had converted him to the better anti-fascism, with a passion for catechumens, because I had known since the age of two that the world in which I had been born without prospects was a ridiculous and absurd world. Some Communist friends from Pordenone (at that time I hadn't yet read Marx and I was still liberal, with a bent for the "action party") had drawn Guido into active fighting. After a few months he had set off into the mountains, where they were fighting. Graziano's edict, which had called him to arms, was the chance motivation for his departure, the excuse to my mother. I took him to the train, with his little case containing a Colt hidden in a book of poems. We hugged each other: that was the last time I saw him.
In the mountains, between Friuli and Yugoslavia, Guido fought long and valiantly for several months: he enlisted in the Osoppo division that worked in the Venezia-Giulia zone, together with the Garibaldi division. Those were terrible days: my mother felt that Guido would never again return. Hundreds of times he could have been killed fighting against Fascists and Germans: because he was a boy whose generosity didn't admit any weakness or compromise. But he was destined to die in an even more tragic way.
As you know Venezia Giulia lies on the frontier between Italy and Yugoslavia; so, in that period, Yugoslavia aimed to annex all the land, not just the section immediately bordering it. My brother, even if enlisted in the "action party, even if tentitively socialist (surely he would be with me now), couldn't agree to the idea that an Italian land, such as Friuli, could be the object of Yugoslavian nationalism. He rebelled, and he fought. In the last months, on the mountains of Venezia Giulia, the situation was desperate because everyone was between two fires. As you know, Yugoslavian Resistance was Communist, more so than the Italian version: so Guido found as his enemies Tito's men including some Italians whose political ideas of course he shared, but with whom he couldn't share the immediate nationalist politics.
He died in a way that telling it breaks my heart: he could also have saved himself, that day: he died running to help his commander and comrades. I think there isn't any Communist who could disapprove of partisan Guido Pasolini's actions. I'm proud of him, and it's the memory of him, of his generosity, of his passion that makes me follow the road I'm running along. The fact that his death happened in this way, under circumstances apparently so difficult to judge, doesn't make me want to turn back. It only confirms my belief that nothing is simple, nothing happens without complications and suffering: and that what is more, most of all, is the critical lucidity that kills words and conventions and goes to the end of the things, in their secret and inalienable truth." (9)

Pasolini put into verse in the Corus in morte di Guido, published in Stroligut in August 1945:

.
La livertat, l'Itaia
e quissa diu cual distin disperat
a ti volevin
dopu tant vivut e patit
ta quistu silensiu
Cuant qe i traditours ta li Baitis
a bagnavin di sanc zenerous la neif,
"Sçampa - a ti an dita - no sta torna' lassu'"
I ti podevis salvati,
ma tu
i no ti às lassat bessòi
i tu cumpains a muri'.
"Sçampa, torna indavour"
I te podevis salvati
ma tu
i ti soso tornat lassu',
çaminant.
To mari, to pari, to fradi
lontans
cun dut il to passat e la to vita infinida,
in qel di' a no savevin
qe alc di pi' grant di lour
al ti clamava
cu'l to cour innosent
.
Guido's death had a devistating effect on the Pasolinis, but most of all on the sorrow-stricken mother. Following his father's return from imprisonment in Kenya the relationship between Pier Paolo and his mother only became closer:
"So he arrived in Casarsa, in a sort of new imprisonment: and he started his twelve year long agony." (10)

For years afterwards, Guido's death would be exploited with unscrupulous cynicism uncountable numbers of times by Italian Right newspapers as a means of attacking Pasolini:
"Pier Paolo, Marxist writer, advocates the ideas and defends the system of his brother's maltreaters." (Secolo d'Italia, 24th September 1960)
"Pasolini's brother was killed by the Communists. He would have asked for his brother Pier Paolo's help in vain." (Il Tempo, 26th March 1970)

In 1945 Pasolini graduated with a thesis entitled "Anthology of pascolinian lyric poetry (introduction and comments)" and settled definitively in Friuli. Here he found a job as teacher in a secondary school of Valvasone, near Udine.

In those years he started his political activity. In 1947 got near PCI [Italian Communist Party, t.n], starting a contribution to the party-weekly "Lotta e lavoro". Circumstances of his brother Guido's death surely represented a difficulty for joining PCI. However Pasolini had always avoided that affair, he seemed to stain Guido's memory. Pier Paolo also had to justify that allegiance to his mother and his father, who accused his wife of allowing Guido to go about with riff-raff.

Loyalty to PCI represented for the young poet a deep courageous act: in that way he wanted to sacrifice the deep sorrow caused to himself and his family to a social ideal, fall shareable with that Friulan PCI that politically drove brother's killers.

Pasolini became secretary of the Section of San Giovanni di Casarsa, but the party and most of all intellectual Friulan Communists didn't like him. They wrote political subjects using the language of'900, while Pasolini wrote using people's language without entering necessarily on political subjects. For many people that was inadmissible: many Communists suspected Pasolini of disinterest in socialist realism, cosmopolitism and an excessive attention in bourgeois culture.

During those years Pasolini knew the painter Zigaina; they were bound together till death by a close friendship.

That period, of communist involvement, is the only one in which Pasolini was actively engaged in the political fight. During those years Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote and drew "manifesti murali", charging writings against the constituted "democristian" [from "Democrazia Cristiana", an old party of the Centre, t.n.] power.

On 15th October 1949 Pasolini was pointed by Carabineers of Cordovado for minor corruption: that was the beginning of a delicate and humiliating series of legal actions, that definitely changed Pasolini's life. After that trial there were many others, but one is allowed to think that if there hadn't been the first proceedings, the others wouldn't have followed.

Years later, in a letter sent to Silvana Ottieri from Rome, where he settled, Pasolini said among other things: on me there's the sign of Rimbaud, or of Campana or also of Wilde, whether I like or not, whether the other people agree or not. (See on this theme also the linked page Il segno di Rimbaud).

Pasolini was accused to have withdrawn with two or three boys, on 30th September 1949, in the fraction of Ramuscello. The parents of the boys didn't sue him but the Carabineers of Cordovado got to know of the rumours in the village and investigated further. It was a period of very harsh contrapositions between the Left and DC [Democrazia Cristiana, t.n.], during the depths of the cold war and Pasolini was very vulnerable because of his position of communist- and anticlerical intellectual. The charge for the facts of Ramuscello was continued both from the Right and from the Left: still before the trial, on 26th October 1949, Pasolini was expelled from PCI. This is what "l'Unità" [a Left newspaper, at that time linked to PCI, t.n.] reported on 29th October:

""POET PASOLINI EXPELLED FROM PCI
The federation of PCI of Pordenone delivered in the 26th of October the expulsion from the party of Doctor Pier Paolo Pasolini from Casarsa for moral unworthiness. We take the facts that caused a grave disciplinary measure for Doctor Pier Paolo Pasolini as a starting point for reporting once again the ruinous influences of some ideological and philosophical currents of Gide, Sartre and -as much extoled- poets and literary men, who want to pose as progressists, but who in reality gather the more ruinous aspects of burgeois decline".

In a few days Pasolini fell in an abyss apparently without a way out. The resonance in Casarsa of the facts of Ramuscello had big echoes. Before the Carabineers he tried to justify those facts, intrinsically confirming the accusations, like an exceptional experience, a sort of intellectual disbanding: that only aggravated his position: expelled from PCI, he left the job as teacher, while his relationship with his mother was momentarily distrupted. Pasolini decided to run away from Casarsa and his often mythicized Friuli. Together with his mother he moved to Rome, beginning a new life for Pier Paolo. He wrote afterwards:

"I fled with my mother and a case and a few jewels that turned out to be fake, / on a train slow as a freight train, / along the Friulan land covered by a light and hard coat of snow. / We went towards Rome. / So we went, left my father / nearby a little stove for poor, / with his old military overcoat / and his horrible cirrhosis-sick furies and paranoiac syndromes, / I lived that / page of novel, the only one of my life: / as for the rest, / I have been living inside a lyric, as every madman". (11)

The roman suburbs.
Literary experiences.
Cinema.
That tragic 2nd November 1975

The first years in Rome were hard for Pasolini, who stumbled into a completely new reality of the Roman suburbs. These were insecure, impoverished and lonely times. One can better understand the drama of Pasolinis situation through his own words:

"That was a tremendous period of my life. I came to Rome from the far Friulan country: unemployed for many years; ignored by all people; consumed by internal terror of not being as life wanted; occupied on working furiously on hard and complicated studies; unable to write but repeating myself in a world that had changed. I would find it unbearable to re-live those two or three years". (12)

"In the first months of'50 I was in Rome with my mother. Two years later my father came too and from Piazza Costaguti we moved to Ponte Mammolo. Already in 1950 I began to write the first pages of Ragazzi di vita. I was unemployed, in really desperate conditions: I could also have died for that. Then, helped by the dialectical poet Vittori Clemente, I found a job as teacher in a private school of Ciampino, for 25.000 lire per month".(13)

Wrote Pasolini in those years to Silvana Ottieri:

"A thing I don't understand, and that I didnt forsee in the affair involving me and my punishment, is my mother's lot. I'll not write you very much about that, because I've already tears in my eyes. She found a job nearby with a little family (husband and wife and a little two years child): and with a heroism and a simpleness I cannot explain she has accepted her new life.
I go and see her every day and take the child for a walk, to help her for a bit: she does anything to present herself as happy and light: yesterday was my birthday; did you know how she behaved..."(14)

The father was sick, and after the facts in Casarsa the conflicts with the son became sharper:

"Two years of furious work, of pure struggle: and my father was always there, alone in our poor little kitchen, with his elbows on the table and his face against his fists, immobile, mad, in pain; he filled the room in the little hollow with the largeness that dieing bodies have". (15)

Rather than asking for help from those he knew, Pasolini, out of modesty, tried to find a job on his own. He entered the film industry at the bottom rungs of Cinecittà he became a proof-reader and sent his books to the local bookstalls.

At last, thanks to the Abruzzi-language poet Vittori Clemente he found a job as teacher in a school of Ciampino.

Those are the years when Pasolini transferred the mythicization of the Friulan countries to the disordered frame of roman, seen as the center of history, that gave birth to a painful growing process: the myth of the Roman lumpenproletariat arose.

"For two or three years I have been living in a "different-smack" world: I fit my body through very slow responsibilities. Between Ibsenian and Pascolinian (to understand one each other...) I'm here in an all-muscles existence, turned inside out like a glove, that always explains itself as one of these songs that once upon a time I hated, absolutely without sentimentality, in human organisms so sensuous as to be nearly mechanical; where one doesn't know any of the Christian attitudes, the forgiveness, the meakness, etc... and the selfishness takes permitted, manly forms (...). In the northern world where I have lived, there was always, or at least it seemed to me, in the relationship between people, the shadow of a piety that took the form of shyness, respect, anguish, affectionate transport etc...: to free oneself from love a gesture or a word was enough. Dominating the pull of the heart, the goodness or the badness that's inside us, it wasn't a balance that one was looking for among people (one person and another person), but a reciprocal impulse. Here among these people, entirely dominated by the irrational, passion, the relationship is always well defined, it builds itself on more concrete facts: from muscular strength, to social position". (16)

Pasolini prepared the anthologies on dialectal poetry; he contributed to "Paragone", a magazine by Anna Banti and Roberto Longhi. In Paragone Pasolini published the first version of the first chapter of Ragazzi di vita.

Angioletti called him to be part of the literary section of the new cast, together with Carlo Emilio Gadda, Leone Piccioni and Giulio Cartaneo. The initial difficult Roman years had ended.

In 1954 Pasolini left teaching and moved to Monteverde Vecchio (a little-bourgeois quarter in Rome). He published his first important volume of dialect poems: La meglio gioventù.

In 1955 Garzanti published the novel Ragazzi di vita, which had a big success both among the critics and the public. The judgement of the official culture of PCI was for the most part negative. The book was declared to be full of "morbid taste", of "the dirty, the abject, the unseemly, the torbid."

The Premiership (in the person of the that-time Home Secretary, Tambroni) promised a lawsuit against Pasolini and Livio Garzanti. The trial ended with acquittal "because the fact doesn't amount to a crime". The book, previously removed from bookshops, was de-sequestrated.

Pasolini became one of the favorite butt by crime-news newspapers: he was accused of crimes until it seemed grotesque: aiding and abetting for brawl and theft; armed robbery in a pub neighbouring to a petrol pump in S. Felice Circeo.

In 1957 Pasolini, together with Sergio Citti, collaborated on Fellini's film, Le notti di Cabiria, writing the dialogue in Roman dialect. He signed the scripts together with Bolognini, Rosi, Vancini and Lizzani, with whom made his dèbut as actor in the film Il gobbo in 1960.

In those years Pasolini contributed to the magazine "Officina", together with Leonetti, Roversi, Fortini, Romanò, Scalia. In 1957 he published the short poems Le ceneri di Gramsci for Garzanti, and the next year L'usignolo della Chiesa cattolica for Longanesi. In 1960 Garzanti published the essays Passione e ideologia, and in 1961 another volume in verse La religione del mio tempo.

In 1961 Pasolini made his first film as film-director and scriptwriter, Accattone. The film was forbidden to those under 18 and excited many polemics to the XXII Venice film festival. In 1962 he directed Mamma Roma. In 1963 the episode La ricotta directed by Pasolini and inserted into the film RoGoPaG, was sequestred and Pasolini was accused of the crime of public defamation of State religion. In'64 he directed Il Vangelo secondo Matteo; in'65 Uccellacci e uccellini; in'67 Edipo re; in'68 Teorema; in'69 Porcile; in'70 Medea; between'70 and'74 the trilogy of life, or of the sex, i.e. Il Decameron, I racconti di Canterbury and Il fiore delle Mille e una notte; finishing with his last film, Salò e le 120 giornate di Sodoma in 1975.

The cinema pushed him into traveling abroad: in 1961 with Elsa Morante and Moravia he went to India; in 1962 to Sudan and Kenya; in 1963 to Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Israel and Giordania where he made a documentary whose title is Sopralluoghi in Palestina).

In 1966, on the occasion of the presentation of Accattone and Mamma Roma at the New York Film Festival, he made his first trip to the United States; he was very taken by that country and most of all by New York. He revealed to Oriana Fallaci:

"I have never fallen so in love with a country. Except for Africa, maybe. But in Africa I would like to go so as to don't kill myself. Yes, Africa is like a drug, that you take instead of killing yourself. On the other hand, New York is a fight that you face instead of killing yourself." (17)

In 1968 Pasolini was again in India to film a documentary. In 1970 he returned to Africa: in Uganda and Tanzania, from which he filmmed the documentary Appunti per un'Orestiade africana.

In 1972, with Garzanti, he published a volume of criticism, mostly on cinema, entitled Empirismo eretico.

In the years of the student protest Pasolini adopted a separate position from the rest of Left culture. Though he accepted and supported students ideological motives, he thought that they were anthropologically bourgeois and, as bourgeoise, destined to fail in their attempt at revolution.

In 1968 Pasolini withdrew his novel Teorema from the Premio Strega competiton and agreed to participate in the XXIX Venice film festival after being guaranteed that there would be no awards. Pasolini was one of the biggest supporters of the Associazione Autori Cinematografici [Cinematographical Authors Association, n.t.] that fought to manage the event themselves. On 4th September the film Teorema was projected for critics in a red-hot atmosphere. Pasolini interrupted the films projection to confirm that the film was present to the festival only at the producer's request, and as author he asked the critics to leave the hall. That didn't happened. Pasolini refused to take part in the traditional press conference, and invited the journalists to a garden of a hotel to talk not about the film, but about the situation of Biennale.

In 1972 Pasolini decided to co-operate with youths of Lotta Continua, and together with some of them, including Bonfanti and Fofi, signed the documentary about the massacre in Piazza Fontana in Milan: 12 dicembre.

In 1973 he began his contribution for "Corriere della Sera" [an Italian newspaper, t.n.], with criticism on the problems of the Country.

In 1970 Pasolini bought what remained of a medieval castle near Viterbo. He rebuilt it and from there he began writing his incomplete work Petrolio.

In 1975, with Garzanti, he published the collection of criticism Scritti corsari, and re-proposed Friulian poetry in a curious way, with the title La nuova gioventù.

On the morning of 2nd November 1975, on the Roman litoral of Ostia, in an uncultivated field in Via dell'idroscalo, a woman, Maria Teresa Lollobrigida, discovered the dead body of a man. Ninetto Davoli identified the body as Pier Paolo Pasolini.

"When his body was found, Pasolini lay outstretched, face downwards, a bleeding arm shifted and the other one hidden by the body.
..


..
The blood-kneaded hair fell on the excoriated and torn forehead. The face deformed by swelling, was black because full of bruises and wounds. Black-and-blue and red of blood, as were the arms, the hands. The fingers of the left hand were broken and cut. The left jaw was broken. The nose was flattened by the tires of his car, under which he had been squashed. A horrible tearing between neck
and nape. Ten broken ribs, the breast-bone broken. The heart burst". (18)
During the night Carabineers stopped a young man named Giuseppe Pelosi, known as "Pino la rana", while driving a Giulietta 2000 that turned out to be owned by Pasolini. The boy, interrogated by Carabineers, and presented with the evidence, confessed the murder. He claimed to have encountered Pasolini near Termini railway station, and after a dinner in a restaurant, reached the place where the body was found. There, according to Pelosi's version, Pasolini attempted to approach him sexually but when he was rejected he responded violently, inciting the boy's reaction. The trial that followed brought to light disturbing facts. One suspected the complicity of other people in the murder. This matter will never be clear. Piero Pelosi was sentenced (he was the only one found guilty) for Pasolini's death.

Pasolini was buried in Casarsa, in his never-forgotten Friuli.

"So it's absolutely necessary to die, because till we're alive we are lacking of sense, and the language of our life (with which we express ourself, and to which we attach the maximum importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibility, a research of relations and meanings without solution of continuity. Death makes an instantaneous montage of our life: that is, it chooses ones really significant moments (and not more by now modifiable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments), and it puts them in succession, making of our never ending, instable and unsure present and so linguistically not describable, a clear, stable, sure past, and so linguistically describable (just in the ambit of a General Semiology). Only thanks to death, our life is used by us to express ourself". (19)

His life
by Christian Temporale

(1) P.P. Pasolini, Il sogno del centauro, by Jean Duflot, Editori Riuniti, Rome 1983.
(2) Interview to Dacia Maraini in "Vogue", May 1971.
(3) Ibidem.
(4) Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Nico Naldini, Cronistoria.
(5) Pier Paolo Pasolini, in AA.VV., Pasolini, una vita futura, Ass. Fondo Pasolini, Garzanti, Milan, 1985.
(6) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il poeta delle ceneri, by Enzo Siciliano, in "Nuovi Argomenti" nn. 67-68, Rome, July-December 1980.
(7) Letter to painter De Rocco, Autumn'44
(8) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere agli amici, by Luciano Serra, Milan 1976, lett. IX passim.
(9) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le belle bandiere, Dialoghi 1960-1965, by Giancarlo Ferretti, Editori Riuniti, Rome 1996.
(10) Il profilo autobiografico in Ritratti su misura di scrittori italiani, by E.F. Accrocca, Venice, 1960.
(11) Pier Paolo Pasolini, il poeta delle ceneri, by Enzo Siciliano, in "Nuovi Argomenti" n. 67-68, Rome, July-December 1980.
(12) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il treno di Casarsa, in "FMR", n. 28, November 1984, Franco Maria Ricci, Milan.
(13) "Profilo autobiografico" in Ritratti su misura di scrittori italiani, by E.F. Accrocca, Venice 1960.
(14) "Lettera a Silvana Ottieri" in AA. VV., Pasolini: cronaca giudiziaria, persecuzione, morte, Garzanti, Milan 1977.
(15) "Profilo autobiografico" in Ritratti su misura di scrittori italiani, cit.
(16) "Lettera a Silvana Ottieri", cit.
(17) Oriana Fallaci, Lettera a Pier Paolo Pasolini, in "Europeo", 14th novembre 1975.
(18) From "Perizia compiuta sul cadavere di Pasolini", "Corriere della Sera" of 2nd novembre 1977.
(19) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, Garzanti, Milan.

A filmography
from Microsoft Cinemania
(1996).


1955 WOMAN OF THE RIVER/LA DONNA DEL FIUME screenwriter
1957 NIGHTS OF CABIRIA/LE NOTTI DI CABIRIA/CABIRIA additional dialogue
1958 GIOVANI MARITI screenwriter
1959 MORTE DI UN AMICO screenwriter
1960 BELL' ANTONIO screenwriter
1960 LA NOTTA BRAVA screenwriter- from novel Ragazzi di vita
1960 UNA GIORNATA BALORDA screenwriter, story
1961 ACCATONE director, screenwriter
1961 LA CANTA DELLE MARANE screenwriter- from novel Ragazzi di vita
1962 THE GRIM REAPER/LA COMMARE SECCA screenwriter, story
1962 ROGOPAG director, screenwriter- from subject-"La Ricotta"
1963 LA RABBIA director, screenwriter, story, editor, commentary
1964 COMIZI D'AMORE director, performer
1965 SOPRALLUOGHI IN PALESTINA director
1966 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW/IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO director, adaptation
1966 THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS/UCCELLACCI E UCCELLINI director, screenwriter
1966 MAMMA ROMA director, screenwriter
1967 LOVE AND ANGER/AMORE E RABBIA director, screenwriter- "La Sequenza del fiore di carta"/"The Sequence of the Paper Flower"
1967 OEDIPUS REX/EDIPO RE director, screenwriter, music, music director, performer
1968 APPUNTI PER UN'FILM SULL'INDIA director, story, commentary, performer
1968 CAPRICCIO ALL'ITALIANA director
1968 TEOREMA director, screenwriter- from novel
1968 THE WITCHES/LE STREGHE director, screenwriter- "La terra vista dalla luna"/"The Earth Seen From the Moon"
1969 PIGSTY/PIGPEN/PORCILE director, screenwriter
1970 APPUNTI PER UN ROMANZO DELL'IMMONDEZZA director
1970 THE DECAMERON/IL DECAMERONE director, screenwriter, composer, performer
1970 MEDEA director, screenwriter
1970 NOTES FOR AN AFRICAN ORESTEIA/APPUNTI PER UN'ORESTIADE AFRICAN director, screenwriter, photography, commentary
1970 THE WALLS OF SANA/LE MURA DI SANA director, commentary, performer
1971 THE CANTERBURY TALES/I RACCONTI DI CANTERBURY director, screenwriter, music, performer
1972 DODICI DICEMBRE 1972 director
1973 STORIE SCELLERATE screenwriter
1974 ARABIAN NIGHTS/IL FIORE DELLE MILLE E UNA NOTTE/THE FLOWER OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS/A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS director, screenwriter
1975 SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM/SALO O LE 120 GIORNATE DI SODOMA director, screenwriter
1981 CASTELPORZIANO, OSTIA DEI POETI lyrics
1983 CALDERON screenwriter- from play
1987 A FUTURA MEMORIA DI PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Source : www.pasolini.net