Pier Paolo Pasolini was a poet, filmmaker, Marxist, and outspoken critic whose brutal death in 1975 remains unsolved.
This episode examines his troubled life, political enemies, and the competing theories surrounding a murder that Italy still argues over.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:22] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to one of my favourite places, not just in life, but for this show: and that's Italy.
[00:00:31] And today, it's the story of one of Italy’s most controversial artists: Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:00:38] He was a poet, a novelist, an intellectual, a filmmaker, a Marxist, a man loved and loathed in equal measure, and his death more than 50 years ago is still shrouded in mystery.
[00:00:53] This is also a request from a wonderful member from Italy, so Carlo, thank you very much for this great suggestion. I hope you'll enjoy it.
[00:01:02] OK, let's not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:07] At 1:30 in the morning of the 2nd of November, 1975, a police car is driving along the coastal road outside Ostia, a seaside town on the outskirts of Rome.
[00:01:23] In the dead of night, the officers see the headlights of a car speeding towards them, on the wrong side of the road, no less.
[00:01:33] They stop the car, a silver-grey Alfa Romeo GT 2000.
[00:01:40] Behind the wheel is a boy: Giuseppe Pelosi, Pino for short.
[00:01:46] He is seventeen years old, too young to legally drive. He's taken to the police station, where he says he stole the car. He seems anxious, concerned, and about one thing in particular: a ring he says he left inside it.
[00:02:07] A large ring, engraved with the words "United States Army."
[00:02:13] Police search the car, but no ring can be found.
[00:02:19] They do, however, find the vehicle registration documents. The car belongs to a man called Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:02:29] The police contact Pasolini's mother and sister, who he lives with, to let them know that his car has been stolen.
[00:02:38] There is even grimmer news to come.
[00:02:42] At 6.30 that morning, the morning of November 2nd, 1975, a woman is walking home in Ostia. It is All Souls' Day, the Catholic feast for the dead, which, given what she will find, makes this all sound closer to fiction than reality.
[00:03:03] She sees something on the ground. At first it looks like a bundle of old clothes, but then she sees arms and legs. On closer inspection, it is a human body, the body of a middle-aged man.
[00:03:20] He is barely recognisable; he has been beaten so savagely that his face is unidentifiable. It looks like he's been run over by some kind of heavy vehicle.
[00:03:33] She calls the police. The dead man, they discover, is Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the country's great intellectuals, poets, and filmmakers.
[00:03:45] At almost exactly the same time as she files the report, the news goes out on the national broadcaster: Pier Paolo Pasolini found dead.
[00:03:58] In a country not generally known for its bureaucratic efficiency, it seems slightly suspicious that the death is announced at almost the exact moment of the body's discovery.
[00:04:11] And this is far from the only unusual aspect to this story.
[00:04:16] Now, to understand why so few people accept the official story of how he died, we first have to understand who he was.
[00:04:27] Pasolini was born in March, 1922, in Bologna, in the north of Italy.
[00:04:34] This, as the history buffs among you may know, was just a few months before Mussolini's March on Rome, and Italy falling to fascism.
[00:04:45] And fascism, both his experience living under it in his adolescence, and under the relics of fascism after it fell, well, it would permeate everything: his personal life, his political views, his philosophy, and his work.
[00:05:04] Pasolini was a creative, an idealist, someone who started writing poetry at the age of seven. He took great joy in natural beauty, in the variety of human experience.
[00:05:21] This, as you might imagine, put him at odds with the entire philosophy of fascism.
[00:05:29] One of the defining principles of Italian fascism was the unification and standardisation of everything.
[00:05:39] Mussolini believed this was particularly important because it would create a sense of national unity.
[00:05:47] Italy, remember, had only become a unified country in 1861, sixty years earlier. Before then, the Italian peninsula had been a patchwork of kingdoms and territories, each with its own laws, its own traditions, its own culture, and its own language.
[00:06:09] For many Italians, standard Italian was still more a written, official language than the language of daily life.
[00:06:19] Most people spoke their regional dialect. If you put a farmer from the Dolomites, in the north east of the country, together with a shepherd from Sicily, they would have barely been able to understand one another.
[00:06:34] The fascist regime tried its utmost to change this.
[00:06:39] Mussolini launched what he called the bonifica linguistica. Foreign words were expelled from public spaces. Dialects were stigmatised in schools. The state radio was in a standardised, centralised Italian.
[00:06:58] To a young Pasolini, this was an assault on everything he believed in: uniqueness, individuality, the beauty of variety.
[00:07:10] And this variety was something he was acutely aware of.
[00:07:15] His mother came from Friuli, a largely agricultural region in the far north-east of Italy, near the border with what was then Yugoslavia. He had lived there as a child, visiting the small farming villages where she had grown up.
[00:07:33] And in those villages, he had heard Friulano, the local dialect.
[00:07:40] He couldn't speak Friulano himself, but there was something about it that seemed to draw him in. He ended up writing poetry in Friulano, and his first poetry collection was published entirely in Friulano, this quite obscure dialect spoken mainly by peasants.
[00:08:03] And apart from the linguistic vandalism he felt the fascists were pursuing, fascism affected him in other, dare I say, more serious ways.
[00:08:16] His younger brother, Guido, had joined the partisans, the resistance fighters against fascism.
[00:08:24] And in February 1945, with the war almost over, Guido was killed. He was not killed by the Germans, or by the fascists. He was killed in a massacre carried out by a rival partisan faction.
[00:08:42] Pasolini blamed the fascists for dragging Italy into the war in the first place. But he also blamed the left, whose ugly infighting had left his brother dead. This is important, as it foreshadows Pasolini not really feeling at home in any traditional political category.
[00:09:03] Still, after the war, Pasolini joined the Italian Communist Party, as the clear opposite to fascism.
[00:09:12] He was an active local member: he organised peasants, attended rallies, and wrote for party publications.
[00:09:20] He was, for the first and last time in his life, a semi-conventional political creature, a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party.
[00:09:31] But it did not last.
[00:09:34] In September 1949, at a local festival in a village, he was accused of having been involved in a sexual encounter with several teenage boys. He was charged with corruption of minors and public obscenity.
[00:09:52] He was later acquitted.
[00:09:54] But the damage was done, and the scandal, and the stigma around his sexuality, would follow him for the rest of his life.
[00:10:04] He was fired from his job and kicked out of the Italian Communist Party. The official statement spoke of "deleterious influences" and "bourgeois degeneration."
[00:10:17] He packed his things, and in January 1950, he moved to Rome with his mother.
[00:10:24] Now, at first, Rome was not kind to them.
[00:10:29] They arrived with very little money. Pasolini worked whatever jobs he could find: private tutoring, writing small commissions, and bit parts as an extra in films.
[00:10:42] He and his mother lived in cheap accommodation on the outskirts of the city, in the kind of neighbourhoods that you won't find on a postcard.
[00:10:52] These were called the borgate, and they were the poor suburbs of Rome, often grey, dusty places without proper sanitation or services.
[00:11:04] These were not places that young, university-educated intellectuals tended to frequent, but Pasolini felt differently.
[00:11:14] While others saw misery and simplicity, he found a kind of vitality. A rawness, a directness, a resistance to the flattening forces of modern Italian life.
[00:11:30] The young men who idled on the streets spoke in thick Roman dialect. They had their own codes, their own dark humour, their own beauty.
[00:11:41] He wrote two novels about them. Both scandalised the literary establishment. And both sold very well.
[00:11:50] And then he turned to film.
[00:11:53] Now, this episode would be hours long if we went into every single one, but suffice it to say, his films were controversial. They ruffled more than a few feathers, and he was prosecuted for nearly all of them.
[00:12:09] Obscenity. Blasphemy. Contempt for religion.
[00:12:13] He was never convicted, but each one brought him new enemies.
[00:12:19] Many in the Catholic Church despised his work, as did many on the right.
[00:12:26] And in 1968, he did something that cost him most of his remaining allies on the left.
[00:12:34] That spring, students across Italy — and across much of Europe — had been rioting.
[00:12:42] In Rome, there had been a violent clash between students and police at a place called Valle Giulia.
[00:12:51] You might have expected Pasolini to have sympathised with the students. After all, they were traditionally associated with the left, and the police were traditionally associated with the right.
[00:13:03] But Pasolini came out in sympathy not with the students, but with the police.
[00:13:11] He described the students as spoiled and bourgeois, children of wealthy families playing at revolution. The police, on the other hand, were young men who had grown up in poverty and joined the police because there was no alternative.
[00:13:30] For all their talk of revolution, the students had the same instinct as the fascists they claimed to oppose: they wanted everyone to think the same way, and they were ready to turn on anyone who didn't.
[00:13:45] He called it left-wing fascism.
[00:13:49] And moving into the 1970s, he became increasingly vocal about what he saw as the cultural catastrophe of his beloved country.
[00:14:01] In the two decades after the war, the Italy Pasolini had grown up in had changed with remarkable speed. The economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s had brought industry, television, rising wages, and mass consumption.
[00:14:20] By almost any conventional measure, most Italians were better off than they had ever been.
[00:14:28] Yet to Pasolini, things had never been worse.
[00:14:34] For all its brutality, he said, fascism had never truly remade ordinary Italians. It had demanded their obedience, but not their souls.
[00:14:47] Consumer capitalism, television, advertising, the ideology of consumption: these had achieved what Mussolini never managed.
[00:14:57] They had flattened Italy. They had eroded the regional cultures, the local dialects, the particular identities that made each part of the country different from every other.
[00:15:10] In their place had come a single, homogenised, nationally standardised way of being.
[00:15:19] He called this the new fascism: it wasn't the fascism of uniforms and rallies, the fascism of Mussolini. This was a fascism that worked through pleasure and desire rather than coercion.
[00:15:35] And it was not only consumer culture that Pasolini was attacking.
[00:15:40] In November 1974, he published an article that became immediately notorious. It was called "Io so".
[00:15:50] "I know."
[00:15:52] In it, he wrote that he knew who was responsible for the political violence of the previous decade: the bombings, the assassinations, the "strategy of tension" that had killed dozens of people, the "Years of Lead", which you might remember from our mini-series at the end of last year.
[00:16:13] "I know," he wrote, "but I have no evidence. Not even clues."
[00:16:20] In this article, he claimed to know exactly who was responsible, who was pulling the strings, yet admitted he had no proof.
[00:16:30] Whatever he actually knew, the article made him powerful enemies.
[00:16:35] And by this point, Pasolini was almost impossible to categorise: too communist for conservatives, too conservative for communists, too religious for secular intellectuals, and too scandalous for the religious. An openly homosexual man in a still religiously conservative country.
[00:16:58] Now, we must move forward towards the evening of the 1st of November, All Saints' Day, and the last evening of Pasolini's life.
[00:17:09] He had recently finished a film called "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom".
[00:17:16] It is the most extreme and deliberately unwatchable film he ever made.
[00:17:22] It was loosely based on a work by the Marquis de Sade, and set in the final months of Mussolini's Republic of Salò in 1944.
[00:17:35] In it, four powerful men abduct eighteen teenagers, take them to an isolated villa, and then subject them to systematic torture, rape, and murder. It is a film about absolute power, about what a ruling class does to those it controls when it believes it will never be called to account.
[00:17:59] Earlier that year, in August, something had happened to those film reels. A theft. Reels from Salò were stolen, and this being 1975, there were no hard drives or reusable backups.
[00:18:16] The thieves demanded a ransom.
[00:18:19] Pasolini refused to pay and instead had the affected scenes reshot.
[00:18:26] But he still wanted them back. Among the missing footage was a scene in which Pasolini himself appeared, dancing. He was desperate to get it back.
[00:18:39] Now, the reason to mention this is because one theory has it that the reason Pasolini went to Ostia on the night of his murder was to get these stolen reels back, and he somehow walked into an ambush.
[00:18:57] To this day, it is unclear exactly what happened to him on the night of 1st November, who killed him, and why.
[00:19:08] Pelosi, the 17-year-old who was found speeding in his car, told his version of events when he was formally questioned after his arrest.
[00:19:19] He said Pasolini had approached him and a group of friends outside a bar near Termini station, and asked if anyone wanted to "fare un giro".
[00:19:31] Now, this expression is actually quite a hard thing to directly translate into English, but is something like "to go for a ride".
[00:19:42] And coming from Pasolini to a group of young men hanging out near the train station late at night, there would have been an implied sexual connotation.
[00:19:54] Pelosi, who was a street kid and prepared to do whatever was necessary to make some money, well, he took him up on the offer and got into the car.
[00:20:05] Pelosi told the older man that he was starving, so the pair went for a late-night meal, with the young man having a bowl of pasta and then a slice of chicken, and Pasolini just drinking a beer.
[00:20:20] Then, Pasolini drove him out to Ostia, on the coast, around 30 kilometres from Rome.
[00:20:27] When they arrived, Pasolini requested sexual acts from him that he did not want to do.
[00:20:34] There was an argument. Pasolini struck him first with a stick, he said.
[00:20:39] Pelosi then grabbed a wooden board and fought back.
[00:20:44] Somehow, the pair were outside the car at this point. Pelosi then ran back to the car and drove away, trying to escape. He says he ran over Pasolini's body by accident as he drove off.
[00:21:00] A sexual encounter gone horribly wrong. Nothing more.
[00:21:05] Now, there are more than a few problems with this story.
[00:21:10] The first is Pasolini himself. He was lean, athletic, and experienced in karate. Pino Pelosi was a skinny seventeen-year-old.
[00:21:23] In a straight fight between the two of them, it is hard to see how Pelosi would have come out on top.
[00:21:31] The second problem is Pasolini's injuries. He had multiple broken bones, crushed ribs, and his body had been run over repeatedly by a car. The injuries simply didn't tally with what Pelosi said happened, that he had been hit by a wooden board.
[00:21:51] The third problem is Pelosi himself. When the police stopped him that night, he was almost unmarked. There were none of the cuts or bruises you would expect on someone who had just fought a grown man to the death, and not a single trace of Pasolini's blood on his clothes.
[00:22:12] The fourth problem is the timing.
[00:22:15] When Pelosi was arrested at 1:30 in the morning, the police went to Pasolini's apartment and told his family the car had been stolen. At least, that was the official version.
[00:22:28] At 6:30 AM, the body was found, and at that exact moment, Italian state radio broadcast the news of the murder.
[00:22:37] This suggests that someone had that information before the official discovery of the body, and had held it until the moment it could appear to have come from the scene.
[00:22:50] Who knew what, and when, has never been answered.
[00:22:56] There are other questions too. Why was Pelosi so desperate to inform the police about the ring, a ring that would directly implicate him in the murder? And friends say that this ring never left Pelosi's finger, so it seemed a little suspicious, convenient, even, for it to be found right next to Pasolini's lifeless corpse. As if the young man was being deliberately set up.
[00:23:26] And there is more to suggest that Pelosi was not alone that night, or even there at all.
[00:23:33] The owners of the restaurant where Pasolini had his last meal said the young man at his table did not match Pelosi's description.
[00:23:42] And on the morning the body was found, a local man told a journalist on the scene that he had seen four or five people around Pasolini that night. They massacred that poor man for half an hour, he said. He cried mamma, mamma, mamma.
[00:24:01] It seemed to be a pretty damning witness statement, but after the statement and the man's identity were made public, he refused to say another word.
[00:24:13] Pelosi was convicted in 1976, but the judge wasn't convinced by his story either, writing, "the record overwhelmingly shows that on that night Pelosi was not alone."
[00:24:28] Now, Pelosi stuck to this story, for a while at least.
[00:24:33] But in 2005, 30 years later, he retracted his confession.
[00:24:41] He said that he had driven to Ostia with Pasolini, but they had been ambushed by a group of men, three, perhaps even five of them.
[00:24:52] Men he described as neo-fascists, with southern Italian accents, who had beaten Pasolini while screaming insults at him, calling him a dirty communist. Pelosi had taken the blame, he claimed, because they had threatened his family.
[00:25:11] And indeed, in 2014, DNA analysis of the clothes Pasolini was wearing that night found traces from at least three separate individuals.
[00:25:25] As for who those individuals were and who sent them, that is where it's easy to go very deep down different rabbit holes.
[00:25:35] Investigators have pointed towards the Banda della Magliana, a powerful criminal organisation with documented ties to far-right extremism and to a secret network called Propaganda Due — P2 [P-Two] for short.
[00:25:52] In other words, he was killed either by right-wing extremists or by mysterious puppet masters linked to the P2 Masonic lodge.
[00:26:03] There's also the theory that he was murdered because of what he was about to publish in an unfinished novel called Petrolio, or "Oil", which spoke of government and corporate corruption.
[00:26:18] And indeed, when it was recovered after his death, the manuscript had a missing section, a section which some have speculated contained politically sensitive material.
[00:26:31] Or was it simply a robbery gone wrong? A group of criminals trying to dispossess a man of his belongings, a strong man who had fought back, and it had ended in tragedy?
[00:26:44] For what it's worth, in December 2022, the Italian Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission concluded that major criminal gangs, including the Banda della Magliana, may have been involved in the murder, and noted serious failures in the original investigation.
[00:27:06] The commission said it was unlikely the perpetrators would ever face justice.
[00:27:13] And when Pino Pelosi died in 2017, the chances of the truth coming to light became even slimmer.
[00:27:22] As of today, the case remains officially unsolved.
[00:27:27] Fifty years on, the man who never fit a single category has a death that doesn't fit one either.
[00:27:34] Italy has been arguing about it ever since, and is no closer to an answer.
[00:27:42] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:27:46] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:27:50] This period of Italian history is a veritable treasure trove of these sorts of mysteries, and if you enjoyed this one, I'd recommend our mini-series on the Years of Lead, which is episodes 582 to 584, episode 147, about the murder of Roberto Calvi, and episode 63, about the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.
[00:28:15] And if you are an Italian speaker, there is an entire drama podcast series called Feroce - L'ultima Notte di Pasolini, which is very good, and goes into the story in ways we didn't have the time to do today.
[00:28:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:22] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to one of my favourite places, not just in life, but for this show: and that's Italy.
[00:00:31] And today, it's the story of one of Italy’s most controversial artists: Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:00:38] He was a poet, a novelist, an intellectual, a filmmaker, a Marxist, a man loved and loathed in equal measure, and his death more than 50 years ago is still shrouded in mystery.
[00:00:53] This is also a request from a wonderful member from Italy, so Carlo, thank you very much for this great suggestion. I hope you'll enjoy it.
[00:01:02] OK, let's not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:07] At 1:30 in the morning of the 2nd of November, 1975, a police car is driving along the coastal road outside Ostia, a seaside town on the outskirts of Rome.
[00:01:23] In the dead of night, the officers see the headlights of a car speeding towards them, on the wrong side of the road, no less.
[00:01:33] They stop the car, a silver-grey Alfa Romeo GT 2000.
[00:01:40] Behind the wheel is a boy: Giuseppe Pelosi, Pino for short.
[00:01:46] He is seventeen years old, too young to legally drive. He's taken to the police station, where he says he stole the car. He seems anxious, concerned, and about one thing in particular: a ring he says he left inside it.
[00:02:07] A large ring, engraved with the words "United States Army."
[00:02:13] Police search the car, but no ring can be found.
[00:02:19] They do, however, find the vehicle registration documents. The car belongs to a man called Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:02:29] The police contact Pasolini's mother and sister, who he lives with, to let them know that his car has been stolen.
[00:02:38] There is even grimmer news to come.
[00:02:42] At 6.30 that morning, the morning of November 2nd, 1975, a woman is walking home in Ostia. It is All Souls' Day, the Catholic feast for the dead, which, given what she will find, makes this all sound closer to fiction than reality.
[00:03:03] She sees something on the ground. At first it looks like a bundle of old clothes, but then she sees arms and legs. On closer inspection, it is a human body, the body of a middle-aged man.
[00:03:20] He is barely recognisable; he has been beaten so savagely that his face is unidentifiable. It looks like he's been run over by some kind of heavy vehicle.
[00:03:33] She calls the police. The dead man, they discover, is Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the country's great intellectuals, poets, and filmmakers.
[00:03:45] At almost exactly the same time as she files the report, the news goes out on the national broadcaster: Pier Paolo Pasolini found dead.
[00:03:58] In a country not generally known for its bureaucratic efficiency, it seems slightly suspicious that the death is announced at almost the exact moment of the body's discovery.
[00:04:11] And this is far from the only unusual aspect to this story.
[00:04:16] Now, to understand why so few people accept the official story of how he died, we first have to understand who he was.
[00:04:27] Pasolini was born in March, 1922, in Bologna, in the north of Italy.
[00:04:34] This, as the history buffs among you may know, was just a few months before Mussolini's March on Rome, and Italy falling to fascism.
[00:04:45] And fascism, both his experience living under it in his adolescence, and under the relics of fascism after it fell, well, it would permeate everything: his personal life, his political views, his philosophy, and his work.
[00:05:04] Pasolini was a creative, an idealist, someone who started writing poetry at the age of seven. He took great joy in natural beauty, in the variety of human experience.
[00:05:21] This, as you might imagine, put him at odds with the entire philosophy of fascism.
[00:05:29] One of the defining principles of Italian fascism was the unification and standardisation of everything.
[00:05:39] Mussolini believed this was particularly important because it would create a sense of national unity.
[00:05:47] Italy, remember, had only become a unified country in 1861, sixty years earlier. Before then, the Italian peninsula had been a patchwork of kingdoms and territories, each with its own laws, its own traditions, its own culture, and its own language.
[00:06:09] For many Italians, standard Italian was still more a written, official language than the language of daily life.
[00:06:19] Most people spoke their regional dialect. If you put a farmer from the Dolomites, in the north east of the country, together with a shepherd from Sicily, they would have barely been able to understand one another.
[00:06:34] The fascist regime tried its utmost to change this.
[00:06:39] Mussolini launched what he called the bonifica linguistica. Foreign words were expelled from public spaces. Dialects were stigmatised in schools. The state radio was in a standardised, centralised Italian.
[00:06:58] To a young Pasolini, this was an assault on everything he believed in: uniqueness, individuality, the beauty of variety.
[00:07:10] And this variety was something he was acutely aware of.
[00:07:15] His mother came from Friuli, a largely agricultural region in the far north-east of Italy, near the border with what was then Yugoslavia. He had lived there as a child, visiting the small farming villages where she had grown up.
[00:07:33] And in those villages, he had heard Friulano, the local dialect.
[00:07:40] He couldn't speak Friulano himself, but there was something about it that seemed to draw him in. He ended up writing poetry in Friulano, and his first poetry collection was published entirely in Friulano, this quite obscure dialect spoken mainly by peasants.
[00:08:03] And apart from the linguistic vandalism he felt the fascists were pursuing, fascism affected him in other, dare I say, more serious ways.
[00:08:16] His younger brother, Guido, had joined the partisans, the resistance fighters against fascism.
[00:08:24] And in February 1945, with the war almost over, Guido was killed. He was not killed by the Germans, or by the fascists. He was killed in a massacre carried out by a rival partisan faction.
[00:08:42] Pasolini blamed the fascists for dragging Italy into the war in the first place. But he also blamed the left, whose ugly infighting had left his brother dead. This is important, as it foreshadows Pasolini not really feeling at home in any traditional political category.
[00:09:03] Still, after the war, Pasolini joined the Italian Communist Party, as the clear opposite to fascism.
[00:09:12] He was an active local member: he organised peasants, attended rallies, and wrote for party publications.
[00:09:20] He was, for the first and last time in his life, a semi-conventional political creature, a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party.
[00:09:31] But it did not last.
[00:09:34] In September 1949, at a local festival in a village, he was accused of having been involved in a sexual encounter with several teenage boys. He was charged with corruption of minors and public obscenity.
[00:09:52] He was later acquitted.
[00:09:54] But the damage was done, and the scandal, and the stigma around his sexuality, would follow him for the rest of his life.
[00:10:04] He was fired from his job and kicked out of the Italian Communist Party. The official statement spoke of "deleterious influences" and "bourgeois degeneration."
[00:10:17] He packed his things, and in January 1950, he moved to Rome with his mother.
[00:10:24] Now, at first, Rome was not kind to them.
[00:10:29] They arrived with very little money. Pasolini worked whatever jobs he could find: private tutoring, writing small commissions, and bit parts as an extra in films.
[00:10:42] He and his mother lived in cheap accommodation on the outskirts of the city, in the kind of neighbourhoods that you won't find on a postcard.
[00:10:52] These were called the borgate, and they were the poor suburbs of Rome, often grey, dusty places without proper sanitation or services.
[00:11:04] These were not places that young, university-educated intellectuals tended to frequent, but Pasolini felt differently.
[00:11:14] While others saw misery and simplicity, he found a kind of vitality. A rawness, a directness, a resistance to the flattening forces of modern Italian life.
[00:11:30] The young men who idled on the streets spoke in thick Roman dialect. They had their own codes, their own dark humour, their own beauty.
[00:11:41] He wrote two novels about them. Both scandalised the literary establishment. And both sold very well.
[00:11:50] And then he turned to film.
[00:11:53] Now, this episode would be hours long if we went into every single one, but suffice it to say, his films were controversial. They ruffled more than a few feathers, and he was prosecuted for nearly all of them.
[00:12:09] Obscenity. Blasphemy. Contempt for religion.
[00:12:13] He was never convicted, but each one brought him new enemies.
[00:12:19] Many in the Catholic Church despised his work, as did many on the right.
[00:12:26] And in 1968, he did something that cost him most of his remaining allies on the left.
[00:12:34] That spring, students across Italy — and across much of Europe — had been rioting.
[00:12:42] In Rome, there had been a violent clash between students and police at a place called Valle Giulia.
[00:12:51] You might have expected Pasolini to have sympathised with the students. After all, they were traditionally associated with the left, and the police were traditionally associated with the right.
[00:13:03] But Pasolini came out in sympathy not with the students, but with the police.
[00:13:11] He described the students as spoiled and bourgeois, children of wealthy families playing at revolution. The police, on the other hand, were young men who had grown up in poverty and joined the police because there was no alternative.
[00:13:30] For all their talk of revolution, the students had the same instinct as the fascists they claimed to oppose: they wanted everyone to think the same way, and they were ready to turn on anyone who didn't.
[00:13:45] He called it left-wing fascism.
[00:13:49] And moving into the 1970s, he became increasingly vocal about what he saw as the cultural catastrophe of his beloved country.
[00:14:01] In the two decades after the war, the Italy Pasolini had grown up in had changed with remarkable speed. The economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s had brought industry, television, rising wages, and mass consumption.
[00:14:20] By almost any conventional measure, most Italians were better off than they had ever been.
[00:14:28] Yet to Pasolini, things had never been worse.
[00:14:34] For all its brutality, he said, fascism had never truly remade ordinary Italians. It had demanded their obedience, but not their souls.
[00:14:47] Consumer capitalism, television, advertising, the ideology of consumption: these had achieved what Mussolini never managed.
[00:14:57] They had flattened Italy. They had eroded the regional cultures, the local dialects, the particular identities that made each part of the country different from every other.
[00:15:10] In their place had come a single, homogenised, nationally standardised way of being.
[00:15:19] He called this the new fascism: it wasn't the fascism of uniforms and rallies, the fascism of Mussolini. This was a fascism that worked through pleasure and desire rather than coercion.
[00:15:35] And it was not only consumer culture that Pasolini was attacking.
[00:15:40] In November 1974, he published an article that became immediately notorious. It was called "Io so".
[00:15:50] "I know."
[00:15:52] In it, he wrote that he knew who was responsible for the political violence of the previous decade: the bombings, the assassinations, the "strategy of tension" that had killed dozens of people, the "Years of Lead", which you might remember from our mini-series at the end of last year.
[00:16:13] "I know," he wrote, "but I have no evidence. Not even clues."
[00:16:20] In this article, he claimed to know exactly who was responsible, who was pulling the strings, yet admitted he had no proof.
[00:16:30] Whatever he actually knew, the article made him powerful enemies.
[00:16:35] And by this point, Pasolini was almost impossible to categorise: too communist for conservatives, too conservative for communists, too religious for secular intellectuals, and too scandalous for the religious. An openly homosexual man in a still religiously conservative country.
[00:16:58] Now, we must move forward towards the evening of the 1st of November, All Saints' Day, and the last evening of Pasolini's life.
[00:17:09] He had recently finished a film called "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom".
[00:17:16] It is the most extreme and deliberately unwatchable film he ever made.
[00:17:22] It was loosely based on a work by the Marquis de Sade, and set in the final months of Mussolini's Republic of Salò in 1944.
[00:17:35] In it, four powerful men abduct eighteen teenagers, take them to an isolated villa, and then subject them to systematic torture, rape, and murder. It is a film about absolute power, about what a ruling class does to those it controls when it believes it will never be called to account.
[00:17:59] Earlier that year, in August, something had happened to those film reels. A theft. Reels from Salò were stolen, and this being 1975, there were no hard drives or reusable backups.
[00:18:16] The thieves demanded a ransom.
[00:18:19] Pasolini refused to pay and instead had the affected scenes reshot.
[00:18:26] But he still wanted them back. Among the missing footage was a scene in which Pasolini himself appeared, dancing. He was desperate to get it back.
[00:18:39] Now, the reason to mention this is because one theory has it that the reason Pasolini went to Ostia on the night of his murder was to get these stolen reels back, and he somehow walked into an ambush.
[00:18:57] To this day, it is unclear exactly what happened to him on the night of 1st November, who killed him, and why.
[00:19:08] Pelosi, the 17-year-old who was found speeding in his car, told his version of events when he was formally questioned after his arrest.
[00:19:19] He said Pasolini had approached him and a group of friends outside a bar near Termini station, and asked if anyone wanted to "fare un giro".
[00:19:31] Now, this expression is actually quite a hard thing to directly translate into English, but is something like "to go for a ride".
[00:19:42] And coming from Pasolini to a group of young men hanging out near the train station late at night, there would have been an implied sexual connotation.
[00:19:54] Pelosi, who was a street kid and prepared to do whatever was necessary to make some money, well, he took him up on the offer and got into the car.
[00:20:05] Pelosi told the older man that he was starving, so the pair went for a late-night meal, with the young man having a bowl of pasta and then a slice of chicken, and Pasolini just drinking a beer.
[00:20:20] Then, Pasolini drove him out to Ostia, on the coast, around 30 kilometres from Rome.
[00:20:27] When they arrived, Pasolini requested sexual acts from him that he did not want to do.
[00:20:34] There was an argument. Pasolini struck him first with a stick, he said.
[00:20:39] Pelosi then grabbed a wooden board and fought back.
[00:20:44] Somehow, the pair were outside the car at this point. Pelosi then ran back to the car and drove away, trying to escape. He says he ran over Pasolini's body by accident as he drove off.
[00:21:00] A sexual encounter gone horribly wrong. Nothing more.
[00:21:05] Now, there are more than a few problems with this story.
[00:21:10] The first is Pasolini himself. He was lean, athletic, and experienced in karate. Pino Pelosi was a skinny seventeen-year-old.
[00:21:23] In a straight fight between the two of them, it is hard to see how Pelosi would have come out on top.
[00:21:31] The second problem is Pasolini's injuries. He had multiple broken bones, crushed ribs, and his body had been run over repeatedly by a car. The injuries simply didn't tally with what Pelosi said happened, that he had been hit by a wooden board.
[00:21:51] The third problem is Pelosi himself. When the police stopped him that night, he was almost unmarked. There were none of the cuts or bruises you would expect on someone who had just fought a grown man to the death, and not a single trace of Pasolini's blood on his clothes.
[00:22:12] The fourth problem is the timing.
[00:22:15] When Pelosi was arrested at 1:30 in the morning, the police went to Pasolini's apartment and told his family the car had been stolen. At least, that was the official version.
[00:22:28] At 6:30 AM, the body was found, and at that exact moment, Italian state radio broadcast the news of the murder.
[00:22:37] This suggests that someone had that information before the official discovery of the body, and had held it until the moment it could appear to have come from the scene.
[00:22:50] Who knew what, and when, has never been answered.
[00:22:56] There are other questions too. Why was Pelosi so desperate to inform the police about the ring, a ring that would directly implicate him in the murder? And friends say that this ring never left Pelosi's finger, so it seemed a little suspicious, convenient, even, for it to be found right next to Pasolini's lifeless corpse. As if the young man was being deliberately set up.
[00:23:26] And there is more to suggest that Pelosi was not alone that night, or even there at all.
[00:23:33] The owners of the restaurant where Pasolini had his last meal said the young man at his table did not match Pelosi's description.
[00:23:42] And on the morning the body was found, a local man told a journalist on the scene that he had seen four or five people around Pasolini that night. They massacred that poor man for half an hour, he said. He cried mamma, mamma, mamma.
[00:24:01] It seemed to be a pretty damning witness statement, but after the statement and the man's identity were made public, he refused to say another word.
[00:24:13] Pelosi was convicted in 1976, but the judge wasn't convinced by his story either, writing, "the record overwhelmingly shows that on that night Pelosi was not alone."
[00:24:28] Now, Pelosi stuck to this story, for a while at least.
[00:24:33] But in 2005, 30 years later, he retracted his confession.
[00:24:41] He said that he had driven to Ostia with Pasolini, but they had been ambushed by a group of men, three, perhaps even five of them.
[00:24:52] Men he described as neo-fascists, with southern Italian accents, who had beaten Pasolini while screaming insults at him, calling him a dirty communist. Pelosi had taken the blame, he claimed, because they had threatened his family.
[00:25:11] And indeed, in 2014, DNA analysis of the clothes Pasolini was wearing that night found traces from at least three separate individuals.
[00:25:25] As for who those individuals were and who sent them, that is where it's easy to go very deep down different rabbit holes.
[00:25:35] Investigators have pointed towards the Banda della Magliana, a powerful criminal organisation with documented ties to far-right extremism and to a secret network called Propaganda Due — P2 [P-Two] for short.
[00:25:52] In other words, he was killed either by right-wing extremists or by mysterious puppet masters linked to the P2 Masonic lodge.
[00:26:03] There's also the theory that he was murdered because of what he was about to publish in an unfinished novel called Petrolio, or "Oil", which spoke of government and corporate corruption.
[00:26:18] And indeed, when it was recovered after his death, the manuscript had a missing section, a section which some have speculated contained politically sensitive material.
[00:26:31] Or was it simply a robbery gone wrong? A group of criminals trying to dispossess a man of his belongings, a strong man who had fought back, and it had ended in tragedy?
[00:26:44] For what it's worth, in December 2022, the Italian Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission concluded that major criminal gangs, including the Banda della Magliana, may have been involved in the murder, and noted serious failures in the original investigation.
[00:27:06] The commission said it was unlikely the perpetrators would ever face justice.
[00:27:13] And when Pino Pelosi died in 2017, the chances of the truth coming to light became even slimmer.
[00:27:22] As of today, the case remains officially unsolved.
[00:27:27] Fifty years on, the man who never fit a single category has a death that doesn't fit one either.
[00:27:34] Italy has been arguing about it ever since, and is no closer to an answer.
[00:27:42] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:27:46] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:27:50] This period of Italian history is a veritable treasure trove of these sorts of mysteries, and if you enjoyed this one, I'd recommend our mini-series on the Years of Lead, which is episodes 582 to 584, episode 147, about the murder of Roberto Calvi, and episode 63, about the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.
[00:28:15] And if you are an Italian speaker, there is an entire drama podcast series called Feroce - L'ultima Notte di Pasolini, which is very good, and goes into the story in ways we didn't have the time to do today.
[00:28:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:22] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to one of my favourite places, not just in life, but for this show: and that's Italy.
[00:00:31] And today, it's the story of one of Italy’s most controversial artists: Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:00:38] He was a poet, a novelist, an intellectual, a filmmaker, a Marxist, a man loved and loathed in equal measure, and his death more than 50 years ago is still shrouded in mystery.
[00:00:53] This is also a request from a wonderful member from Italy, so Carlo, thank you very much for this great suggestion. I hope you'll enjoy it.
[00:01:02] OK, let's not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:07] At 1:30 in the morning of the 2nd of November, 1975, a police car is driving along the coastal road outside Ostia, a seaside town on the outskirts of Rome.
[00:01:23] In the dead of night, the officers see the headlights of a car speeding towards them, on the wrong side of the road, no less.
[00:01:33] They stop the car, a silver-grey Alfa Romeo GT 2000.
[00:01:40] Behind the wheel is a boy: Giuseppe Pelosi, Pino for short.
[00:01:46] He is seventeen years old, too young to legally drive. He's taken to the police station, where he says he stole the car. He seems anxious, concerned, and about one thing in particular: a ring he says he left inside it.
[00:02:07] A large ring, engraved with the words "United States Army."
[00:02:13] Police search the car, but no ring can be found.
[00:02:19] They do, however, find the vehicle registration documents. The car belongs to a man called Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:02:29] The police contact Pasolini's mother and sister, who he lives with, to let them know that his car has been stolen.
[00:02:38] There is even grimmer news to come.
[00:02:42] At 6.30 that morning, the morning of November 2nd, 1975, a woman is walking home in Ostia. It is All Souls' Day, the Catholic feast for the dead, which, given what she will find, makes this all sound closer to fiction than reality.
[00:03:03] She sees something on the ground. At first it looks like a bundle of old clothes, but then she sees arms and legs. On closer inspection, it is a human body, the body of a middle-aged man.
[00:03:20] He is barely recognisable; he has been beaten so savagely that his face is unidentifiable. It looks like he's been run over by some kind of heavy vehicle.
[00:03:33] She calls the police. The dead man, they discover, is Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the country's great intellectuals, poets, and filmmakers.
[00:03:45] At almost exactly the same time as she files the report, the news goes out on the national broadcaster: Pier Paolo Pasolini found dead.
[00:03:58] In a country not generally known for its bureaucratic efficiency, it seems slightly suspicious that the death is announced at almost the exact moment of the body's discovery.
[00:04:11] And this is far from the only unusual aspect to this story.
[00:04:16] Now, to understand why so few people accept the official story of how he died, we first have to understand who he was.
[00:04:27] Pasolini was born in March, 1922, in Bologna, in the north of Italy.
[00:04:34] This, as the history buffs among you may know, was just a few months before Mussolini's March on Rome, and Italy falling to fascism.
[00:04:45] And fascism, both his experience living under it in his adolescence, and under the relics of fascism after it fell, well, it would permeate everything: his personal life, his political views, his philosophy, and his work.
[00:05:04] Pasolini was a creative, an idealist, someone who started writing poetry at the age of seven. He took great joy in natural beauty, in the variety of human experience.
[00:05:21] This, as you might imagine, put him at odds with the entire philosophy of fascism.
[00:05:29] One of the defining principles of Italian fascism was the unification and standardisation of everything.
[00:05:39] Mussolini believed this was particularly important because it would create a sense of national unity.
[00:05:47] Italy, remember, had only become a unified country in 1861, sixty years earlier. Before then, the Italian peninsula had been a patchwork of kingdoms and territories, each with its own laws, its own traditions, its own culture, and its own language.
[00:06:09] For many Italians, standard Italian was still more a written, official language than the language of daily life.
[00:06:19] Most people spoke their regional dialect. If you put a farmer from the Dolomites, in the north east of the country, together with a shepherd from Sicily, they would have barely been able to understand one another.
[00:06:34] The fascist regime tried its utmost to change this.
[00:06:39] Mussolini launched what he called the bonifica linguistica. Foreign words were expelled from public spaces. Dialects were stigmatised in schools. The state radio was in a standardised, centralised Italian.
[00:06:58] To a young Pasolini, this was an assault on everything he believed in: uniqueness, individuality, the beauty of variety.
[00:07:10] And this variety was something he was acutely aware of.
[00:07:15] His mother came from Friuli, a largely agricultural region in the far north-east of Italy, near the border with what was then Yugoslavia. He had lived there as a child, visiting the small farming villages where she had grown up.
[00:07:33] And in those villages, he had heard Friulano, the local dialect.
[00:07:40] He couldn't speak Friulano himself, but there was something about it that seemed to draw him in. He ended up writing poetry in Friulano, and his first poetry collection was published entirely in Friulano, this quite obscure dialect spoken mainly by peasants.
[00:08:03] And apart from the linguistic vandalism he felt the fascists were pursuing, fascism affected him in other, dare I say, more serious ways.
[00:08:16] His younger brother, Guido, had joined the partisans, the resistance fighters against fascism.
[00:08:24] And in February 1945, with the war almost over, Guido was killed. He was not killed by the Germans, or by the fascists. He was killed in a massacre carried out by a rival partisan faction.
[00:08:42] Pasolini blamed the fascists for dragging Italy into the war in the first place. But he also blamed the left, whose ugly infighting had left his brother dead. This is important, as it foreshadows Pasolini not really feeling at home in any traditional political category.
[00:09:03] Still, after the war, Pasolini joined the Italian Communist Party, as the clear opposite to fascism.
[00:09:12] He was an active local member: he organised peasants, attended rallies, and wrote for party publications.
[00:09:20] He was, for the first and last time in his life, a semi-conventional political creature, a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party.
[00:09:31] But it did not last.
[00:09:34] In September 1949, at a local festival in a village, he was accused of having been involved in a sexual encounter with several teenage boys. He was charged with corruption of minors and public obscenity.
[00:09:52] He was later acquitted.
[00:09:54] But the damage was done, and the scandal, and the stigma around his sexuality, would follow him for the rest of his life.
[00:10:04] He was fired from his job and kicked out of the Italian Communist Party. The official statement spoke of "deleterious influences" and "bourgeois degeneration."
[00:10:17] He packed his things, and in January 1950, he moved to Rome with his mother.
[00:10:24] Now, at first, Rome was not kind to them.
[00:10:29] They arrived with very little money. Pasolini worked whatever jobs he could find: private tutoring, writing small commissions, and bit parts as an extra in films.
[00:10:42] He and his mother lived in cheap accommodation on the outskirts of the city, in the kind of neighbourhoods that you won't find on a postcard.
[00:10:52] These were called the borgate, and they were the poor suburbs of Rome, often grey, dusty places without proper sanitation or services.
[00:11:04] These were not places that young, university-educated intellectuals tended to frequent, but Pasolini felt differently.
[00:11:14] While others saw misery and simplicity, he found a kind of vitality. A rawness, a directness, a resistance to the flattening forces of modern Italian life.
[00:11:30] The young men who idled on the streets spoke in thick Roman dialect. They had their own codes, their own dark humour, their own beauty.
[00:11:41] He wrote two novels about them. Both scandalised the literary establishment. And both sold very well.
[00:11:50] And then he turned to film.
[00:11:53] Now, this episode would be hours long if we went into every single one, but suffice it to say, his films were controversial. They ruffled more than a few feathers, and he was prosecuted for nearly all of them.
[00:12:09] Obscenity. Blasphemy. Contempt for religion.
[00:12:13] He was never convicted, but each one brought him new enemies.
[00:12:19] Many in the Catholic Church despised his work, as did many on the right.
[00:12:26] And in 1968, he did something that cost him most of his remaining allies on the left.
[00:12:34] That spring, students across Italy — and across much of Europe — had been rioting.
[00:12:42] In Rome, there had been a violent clash between students and police at a place called Valle Giulia.
[00:12:51] You might have expected Pasolini to have sympathised with the students. After all, they were traditionally associated with the left, and the police were traditionally associated with the right.
[00:13:03] But Pasolini came out in sympathy not with the students, but with the police.
[00:13:11] He described the students as spoiled and bourgeois, children of wealthy families playing at revolution. The police, on the other hand, were young men who had grown up in poverty and joined the police because there was no alternative.
[00:13:30] For all their talk of revolution, the students had the same instinct as the fascists they claimed to oppose: they wanted everyone to think the same way, and they were ready to turn on anyone who didn't.
[00:13:45] He called it left-wing fascism.
[00:13:49] And moving into the 1970s, he became increasingly vocal about what he saw as the cultural catastrophe of his beloved country.
[00:14:01] In the two decades after the war, the Italy Pasolini had grown up in had changed with remarkable speed. The economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s had brought industry, television, rising wages, and mass consumption.
[00:14:20] By almost any conventional measure, most Italians were better off than they had ever been.
[00:14:28] Yet to Pasolini, things had never been worse.
[00:14:34] For all its brutality, he said, fascism had never truly remade ordinary Italians. It had demanded their obedience, but not their souls.
[00:14:47] Consumer capitalism, television, advertising, the ideology of consumption: these had achieved what Mussolini never managed.
[00:14:57] They had flattened Italy. They had eroded the regional cultures, the local dialects, the particular identities that made each part of the country different from every other.
[00:15:10] In their place had come a single, homogenised, nationally standardised way of being.
[00:15:19] He called this the new fascism: it wasn't the fascism of uniforms and rallies, the fascism of Mussolini. This was a fascism that worked through pleasure and desire rather than coercion.
[00:15:35] And it was not only consumer culture that Pasolini was attacking.
[00:15:40] In November 1974, he published an article that became immediately notorious. It was called "Io so".
[00:15:50] "I know."
[00:15:52] In it, he wrote that he knew who was responsible for the political violence of the previous decade: the bombings, the assassinations, the "strategy of tension" that had killed dozens of people, the "Years of Lead", which you might remember from our mini-series at the end of last year.
[00:16:13] "I know," he wrote, "but I have no evidence. Not even clues."
[00:16:20] In this article, he claimed to know exactly who was responsible, who was pulling the strings, yet admitted he had no proof.
[00:16:30] Whatever he actually knew, the article made him powerful enemies.
[00:16:35] And by this point, Pasolini was almost impossible to categorise: too communist for conservatives, too conservative for communists, too religious for secular intellectuals, and too scandalous for the religious. An openly homosexual man in a still religiously conservative country.
[00:16:58] Now, we must move forward towards the evening of the 1st of November, All Saints' Day, and the last evening of Pasolini's life.
[00:17:09] He had recently finished a film called "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom".
[00:17:16] It is the most extreme and deliberately unwatchable film he ever made.
[00:17:22] It was loosely based on a work by the Marquis de Sade, and set in the final months of Mussolini's Republic of Salò in 1944.
[00:17:35] In it, four powerful men abduct eighteen teenagers, take them to an isolated villa, and then subject them to systematic torture, rape, and murder. It is a film about absolute power, about what a ruling class does to those it controls when it believes it will never be called to account.
[00:17:59] Earlier that year, in August, something had happened to those film reels. A theft. Reels from Salò were stolen, and this being 1975, there were no hard drives or reusable backups.
[00:18:16] The thieves demanded a ransom.
[00:18:19] Pasolini refused to pay and instead had the affected scenes reshot.
[00:18:26] But he still wanted them back. Among the missing footage was a scene in which Pasolini himself appeared, dancing. He was desperate to get it back.
[00:18:39] Now, the reason to mention this is because one theory has it that the reason Pasolini went to Ostia on the night of his murder was to get these stolen reels back, and he somehow walked into an ambush.
[00:18:57] To this day, it is unclear exactly what happened to him on the night of 1st November, who killed him, and why.
[00:19:08] Pelosi, the 17-year-old who was found speeding in his car, told his version of events when he was formally questioned after his arrest.
[00:19:19] He said Pasolini had approached him and a group of friends outside a bar near Termini station, and asked if anyone wanted to "fare un giro".
[00:19:31] Now, this expression is actually quite a hard thing to directly translate into English, but is something like "to go for a ride".
[00:19:42] And coming from Pasolini to a group of young men hanging out near the train station late at night, there would have been an implied sexual connotation.
[00:19:54] Pelosi, who was a street kid and prepared to do whatever was necessary to make some money, well, he took him up on the offer and got into the car.
[00:20:05] Pelosi told the older man that he was starving, so the pair went for a late-night meal, with the young man having a bowl of pasta and then a slice of chicken, and Pasolini just drinking a beer.
[00:20:20] Then, Pasolini drove him out to Ostia, on the coast, around 30 kilometres from Rome.
[00:20:27] When they arrived, Pasolini requested sexual acts from him that he did not want to do.
[00:20:34] There was an argument. Pasolini struck him first with a stick, he said.
[00:20:39] Pelosi then grabbed a wooden board and fought back.
[00:20:44] Somehow, the pair were outside the car at this point. Pelosi then ran back to the car and drove away, trying to escape. He says he ran over Pasolini's body by accident as he drove off.
[00:21:00] A sexual encounter gone horribly wrong. Nothing more.
[00:21:05] Now, there are more than a few problems with this story.
[00:21:10] The first is Pasolini himself. He was lean, athletic, and experienced in karate. Pino Pelosi was a skinny seventeen-year-old.
[00:21:23] In a straight fight between the two of them, it is hard to see how Pelosi would have come out on top.
[00:21:31] The second problem is Pasolini's injuries. He had multiple broken bones, crushed ribs, and his body had been run over repeatedly by a car. The injuries simply didn't tally with what Pelosi said happened, that he had been hit by a wooden board.
[00:21:51] The third problem is Pelosi himself. When the police stopped him that night, he was almost unmarked. There were none of the cuts or bruises you would expect on someone who had just fought a grown man to the death, and not a single trace of Pasolini's blood on his clothes.
[00:22:12] The fourth problem is the timing.
[00:22:15] When Pelosi was arrested at 1:30 in the morning, the police went to Pasolini's apartment and told his family the car had been stolen. At least, that was the official version.
[00:22:28] At 6:30 AM, the body was found, and at that exact moment, Italian state radio broadcast the news of the murder.
[00:22:37] This suggests that someone had that information before the official discovery of the body, and had held it until the moment it could appear to have come from the scene.
[00:22:50] Who knew what, and when, has never been answered.
[00:22:56] There are other questions too. Why was Pelosi so desperate to inform the police about the ring, a ring that would directly implicate him in the murder? And friends say that this ring never left Pelosi's finger, so it seemed a little suspicious, convenient, even, for it to be found right next to Pasolini's lifeless corpse. As if the young man was being deliberately set up.
[00:23:26] And there is more to suggest that Pelosi was not alone that night, or even there at all.
[00:23:33] The owners of the restaurant where Pasolini had his last meal said the young man at his table did not match Pelosi's description.
[00:23:42] And on the morning the body was found, a local man told a journalist on the scene that he had seen four or five people around Pasolini that night. They massacred that poor man for half an hour, he said. He cried mamma, mamma, mamma.
[00:24:01] It seemed to be a pretty damning witness statement, but after the statement and the man's identity were made public, he refused to say another word.
[00:24:13] Pelosi was convicted in 1976, but the judge wasn't convinced by his story either, writing, "the record overwhelmingly shows that on that night Pelosi was not alone."
[00:24:28] Now, Pelosi stuck to this story, for a while at least.
[00:24:33] But in 2005, 30 years later, he retracted his confession.
[00:24:41] He said that he had driven to Ostia with Pasolini, but they had been ambushed by a group of men, three, perhaps even five of them.
[00:24:52] Men he described as neo-fascists, with southern Italian accents, who had beaten Pasolini while screaming insults at him, calling him a dirty communist. Pelosi had taken the blame, he claimed, because they had threatened his family.
[00:25:11] And indeed, in 2014, DNA analysis of the clothes Pasolini was wearing that night found traces from at least three separate individuals.
[00:25:25] As for who those individuals were and who sent them, that is where it's easy to go very deep down different rabbit holes.
[00:25:35] Investigators have pointed towards the Banda della Magliana, a powerful criminal organisation with documented ties to far-right extremism and to a secret network called Propaganda Due — P2 [P-Two] for short.
[00:25:52] In other words, he was killed either by right-wing extremists or by mysterious puppet masters linked to the P2 Masonic lodge.
[00:26:03] There's also the theory that he was murdered because of what he was about to publish in an unfinished novel called Petrolio, or "Oil", which spoke of government and corporate corruption.
[00:26:18] And indeed, when it was recovered after his death, the manuscript had a missing section, a section which some have speculated contained politically sensitive material.
[00:26:31] Or was it simply a robbery gone wrong? A group of criminals trying to dispossess a man of his belongings, a strong man who had fought back, and it had ended in tragedy?
[00:26:44] For what it's worth, in December 2022, the Italian Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission concluded that major criminal gangs, including the Banda della Magliana, may have been involved in the murder, and noted serious failures in the original investigation.
[00:27:06] The commission said it was unlikely the perpetrators would ever face justice.
[00:27:13] And when Pino Pelosi died in 2017, the chances of the truth coming to light became even slimmer.
[00:27:22] As of today, the case remains officially unsolved.
[00:27:27] Fifty years on, the man who never fit a single category has a death that doesn't fit one either.
[00:27:34] Italy has been arguing about it ever since, and is no closer to an answer.
[00:27:42] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Pier Paolo Pasolini.
[00:27:46] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:27:50] This period of Italian history is a veritable treasure trove of these sorts of mysteries, and if you enjoyed this one, I'd recommend our mini-series on the Years of Lead, which is episodes 582 to 584, episode 147, about the murder of Roberto Calvi, and episode 63, about the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.
[00:28:15] And if you are an Italian speaker, there is an entire drama podcast series called Feroce - L'ultima Notte di Pasolini, which is very good, and goes into the story in ways we didn't have the time to do today.
[00:28:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
