30 years on: the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini
On Sunday 2 November 1975, the renowned Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was found dead outside Ostia, near Rome. I was the one who broke the news to the world.
I was working for Reuters in Rome at the time, and was sitting quietly in the office minding my own business when a colleague from the Italian news agency ANSA, in whose building Reuters was then based, popped in to tell me the news. (In those days, ANSA didn't start up its news service till after lunch on Sundays - happy days!)
I phoned the police in Ostia to check it out, they confirmed what I had been told, and Reuters had the scoop. The police version of events was that Pasolini had picked up a young male prostitute in central Rome, taken him to Ostia for sex, and then the young man had attacked him and run him over in his own car, in which he was arrested some hours later.
But Italy in the 70s was a place rife with rumours. Pasolini was a man of the Left, and a dissident - many on the Left didn't believe the official version of how he met his death and suspected that political, even State-linked, opponents had killed him. As Geoff Andrews recalls in a fascinating piece at :
"Pasolini had made many enemies. In the weeks leading up to his murder he had condemned Italy's political class for its corruption, for neo-fascist conspiracy and for collusion with the Mafia. In articles for Corriere della Sera he had called for Italy's political class to be put on trial."
For a brief time, I was caught up in the maelstrom of rumour and counter-rumour. The investigating magistrate leading the inquiry into Pasolini's murder hauled me in for questioning: he wanted to know who exactly had told me of the film director's death and what they had said. I answered as best I could and heard no more about it.
But 30 years on, Pasolini's legions of admirers still insist that there are more questions that haven't been answered.
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