Upon reading “Who Really Murdered Pier Paolo Pasolini?” (Spectrum, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, August 24) I felt that your correspondent Marianna Giusti must have drawn inspiration from one of the Italian film director’s own comments in an opinion piece he wrote for Corriere della Sera in 1974: “I know. But I don’t have evidence. I don’t even have clues. I know because I am an intellectual [ . . . ] who tries [ . . . ] to imagine all that is not known or kept silent.”
Be that as it may, I feel strongly about the need to check facts — the link between Pasolini’s murder and the death of Enrico Mattei, founder of the ENI oil company, in a 1962 aeroplane crash being a case in point.
Pasolini, the article says, had been investigating Mattei for an unfinished book. But the accident and criminal investigations concurred in establishing the cause as “loss of control in flight”, with weather, fatigue and stress as contributing factors, also ruling out the bomb theory, so dear to press and cinema alike.
When prosecutor Vincenzo Calia reopened the case, he claimed on the flimsiest of evidence there was a bomb but closed the case without charging anyone. Had the case gone to court, it would have been shown there never was any evidence.
The account of the death of Guido Pasolini, Pier Paolo’s younger brother, is another glaring distortion. While he did take part in the Christian Democrat Osoppo resistance brigade, it is established that he was killed not by “Yugoslav nationalists”, as you report, but by Communist Garibaldi partisans — and over political disagreements. On February 7 1945 the Garibaldis ambushed the Osoppos, killing some and bringing others before a kangaroo court, including Guido, who was executed on February 12. The episode would always weigh on Pier Paolo.
What Giusti overlooks is why so many are unwilling to accept the Pasolini murder verdict. Simply put, members of the Italian left struggle to reconcile their present Pasolini veneration with their original troubled relationship.
The moralistic Italian Communist party (PCI) famously forced its married secretary-general Palmiro Togliatti to hide his relationship with his much younger Communist party colleague Nilde Iotti.
PCI was also ambiguous on divorce, trying to avoid the referendum to abolish the 1970 law introducing it. This made it attractive to downplay homosexual dynamics in favour of the “usual suspects”. In fact, there is no mystery about Pasolini’s expulsion from the PCI for “moral indignity”.
The report by the PCI’s own newspaper pointedly mentioned André Gide as code for homosexuality.
Professor Gregory Alegi
LUISS University, Rome, Italy
