On the morning of 2 November 1975, in wasteland outside Rome, a woman noticed something in front of her house. ‘See how those bastards come and dump their rubbish here?,’ she reportedly complained. What she had stumbled on was not rubbish after all, but the body of the Italian film-maker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini, beaten beyond recognition and run over by his own Alfa Romeo. Later that day, a 17-year-old Roman rent boy named Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Pelosi confessed to the murder. Was this a homosexual assignation gone fatally wrong or a planned political assassination? All his life, Pasolini had fulminated against the Italian bourgeoisie and its embrace of the Mussolini regime. His presumed killer was found to have contacts in Italy’s neo-fascist underground; 50 years on, the verdict is still open.

Though Pasolini was born in Bologna (in 1922 – the year Mussolini took power), Rome was the city that provided him with material for his greatest books and films. On his arrival in Rome in 1950, he settled in the Jewish ghetto and got a job as a school teacher. From the ‘Christian north’ of Italy, Pasolini believed he had arrived at the ‘pagan’ centre-south, a world whose archaic values were apparently distinct from those of industrial Bologna. His life changed again a year later when, in the summer of 1951, he moved out to Rome’s working-class Ponte Mammolo district on the banks of the River Aniene – an algae-clogged tributary of the Tiber. Pasolini’s sainted exile in the city’s far periphery began here. In those postwar years, the outskirts of Rome retained something of the semi-rural atmosphere of ‘l’Italietta’ (Italy’s little homelands), where migrants from the Mezzogiorno brought with them their own moralities and dialects. In Ponte Mammolo, Pasolini recorded Calabrian, Neapolitan and Sicilian vernacular words with ethnographic exactitude. 

His first great Roman novel, Ragazzi di vita, published in 1955 and translated variously into English as The Ragazzi, The Street Kids, and Boys Alive, recounts the spiral into crime of a group of streetwise teenagers from the last days of the German occupation to the beginning of the 1950s. Riccetto, the novel’s chief anti-hero delinquent, is a Pelosi-like grubby character out of a Caravaggio canvas. Pasolini wrote sections of the novel in Roman dialect (or a highly stylised version of it) in order to remind Italian literature of a language it had largely ignored: it was part of his lifelong resistance to what he called ‘la lingua dei padroni’, the language of the bosses. 

As a poet, Pasolini revived the Italian tradition of nationalist civil poetry, which speaks in personal terms of the country’s politics and history. Le ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci), his 1957 verse masterpiece, was the most important poetry collection to have emerged in Italy since the Second World War. Much of it was written in the style of the 19th-century Italian crepuscular-romantic poets Giovanni Pascoli and Giosuè Carducci, but with the entirely new underworld content that Pasolini had absorbed during his time in Ponte Mammolo. Just as the much-loved Roman vernacular poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli had chronicled the lives of tavern boys and petty thieves in the Risorgimento-era Trastevere district (where a monument to Belli stands today), so Pasolini chronicled the card sharps and prostitutes of the city’s sub-proletarian Testaccio, Ostia and Porta Portese swamplands. In the collection’s title poem, he addresses his ‘civil message’ to the disinherited and damned of postwar Italy while contemplating the resting place in Rome of Antonio Gramsci, the grand theoretician of Italian Marxism, who died in 1937 in a Fascist prison. Close to Gramsci’s heart was the question of a national-popular literature that would incorporate marginalised peoples and their dialects. Pasolini’s epic, history-laden poem seeks to ally Gramsci’s intellectual leftism with a Franciscan Catholicism: blessed are the Italian poor as they are exempt from the unholy Trinity of materialism, rationalism and property. 

Pasolini’s Rome was not an aesthete’s fantasy, but a real place recorded with a cartographer’s eye for street names, bus numbers and tram terminuses. When I lived in Rome in the early 1980s, I set out to explore the borgate (suburban outlying areas) that appear in Pasolini’s work. Almost within earshot of the tourist crowds around the Forum and the Colosseum, I photographed a world of ruined ancient Roman aqueducts and baroque gateways and disused football pitches sprouting poppies. In Testaccio, near Gramsci’s grave in the non-Catholic English cemetery, I found cave-like dwellings hammered out of wooden planks and corrugated iron, where people carried drums of olive oil on their heads, like African villagers. Much of Pasolini’s Rome – a pasticcio of the poetic and the squalid – disappeared when new housing estates overwhelmed the Roman underclass in the 1960s, but enough of it remained. 

The Italian word borgata derives from borgo, ‘village’, though it has come to mean an area of a city that has spilled into the countryside, neither rural nor urban, but a midway zone of council tenements and meadow scrubland, sometimes blighted by crime. Pasolini’s sour-sweet relationship with Rome is not easily understood without some knowledge of the borgate. The periphery of Rome first began to expand in 1925 when Mussolini decreed that the city centre must ‘appear vast, orderly and powerful, as in the days of the first empire of Augustus’. The medieval and Renaissance habitations in the alleys behind St Peter’s, the Forum and the Colosseum were demolished to make way for ‘Mussolini modern’ buildings with Fascist stone-wolf motifs and other faux-Roman insignia. Those made homeless by the demolitions were deported to housing estates on the outskirts. Pasolini’s killer came from the borgata of Tiburtino III, built in 1935 on marshland and periodically flooded by the Aniene.

Pasolini’s Roman cinema, typically, intermingles the sacred with the profane. La ricotta, his 35-minute episode in the collaborative film Ro.Go.Pa.G (1963), unfolds in a bleak urban outback where an American director played by Orson Welles is shooting a movie about Christ’s Passion. Over a tableau vivant inspired by Baroque paintings of the Deposition by Mannerists such as Pontormo and Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, Welles cries out: ‘Get those crucified bastards out of here!’ The Roman who plays the part of the good thief in the film dies from a case of real-life starvation while tied up on the cross under a broiling sun. Visible in the distance behind him are ugly high-rise complexes like great bare concrete dominoes – the reward, Pasolini seems to be saying, for Rome’s booming consumer capitalism, which had flooded the borgate with washing machines, televisions and other trappings of Italy’s newly globalised economy. 

Disillusioned by what he saw as his country’s deepening social malaise, Pasolini became a curiously reactionary figure in the mid 1970s as he decried political and religious cynicism in Italy’s institutions and ruling class. In a series of now infamous newspaper polemics for the Milan-based Corriere della Sera, he attacked divorce, abortion, men’s long hair, offensive advertising (‘Jeans Jesus’), the feminist movement and anything else he felt had undermined the sanctity of his beloved pre-consumerist Italy. Perhaps for these reasons the far right in Italy has today tried to claim Pasolini as an ally. His pauperist Catholicism and broadsides against capitalism align him somewhat with Italy’s anti-corporate populist right. However, Pasolini was an intellectual Marxist: his co-option into a rightist agenda is nonsensical. Pasolini aimed his most ferocious attacks at Italian television, which he believed had flattened Italy’s multifarious dialects into a uniform, standard Italian inflected with Americanisms and consumer-Esperanto. So much so, Pasolini wrote, that if he wanted to remake his first Roman film, the magnificent 1961 Accattone (‘Beggar’), he would not be able to do so, as the spoken dialect in the original had all but disappeared. Pasolini applied the word ‘aphasia’ to the phenomenon.

Try as he might, Pasolini could not escape his public image as the seer-like scourge of Italy’s troubled political life. Olivia Laing’s new novel, The Silver Book, unfolds in Italy at the time of Pasolini’s murder. Pasolini, an Alfa-driving ‘sexy god’ director with dyed black hair, is a key figure in it. He is busy shooting Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom), his last and surely least appealing film. Gone is the Caravaggesque sensory realism and solar vitality of his Roman movies and novels: Salò, a violent essay on the shame of Italy’s Nazi-Fascist past, is the work of a disenchanted man. Pasolini was still at work on the film’s final cut when he met his murderer.