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PIER PAOLO PASOLINI, who was not just the major filmmaker of his generation in Italy but also the major poet, was murdered on November 1, 1975. How and why he was killed remain subject to fiery debate. The official story, now completely discredited, is that he was killed by a sixteen-year-old boy from the slums who didn't want to have sex with him. Many think he was murdered by the CIA or the Mafia or the Italian Néofasciste. A few believe he engineered his own suicide. The young man who was imprisoned for his death recently recanted his confession and said that three men had found him and Pasolini having sex, and beat the poet to death. The case was reopened recently but quickly closed.
Pasolini was born the year the fascists took power in Italy, 1922, and spent his first twenty-three years living under a system he despised. He later described himself during that time as "an unarmed Partisan/who fought with the weapons of poetry." In the last months of the second World War, his younger brother, Guido, decided to join the Partisan forces fighting the fascists in the mountains near their town of Casarsa in Friuli. Pier Paolo saw Guido off at the train station and gave him a book of poems by Eugenio Montale, the major poet of the previous generation. But the quiet book of poems held a surprise: Pier Paolo had carved out enough space in the book's pages to hide a gun.
It...