The Pasolini case

Half a century has passed since the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Roman lawyer Stefano Maccioni, who has been studying the case for over a decade, is now joining Senator Ilaria Cucchi's initiative to open a parliamentary commission of inquiry.

Everything about the artist's murder is obscure, from the official narrative of the crime, with all the twists and turns it took to avoid any evidence that might cast doubt on the police story, to the setting of the events: the heart of the Age of Lead, the Christian Democrats in power, the Vatican, and the hegemony of the United States in post-war Europe. All of them, united, acted together to halt the advance of Enrico Berlinguer's Eurocommunism, which was adapting to a democratic path similar to that which enabled Salvador Allende's triumph in Chile.

In the days leading up to his death in November 1975, Pasolini was finishing his novel "Petroleum" (published by Gallimard in 1992). In it, he denounces the fierce lobbying for control of hydrocarbons in Italy that led to the death of Enrico Mattei, head of the public company that managed them and prevented them from ending up in the hands of the so-called "seven sisters" due to the number of multinational corporations seeking to exploit them. Five of the seven companies were part of the American company Standard Oil. Mattei was replaced by Eugenio Cefis, founder of the powerful Masonic lodge PD (Propaganda Due), present in Argentina from Perón's third administration until the fall of the messianic project of Admiral Massera, another member of the lodge. "Petroleum" is missing a chapter that disappeared from the manuscript of the work just after his death, and Pasolini himself refers to this passage in other parts of his work, which has since been impossible to find.

Just as the Mattei case had to wait years for the first evidence to emerge that the plane crash in which he died was actually an attack, as happened in 1995 when traces of an explosion were found, although there has still been no verdict on this incident, it is increasingly clear that Pasolini's death was not only caused by the young man with whom he had sex that night.

Weeks before the murder, Pasolini wrote in Corriere about the “sudden and lightning-fast” disappearance of fireflies in villages due to pollution.

When the Christian Democrats had been in power for three decades, already in 1975, Pasolini noted that Italy was moving from the "firefly phase" to the "phase of the disappearance of the fireflies." This is not a normal evolution, he points out, but rather a radical change.

Pasolini speaks of a transition of the Christian Democrats from a provincial phase, subject to the Vatican and its basic forms of government, to a transfer of power, with industrialization, that plunged Italy into an economic, ecological, urban planning, and anthropological disaster. In the midst of this transformation, the leadership was artificially renewed, unable to imagine what form the real power would take, which no longer resided in the Church, as it had in the post-World War I.

From this reading, under the metaphor of the fireflies, one can intuit another event we are now witnessing: the slow fading of the Enlightenment, the death throes of the Enlightenment—in short, the dissolution or attempt to bring about the end of modernity. And as Pasolini warned, this is not a simple change but a radical metamorphosis that, rather than a revolutionary leap of democratic advancement, threatens to regress to pre-modernity. That is, a fade to black.

*Writer and journalist.