Giovanni Landi, Pier Paolo Pasolini – Assassinio di un intellettuale scomodo, Corriere della Sera (RCS Media Group), “Grandi delitti nella storia” series, no. 10, edited by Barbara Biscotti.

Here is an excellent book, one you read straight through in a single sitting, perhaps with a necessary pause to get past the feeling of unease that empathy stirs after the chapter on the crime. The merits of Landi’s book are at least four.

The first has to do with the narrative organisation of the many precise materials he draws on. The life of Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Victim) is set right at the centre of a reconstruction that opens with a Prelude and, indeed, with The Crime, and closes with The Guilty, that is, the analytical description of the figures caught up in the massacre of the poet-writer-director and in the long, unsatisfactory judicial process.

The author’s second merit lies in having described, with absolute simplicity and sober intellectual honesty – in a word, with normality – Pasolini’s homosexuality and the practices bound up with it, which stirred so much hatred in his merciless detractors.

The third lies in the well-documented reconfirmation (should there have been any need of it) that, in controversial cases, the “judicial truth”, established through verdicts, almost never corresponds to the “real truth” in all its actual complexity. Giovanni Landi amply demonstrates this, treating with great meticulousness every facet of the legal proceedings that followed the murder (or better still, as the title has it, the assassination).

The fourth is having put forward once more a portrait of Pasolini that foregrounds his “testimony of life” rather than the “ideological” aspects of his thought. This emphasis deserves an explanation. The present writer, although he has admired some of the films of Pasolini the director (Theorem more than others) and although he met him in person, and with pleasure, in a game of football, has not always shared the way in which he approached his relationship with modernity. There was – still in the present writer’s view – something “backward-looking” in his nostalgia for “the disappearance of the fireflies”: an opinion that is obviously open to dispute, but which has its place (and is perhaps fitting) in a frank exchange of ideas. Giovanni Landi, however, does better. The Pasolini he describes is the man wholly free in his conduct and in the expression of his own thought, ready to denounce the hypocrisy of society and the games of the powerful even at the risk of his own safety (and his end bears witness to it): in short, a witness to truth in the face of the armoured conformism of both right and left. A man greatly loved by a small band of friends (his mother, his sister, his cousin, Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Alberto Moravia, Laura Betti, Dacia Maraini and a few other intellectuals), but also greatly hated for his extraordinary freedom by a great mass of people incited by important figures who were often acting in bad faith. Landi is able to show us how – sometimes, and certainly in Pasolini’s case – truth expressed in freedom can be genuinely revolutionary.

In short, a very well written book. And, given how well it turned out, we can only wait for further brilliant work from its author.

Roberto Segatori was full professor of the Sociology of Political Phenomena, a teacher of Governance and Public Policy and, for two terms, director of the Department of Institutions and Society at the University of Perugia, where for years he chaired the degree programme in Social Work. From 2006 to 2013 he was national Coordinator of the Political Sociologists of the Italian Sociological Association. He is the author of more than one hundred and thirty scholarly publications.