The Long Road of Sand

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, 5th March 1922 - Lido di Ostia, 2nd November 1975) was an Italian poet, journalist, film-maker, scriptwriter, actor, songwriter and writer. It is considered one of the major Italian artists and intellectuals of 20th century. Gifted with an exceptional cultural versatiliPhilippe Séclier: Born in 1958, the journalist Philippe Séclier, is now devoting himself to photography and images. In 2001 he published Hôtel Puerto (Images en Manoeuvres edition), a photographic book on harbors and cargo boats. This work has been exhibited in numerours galleries both in France and abroad.Twentieth Anniversary of His MurderPasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car, dying on 2 November 1975 on the beach at Ostia, near Rome. Multiple bones in his body had up to that point been broken and his testicles crushed by what appeared to be a metal bar. His body had been partially burned, the autopsy report revealed, by gasoline after the point of death. It has long been considered to have been a mafia-style revenge killing, extremely unlikely for one person to have carried out. Pasolini was buried in Casarsa, in his beloved Friuli.Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old male prostitute, who was incidentally less physically powerful than the director, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. Twenty-nine years later, on 7 May 2005, he retracted his confession, which he said was made under the threat of violence to his family. He claimed that three people with a southern accent had committed the murder, insulting Pasolini as a dirty communist.Other evidence uncovered in 2005 pointed to Pasolini having been murdered by an extortionist. Testimony by Pasolini's friend Sergio Citti indicated that some of the rolls of film from Salò had been stolen, and that Pasolini had been going to meet with the thieves after a visit to Stockholm, 2 November 1975.Despite the Roman police's reopening of the murder case following Pelosi's statement of May 2005, the judges charged with investigating it determined the new elements insufficient for them to continue the inquiry.