More than 50 years after Pier Paolo Pasolini, the acclaimed Italian film director, poet and novelist, was found bludgeoned to death, the Rome public prosecutor’s office has authorized a new investigation into his death.
Mr. Pasolini, a leftist and openly gay intellectual whose work ranged from the religious to the harshly secular, was 53 when he was murdered under mysterious circumstances. Since Nov. 2, 1975, when a carpenter found his mangled body in a seaside town near Rome, his killing has shocked and baffled Italians.
A 17-year-old escort, Giuseppe Pelosi, said that Mr. Pasolini had picked him up in Rome for sex. Mr. Pelosi confessed to the crime within hours. He was convicted of the murder and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Over the decades that followed the filmmaker’s murder, Mr. Pelosi offered a raft of different versions of his story and then died in 2017. In one version, he had killed Mr. Pasolini alone. In others, he was at the scene with three other men, or at least six other people. On Italian television in 2005, he recanted his confession.
In part because of this changing narrative, Mr. Pasolini’s murder has long aroused suspicions of a cover-up and has been the subject of conspiracy theories. Books, films, newspaper investigations and armchair experts have, at various points, pinned the blame for the killing on organized crime, Italy’s far right and extortionists.
In 2010, at the request of Stefano Maccioni, a criminal defense lawyer fixated on researching Mr. Pasolini’s death, Rome’s public prosecutor’s office opened a new investigation into the murder. It closed that probe after five years.
Mr. Maccioni requested further investigations in 2016 and 2023. Both times, Rome prosecutors shut him down.
Then last November, he tried again. He presented the public prosecutor’s office with a dossier containing new evidence, he told The New York Times on Monday. This evidence pointed to the existence of “a person informed about the facts” whom investigators had not previously questioned, Mr. Maccioni added.
Last week, prosecutors informed him that they had instructed the judicial police to reopen the case. Mr. Maccioni announced the latest investigation on Monday, he said, because it is the anniversary of the discovery of Pasolini’s body 51 years ago.
For the last 18 years, Mr. Maccioni has doggedly pursued the Pasolini case, and he published two books about the murder and investigations related to it.
“There are too many things that don’t add up,” he said.
News that prosecutors reopened the file on Mr. Pasolinis death left Mr. Maccioni “moderately satisfied,” he said.
“Moderate because I know the road is very long,” he said, adding that the evidence he brought, “these micro-fragments of this enormous puzzle,” represented years of work.
“Every time I try to put this dossier away, something pulls me back into it,” he said.
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