BLINDSPOT interview with Simona Zecchi (November 26, 2024)
Fifty years have passed since the brutal murder of the famous Italian intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini. The lifeless body of Pasolini was found in a pool of blood and mud on a beach in Ostia, near Rome, on November 2, 1975.
In this interview with Blindspot, Simona Zecchi, an independent investigative journalist, tells us about the results of an investigation that led her to conclude that the commonly adopted version of the crime was wrong and that Pasolini was ultimately murdered to silence his journalistic work that denounced responsibility for the wave of attacks that swept Italy in those years.
To date, only one person has been convicted for Pasolini’s assassination: Giuseppe Pelosi, a 17-year-old prostitute, sentenced in April 1976 to nine and a half years in prison. For a long time, the only hypothesis favored at the time by judges, the police, and most of the media, became the widespread opinion about that bloody assassination: Pasolini was murdered by Pelosi after a sexual intercourse that degenerated into homicide.
Although a possible involvement in the crime of members of the Christian Democratic Party and far-right movements has progressively emerged, no other convictions were handed down by the courts. And if the crime perpetrated on the night of November 1-2, 1975, had a sexual context, especially a homosexual one, that was enough to keep the Italians away from the issue.
In her book entitled “Massacre of a Poet” (published by Ponte alle Grazie on October 2015), Simona Zecchi dismantled point by point the version that had become established in general opinion. Her work based on the methodical analysis of numerous photos and unpublished documents, testimonies, archives, and judicial investigations, reconstructs step by step the chronology and underlying motives of this assassination.
It was a political, premeditated assassination, Simona Zecchi says. Pasolini didn’t go to Ostia to have sex with Giuseppe Pelosi, but because he was led to believe he could recover the stolen reels of his film “Salo and the One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom,” released after his death. And the intention was to put an end to the opinion articles he was writing in the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera.
With the opinion article “I know”, published in Corriere della Sera on 14 November 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini stuck a stick in the hornet’s nest, saying that he new who were the masterminds beyond the wave of terrorist acts that shook Italy in the Years of Lead, from 1968 to 1982, and which became known as the “strategy of tension”, aimed at creating a situation of widespread fear among the population.
During the Years of Lead far-right neo-fascist extra-parliamentary groups, far-left Marxist groups, and state intelligence agencies committed both far-left and far-right incidents of political terrorism, marked by a wave of bombings, kidnappings, arson, and assassinations.
The coalition of forces responsible for those incidents of political terrorism and violent clashes aimed at destabilizing the country felt that Pasolini would end up finding the evidence he then claimed not to have and decided to kill him before it would happen.
BLINDSPOT interview with Simona Zecchi (November 26, 2024)
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
SIMONA ZECCHI: Well, first off, what I did was to do like a tabula rasa on everything was said and written about that murder, also considering what was said and written and discovered until then, which is 2015, the date of my first book publication, Massacro de un Poeta, Massacre of a Poet, which was also translated into Spanish in 2023. This book was the first book that brought into light some very unknown documentation, both on the criminal side of the facts, which means, like for example, detailed facts that could be put under investigation back then and afterwards in the 2000s, as well as documentation related to the political side of the story, which until 2015 was unpublished, was never published, were never made known, both by the family and by the judiciary side of the institutions. My work was that to develop, to follow up a kind of, let’s say, of course, in smaller terms, Gramsci’s kind of method, which started off from the details, the small details, until the bigger ones.
And along through this kind of work, once I discovered that some of the tracks were not enough to prove something, I discarded them. So this was mainly to explain my kind of method, investigative method, abductive one, we can say. According to this kind of method, I discovered many things, like for example, that Pelosi’s trousers were not clean and were full of other DNA profiles. That is why the, before the trousers went to the medical doctors who had to examine them together with other tools and other objects of that night, they were, the tracks of the other, of other blood’s DNAs were cancelled before they arrived to the doctor.
And the doctors, as one of them also witnessed to me, were chosen by their ideological conception, which is a right and a right side ideological, let’s say, position. This was told to me by one of them later in the years, because I asked him, and he said, “yes, you’re right. And when Aldo Mauro’s brother came over as the president of the magistrates of the first grade, we were afraid about what could be the results of the trial, because we wanted the contrary”. So this was very important. He died, but I wrote it down, black and white, and I have the registration of that interview, which was made in 2013 or 14.
A lot of many other details and facts were discovered, and I tried to see whether they could be valid ones. For example, an interview I made to the main military responsible for the far-right movement back in the 70s, whose name was, because he died in 2021, Pierluigi Concutelli. He was the main figure of the Movimento Ordine Nuovo, the military side of the New Order intellectual side, which was also involved in the “strategy of tension” years.
There were some tracks and some witnesses who told me about his involvement. So once he was out from the prison in 2011, I could ask him to be interviewed for an article on Il Fatto Quodidiano in 2014. And even though he denied his involvement, every time I showed him the facts, the prints on Pasolini’s back, for example, or other kinds of facts which could be conceived as close to an action made by a far-right movement on Pasolini that night, every time he lowered his head and his eyes. And I said, yeah, he was still alive, and the investigation, the new investigations on Pasolini were still open at the time, but the magistrates, the prosecutors didn’t want to listen to him.
So that is why I say there’s no political will. But not just from the right side, even from the left side.
BLINDSPOT: There are some saying that the reason why they wanted to kill him was what he would be publishing in his writings of that text he didn’t complete and was posthumously published, “Petrolio”, right? What were your conclusions? Do you think this could be the reason?
SIMONA ZECCHI: Pasolini, back at the time, right before he was murdered, he was writing, he was a very never-ending writer. I mean, he wrote a lot. He was not just writing the novel “Petrolio”, or “Oil”, as it was translated in the US in 1992.
He also wrote, journalistically speaking, on Il Corriere della Sera, which is still another important bourgeois newspaper today. And it was back then already with the same importance. Since 1973, until his death, he was writing very harsh articles on the strategy of tension, on the use of the CIA and the mafia in Italy of their actions, and on the political disaster we were, the country was heading towards with the Christian Democrats’ power. And the, let’s say, unguiltiness of the PCI, the Communist Party, but at the same time, his unwillingness to do something about it.
And that was written, black and white, on his most famous article, “Io so”, “I know”, known as “I know”, le prove, the evidence. He wrote it in 1974, November 1974. One year, exactly one year before his death.
But since that article, until his death, one year more passed. And during that year, many things happened. And I investigated those things.
He was, the urgency of the journalistic writing was all focused on Il Corriere della Sera, not on “Petrolio”. “Petrolio” had to be, according to what he stated, and what it was his intentions, a summa literaria of the political power between 1960s and 70s, but under a literary form.
Of course, “Petrolio” is a very important work, work of art, which also deals with the power and the “strategy of tension” years, and the oil power of the time, most of all, until 74. But it was not the tool through which he was going to denounce, to write, and in capital words, what was going on. The real work was a journalistic one, and the urgency was on Il Corriere della Sera, where between March 1975 and October 1975, he was writing on the various massacres which had taken place in Italy, like the Piazza Fontana massacre, and other kinds of massacres.
BLINDSPOT: One man responsible or accused and condemned for that is in prison, it’s by himself he contacts Pasolini?
SIMONA ZECCHI: Yeah, his name was Giovanni Ventura. He died in 2010 in Argentina, where he escaped since his capture for the Piazza Fontana massacre in 1978. Giovanni Ventura was held in prison in Bari, in the south of Italy, when he started out his communication, written communication, through letters with Pier Paolo Pasolini. These letters spanned through March, April, May, like six months, from the 8th of March 1975 until the 8th of October 1975.
And those months were also the very months in which Pasolini wrote on Il Corriere della Sera about the trial that had to be made against the Christian Democrats, about the “strategy of tension” years, about the massacres. This is very important to say. What I discovered was he was sent this kind of dossier by Giovanni Ventura, which was full of what Ventura knew about the political sectors of the Christian Democrats behind the destabilisation projects.
In fact, in 1974, Pasolini, on his famous piece “Io so”, I know the people’s names, what he states is, I know but I don’t have the evidence. But a long year passes by and those pieces of evidence were sent over to him by Ventura. I found in Ventura’s house, in his archive, a very well-hidden archive. There was also a document dated 16th of October 1975, where Ventura states that he was going to send the material to Pasolini.
And I also found out an affirmation from a poet who was Pasolini’s secretary during the 70s, who was a gay poet and who died of HIV. And in 1995, before he died, he said “Pasolini, two weeks before he died, told me that he received some material”.
I closed the book, Massacro di un Poeta, Massacre of a Poet, which was published twice in 2015 and 2018 and then in Spain. At the end of the book, at the very end, I also published these letters. So they were, it was the first time ever that those letters were published, nor his family, who owns an institutional Pasolini archive in Florence. And those letters were there, were archived or guarded right there.
The family didn’t want the responsibility, according to me, they didn’t want the responsibility of publishing those letters. And I have an email stating that.
BLINDSPOT: We have 50 years after Pasolini’s death. Is it important today?
SIMONA ZECCHI: Of course, it’s very important. Nationally, as far as Italy is concerned, and internationally. I’ll tell you why.
First off, in Italy, there are still many massacres cases, which are still open, judicially speaking. The whole truth is still far from being told. And that is why, according to me, they don’t want to establish the truth on Pasolini’s murder.
Plus, we have a far-right political force here in Italy, now governing the country, who does not want to listen to these kinds of stories anymore, doesn’t want to be, doesn’t want to face up with the responsibilities they had in those years.
