An African Oresteia : Field Notes on Pasolini's Appunti per un' Orestiade africana

rome, 1975 A beach in Ostia, just outside of Rome, was the scene of a grisly killing in 1975. The victim was Pier Paolo Pasolini, a one-time schoolteacher, who went on to become one of Italy’s most important public intellectuals. Pasolini was many things to many people—poet, translator, staunch advocate for his native Friulian dialect, semiotic theorist, journalist, social critic, political activist, novelist, and, ultimately, a filmmaker. Pasolini’s corpse had been badly mutilated and was hardly recognizable. His skull had been crushed with a wooden plank and, according to the coroner’s report, he had been kicked repeatedly in the scrotum with such vehemence that his groin area was black and grotesquely distended. Pasolini’s attackers then drove over his body multiple times with his own Alpha Romeo GT. A seventeen-year-old hustler and convicted felon named Giuseppe Pelosi (nicknamed “Pino la Rana,” or “Joey the Frog”) was charged with the murder and initially confessed to the crime. Pelosi served nine years. He was released from prison in 1984, but he retracted his confession in 2005, claiming that he did not kill Pasolini, but had taken the fall because certain men with Sicilian accents had threatened to hurt his family. From the outset of the investigation, police reports indicated that Pelosi’s story—that Pasolini had picked him up for sex at the Stazione Termini and that their transaction had turned vi-