Pier Paolo Pasolini

Italian writer, filmmaker, poet, and intellectual (1922–1975)

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Lived 1922–1975, aged 53Italy

Italy DirectorsMovie Director

Wikipedia
78 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1922–1975
Aged 53
Known for
Salò, or the 120 Days …
1976

Summary

Updated 2026-06-10

The Italian filmmaker and Marxist intellectual who turned sacred texts and medieval bawdry into visceral cinema, then pushed further into territory so extreme it still divides opinion — before his unsolved murder on a Roman beach in 1975 became a wound Italy keeps reopening.

Biography

About

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born 5 March 1922, a poet and openly gay man who embraced Marxism after World War II and began excoriating what he saw as the consumerist rot eating Italian culture from within. He brought that fury to film: The Gospel According to St. Matthew in 1964, then the Trilogy of Life — The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights — juxtaposing folklore with graphic sexuality. His final work, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, remains one of cinema's most unsparing examinations of power and degradation. On 2 November 1975, he was abducted, tortured, and killed at Ostia; rec…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini

said1966

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

— Interview in Film Culture, no. 42 (1966), p. 101.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

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