The dog who bit everyone

On 2 November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini — poet, filmmaker, novelist, newspaper columnist — was found assassinated on a patch of scrubland near Rome. The seventeen-year-old boy whom he’d brought there for sex the night before was convicted of Pasolini’s murder, but the police investigation was farcically inept, and all the evidence that there were multiple assailants was ignored. Fifty years on, new theories about his assassination keep being voiced. One of the more intriguing is that Pasolini was killed to stop him from publishing Petrolio, the massive roman à clé he was writing in the last few years of his life. 

Petrolio (« petroleum » or « crude oil » in English) is, among other things, an inquest into ENI, Italy’s petrochemical conglomerate, whose charismatic director Enrico Mattei was killed in 1962 when a bomb was planted on his plane. Pasolini’s novel examines the shady business empire amassed by Mattei’s deputy and then successor Eugenio Cefis. It suggests that Cefis hired the Sicilian Mafia to kill his boss. Did Cefis also order Pasolini’s murder to keep him from publishing his exposé? The latest critical edition of Petrolio, which came out in Italy last summer, says « probably ».¹

One problem in identifying Pasolini’s assassins has always been: who didn’t want him dead? Pasolini was a dog who bit everyone: in his writings of the 1970s, he repeatedly named and excoriated all the institutions and individuals he believed had helped turn contemporary Italy from a place of living traditions to what he called a hollow « penitentiary of consumerism ».

Several days after his assassination, Il Corriere della Sera published on its front page Pasolini’s last essay. His piece demanded that the entire leadership of the Christian Democratic party (which had governed Italy almost continuously since World War II in a US-dictated arrangement designed to keep out the Communists) be put on trial. Its crime? « Genocide » — cultural, political, ecological. 

Pasolini was 53 when he was murdered. He’d just completed his film Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom, an allegory of contemporary Italian power, in which a bishop, a judge, a banker, and an aristocrat kidnap a bunch of girls and boys and torture them to death in grisly acts of sexual sadism, coprophagy and religious profanation. (Salò invariably appears on critics’ lists of the ten most disgusting films ever made, though everyone agrees it must be seen.) Still unfinished at his death was Petrolio, this novel that Pasolini deemed in an interview the « summa of all my experiences, all my memories » — a novel that is part Salò, part newspaper-essay run mad. 

Petrolio tells the story of Carlo Valletti, a man who splits in two. It’s a Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde division, though which man is good and which is demonic isn’t so clear. 

Carlo 1, a progressive Catholic from the Northern bourgeoisie, is an engineer at ENI — the petroleum company; Carlo 2 is his low-life double. Carlo 1 — colorless, flabby — represents careerism in all its mediocrity; Carlo 2, on the other hand, is ruled by a sexual urge so all-consuming, so transgressive that it amounts in Pasolini’s words to a kind of martyrdom. While Carlo 1 climbs the ranks of ENI, making strategic alliances with the mafiosi politicians and neo-Fascists who represent the new power, Carlo 2 goes home and seduces his own mother, his grandmother, three sisters, the family servant and her underage daughter; he engages in round-the-clock masturbation, haunting train stations and public parks in search of young girls to whom he can expose himself. At a crucial turning-point in the novel, Carlo 2 loses his male genitals and acquires breasts and a vagina, before descending into an underworld of paid sex with young working-class men. When Carlo 2 eventually disappears, Carlo 1, whose body too has metamorphosized from male to female and back to male, gets himself castrated and becomes a holy man. 

I’ve read Petrolio three times since its publication seventeen years after Pasolini’s death — always in Ann Goldstein’s excellent English-language translation (1997), though more recently I’ve been trying to struggle through chunks of the Italian. Sometimes I find myself thrilled by the novel’s caustic wit, its long passages of poetic gorgeousness, its humanist erudition, or by the prophetic clarity of Pasolini’s analysis of post-war capitalism — the cultures it’s destroyed, the kind of societies and humans it is producing; other times I find both the novel and its author-narrator unbearably pompous and hectoring. It doesn’t help that Petrolio is unfinished. The folder Pasolini left at his death contained roughly five hundred pages of numbered notes (appunti), with diagrams, crossings out, repetitions, contradictions, cross-references, lists, and typographical symbols indicating things to be added later. But the problem isn’t only that the novel is unfinished, but that Pasolini intends it to be unfinishable, as if completion were a kind of death. 

Throughout the existing manuscript, Pasolini discusses his plans for Petrolio (also called Vas or « vessel ») in a running conversation with himself and occasionally the reader. The work will be two thousand pages long — four times longer than its current length — and yet will still contain « vast lacunae ». He envisages it as « a critical edition of an unpublished text », of which there will be four or five competing versions — « a monumental work, a modern Satyricon » by a dead author whose identity is contested. It will include letters from this fictional author’s friends disputing the accuracy of the different versions of the manuscript, along with oral histories, songs, dreams, apocrypha. He foresees an entire « critical figurative version » of the work, consisting of the author’s own illustrations, as well as « rare » documentary films and photographs (of these planned photographs, more later). There will also be a slew of actual archival material — newspaper articles, tapes of interviews with witnesses and « high-ranking » officials — material that relates to post-war Italian politics and to ENI, Italy’s semi-private, semi-public petrochemical company whose workings are at the heart of his story.

In addition, as he reminds us throughout the existing manuscript, various sections will be composed in Japanese, others in « the literary neo-Greek used by [the modern Greek poet Constantine] Cavafy. » And: « I do not deny that certainly the best thing would be to invent an alphabet, perhaps of ideographs or hieroglyphs, and to print the entire book that way. » But such an exercise, Pasolini admits, he would find « extreme, yes, but also extremely boring. »

« Extremely boring, » however, is part of the point. Again and again, he insists that Petrolio is not a naturalistic novel offering any of fiction’s customary pleasures. Again and again, he halts his narrative at the entrance to an event his protagonist is attending — a society soirée, a reception at the Presidential Palace, a business lunch — telling us: If you expect me to describe the guests’ clothes, their conversation, the delicious dishes, forget it, I hate money, I hate power, I have no idea what politicians or industrialists talk about and it would bore me to find out, besides, we are in a world where the old conventions of representation (the devices Pasolini used in his fiction of the 1950s and 60s) are no longer adequate to express current-day reality.

His aim, he explains, is not to « write a story but to construct a form » — a form he describes sometimes as a poem, sometimes as a « vortex », « a vast deep lava flow », a « bottomless river ». In one of his more vivid disquisitions, he explains that Petrolio is not « un romanzo a schidionata » — not a novel « on a spit » like a shish kebab, meaning something linear, where one thing follows another — but « un romanzo a brulichio » — « in a swarm » brulichio being a word used to describe a broiling mass of ants.

Yet even at his most doctrinaire, Pasolini is a poet and a visionary, and his text teems with intoxicating evocations of landscape, people, architecture — culminating in the novel’s grand finale, which takes us from a terrorist attack in a Turin train station back in time to the same site’s prehistoric vegetation and forward through the millennia to its dystopian future. 

In December 2025, I went to see Pétrole, French theater-director Sylvain Creuzevault’s stage version of Pasolini’s novel, which had just opened in Paris at the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe. (The play will be touring France and Switzerland this spring and summer.)

Creuzevault is in many ways the ideal director to stage a militantly polemical work whose subject, most critics argue, is power. Like Pasolini, Creuzevault is steeped in what he describes as a « heterodox Marxism ». He’s 43 years old, a former actor who now runs his own theater company. Throughout his twenty-plus years as a stage director, Creuzevault’s constant theme has been the ideologies that have shaped modern Europe: his creations include a revisionist history of the French Revolutionary Terror; an investigation of French fascist intellectuals during World War II; and two glorious and improbable dramatizations of Marx’s Das Kapital. (One of these, Le Capital et Son Singe, which I saw in 2014, is a debate in a Paris dining club that takes place one night during the 1848 uprising.) 

Shortly before Pétrole opened, Sylvain Creuzevault spoke at a French literary festival; the video was posted on YouTube. Balding, with a straggly beard, wearing baggy corduroys and a brown sweater with a hole in the elbow, he looked like an overgrown graduate student. (In fact, he’s a former national handball champion and an adept of Jacques Lecoq’s acrobatically physical school of theater.) His manner was mischievous, provocative — in a recently published book of interviews, Creuzevault’s stream-of-consciousness word-play is so out-of-control it borders on Tourette’s Syndrome.²

That day’s interviewer — Petrolio’s French translator and Pasolini biographer René de Ceccatty — asked him how he « constructed this text ». Creuzevault was silent. Finally, hunched over, staring at the table in front of him, he gave an answer so off-the-wall it left the elderly well-heeled audience visibly uncomfortable. « I’m going to tell you the amount of my taxable income in 2024, » he replied. « It was 35.000 euros. In the years I’ve been making theater, I’ve earned on average about 2.700 a month. » He paused. « I’m pan-sexual, predominately hetero — that is to say, the gentlemen in this room don’t have much to fear from me, though you never know. » (Nervous laughter from the men.) And finally, he concluded, « most of my friends belong to what the police classify as the ‘ultra-gauche’ »: in the French context, a movement that supports revolution — violent, if necessary. 

Class, sexual orientation, political allegiance — there you had him in a nutshell. But why did Sylvain Creuzevault feel compelled to make this avowal? Because what he found so « vivid and organic » in Pasolini, he explained, was the way the Italian « puts his own skin on the table », how he embodies his own politics with such raw and feverish self-exposure. 

Creuzevault is right about Pasolini. One of the many reasons his example is so precious to us today is that he did indeed live his beliefs in his own flesh — which is why the Italian government continually banned Pasolini’s works, charging his books and films either with obscenity or blasphemy no fewer than 34 times (and that’s not including the repeated charges against him for sexual offenses). But the very extremeness of Pasolini’s own example — and, in his own words, the « price » he paid for it — raise the bar high for anyone trying to adapt the poet’s life and work. After seeing Creuzevault’s Pétrole, I found myself wondering whether or not his production had met this challenge of genuinely « putting [your] own skin on the table ». 

Pasolini is a storyteller who favors collections of tales — I’m thinking of his 1970s film adaptations of The Decameron, The Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, or his earlier Uccelacci e uccelini (1966). Petrolio too is such a baggy monster crammed with parables and side-stories told by multiple narrators. Many of these « myths » or « visions » involve a journey, whether a Dantesque journey through circles of hell, or a journey to the East in search of spiritual initiation or plunder. Many involve the interplay between saintliness and sin. There is a parable of a man who thinks he’s sold his soul to the devil to achieve sainthood, only to find the mysterious buyer was God. Other parables address colonialism’s crimes: an English journalist « in a spirit of irony » travels to Khartoum to buy an eight-year-old girl as his sex-slave and then, in a paroxysm of remorse, converts not to Christianity but to Marxism. Another describes a plague that decimates a city in India — a plague that Pasolini attributes to « packets of poisoned food » dropped from the air by « the whites » — an allegory that anticipates Union Carbide’s poisoning of Bhopal by ten years. 

Most of these side-stories Creuzevault strips away to concentrate on what he sees as the novel’s central focus: this period of political violence and intrigue in Italy that began with the 1962 killing of ENI’s director Enrico Mattei. It’s a period when the country was seized by a succession of assassinations of prominent figures and of bombings in public places, and it continued — long after Pasolini’s own murder — until the fall of communism. Some of these atrocities were the work of Italy’s extreme left, but many of the acts pinned on the left, as Pasolini maintained in his newspaper columns and in Petrolio, were in fact false-flag operations instigated by a combination of neo-Fascists, members of the secret service and sub-groups of the Christian Democrats — with help from the Mafia and the CIA.

The aim of this so-called « strategy of tension » was to prove the country was in such danger that only the political right could save it.³ What occurred instead was the collapse of the traditional right-wing and left-wing parties, partly under the weight of the corruption scandals exposed in the early 1990s, and the emergence of a new political order that was far murkier than the old binaries, a matrix of shifting alliances that now governs Italy today. It was Pasolini’s genius, as Creuzevault sees it, to choose Big Oil as the key to understanding this new power. 

Pétrole is billed as « a collective creation ». Creuzevault’s theater company consists of a troupe of actors who work for months, even years on a given text — a process the director calls a « conspiration ». This latest conspiracy features three women and five men, and their performances are stupendous. The play’s set is sometimes an airport runway in the 1960s, lit in the harsh, sodium-drenched black-and-white of a crime reporter’s camera flash; sometimes the kind of semi-urban, semi-rural wasteland that is central both to Pasolini’s art and his own life-and-death.

The action is non-stop zany, gruesome, carnivalesque. Pétrole’s oil-executives creep through a night fog, wearing toy gladiator’s helmets and carrying neon shields bearing ENI’s heraldic yellow-black-and-red insignia of a six-legged fire-breathing dog; there are guest appearances by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan dancing a kind of can-can; an ENI delegation to the courts of various Middle Eastern dictators are harangued for their bumbling neocolonial rapacity — first by the sister of Syrian dictator Hafez Assad and finally by the Emir of Kuwait’s shrewd and shrewish daughter. 

Two different actors incarnate Carlo’s split personalities. Carlo 2 — the engineer’s priapic double — has a plastic penis springing out of his suit trousers that he is constantly caressing, reaching orgasms that seemingly spout not sperm, but oil; the men of power whom Carlo 1 courts wave around even bigger though more flaccid artificial dicks. In the play’s finale — one of its many finales — Carlo 1, who’s been demonically brandishing a massive pair of scissors, undergoes his surgical castration on a bloody operating table. 

Although there are scenes in which all eight actors prance around on stage, most of the play’s action is shown to us via live video stream. The performers are sometimes enclosed in a kind of portakabin, at other times the videographer stands in front of them, blocking them from our view, while their faces are streamed onto a giant screen. It’s an unfortunate choice: the primal magic of theater is of strangers gathering to experience a live ritual — a ritual that still has power, even if you’re looking down at the performers from the top row of an eight hundred-seat auditorium. But given a screen, most of us will slip back into a more familiar distancing passivity — a consumerist passivity that just happens to be one of Pasolini’s bêtes noires.

Petrolio — Pasolini’s Petrolio — is a jeremiad against industrial capitalism, but it’s also a powerful eulogy for the worlds that capitalism has wiped out. 

Chief among them is the rural peasant culture that Pasolini first knew and idolized, growing up in his mother’s home-province of Friuli. This earthy archaic world of regional dialects and traditions was a « reality » that Pasolini accessed through his politics — a blend of Christianity and Marxism not uncommon in twentieth century Italy — and through his love of young field-hands and shepherds. After his move to Rome in the early 1960s, Pasolini found this same « reality » in the street-kids whom he picked up for outdoor sex and games of football and to act in his films — boys who were recent migrants from the agrarian south and who even if they now lived in a Roman slum, still « belong[ed] », as he writes, « to the great world of Masses and tabernacles, of sacred woods and slavery, of poverty and the return of the seasons. » 

But by the early 1970s, Pasolini was beginning to witness a rupture — what he describes as an « anthropological cataclysm ». Consumer capitalism was now so totalizing a force that even human bodies had mutated. Instead of the working-class boys whose bodies he used to fetishize, there’s a new generation of pale neurotic consumers: listless, unisex, petit bourgeois, rejecting any transmission from the world of their fathers.

Petrolio dramatizes this schism between the old and new youth. The freakiest vision of this lost reality comes in Note 55, a scene titled Il pratone della Casilina (the field by via Casilina) where Carlo 2, now with female genitalia, has sex with twenty young strangers in a meadow at night. It’s an uncanny scene, a thirty-page-long « poem ». Pasolini begins by describing the garbage-and-rubble-strewn field with its intoxicating scents of wild fennel and chamomile, the « blond fleece » of its summer grass, the « deep indigo » sky and red moon, the twinkling lights of the surrounding buildings. He then takes us through the roster of twenty boys who are all lined up waiting to have sex with Carlo 2 in front of their friends. (In fact, the manuscript covers only ten out of the twenty.) 

These teenaged masons or bakers or garage-mechanics are each summoned up as lovingly as a warrior in Homer’s Iliad, with Pasolini invoking his name, birthplace, parentage, his coloring and hair, his oil-stained overalls or neatly patched trousers. Above all, Pasolini pays tribute to the size, tint, scent and texture of each boy’s cock. It’s Carlo 2’s passion for each one that gives the poem its emotional power — the ecstasy of longing, pride, and pain he experiences in performing the « holy » task of fellatio, a desire so overwhelming, so purifying, it’s become « tragic », a martyrdom, turning him into these boys’ « silent slave ». 

There’s an odd twist to the scene’s premise, because — although Carlo 2 at this point has a woman’s body and is pretending to be a prostitute — in fact he’s the one who’s paying the boys to let him service them. What Pasolini is thus describing is the kind of brief fugitive encounter between a richer, older, more powerful homosexual man and a poor heterosexual boy that he himself sought and repeated every day and night of his life, that he himself lived and died for. 

Creuzevault, who declared himself stumped by how to stage this scene, converts it to a breathless monologue by Carlo 2, whose close-up face we view on screen. It’s a narrative strategy that recalls the « mille tre » aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni — another tale of sex addiction — when Don Giovanni’s conquests are enumerated to us by his man-servant Leporello in a country-by-country inventory of how many chambermaids, shopgirls and countesses his master has seduced. But Mozart’s opera is a comedy — a dark comedy — and the effect of transposing Carlo 2’s « martyrdom », this uncanny scene in a dark field, to a video monologue somehow diminishes both its tragic exaltation and its violence. 

Watching Carlo 2’s rapid-fire recital, I found myself trying to imagine how Pasolini might have staged the twenty boys in the field. One clue comes to us from the photographer Dino Pedriali. Shortly before his death, Pasolini encountered Pedriali, who was then 25 and had grown up in one of Pasolini’s favorite Roman slums. Pedriali, at Pasolini’s direction, took a haunting series of photos of the filmmaker naked in his bedroom — the last photos we know of Pasolini alive.

Pasolini asked Pedriali to collaborate with him on the visual portion of Petrolio. The novel was a roman à clef exposing powerful people, he warned, a top-secret project that ran the risk of jail time and would make them both many enemies. Not even Pasolini’s closest friends were to know. After Pasolini’s murder, Dino Pedriali published a book of his photos of the filmmaker. Pedriali later became known for his nude portraits of young men — more hard-core, down-and-out versions of Pasolini’s street-kids — with close-ups of their penises: a subject that was perhaps inspired by their talks about Petrolio.

Pasolini’s Petrolio — this unfinished and unfinishable masterpiece from beyond the grave — speaks to us on many levels. Creuzevault’s production chooses to focus on the novel’s political relevance today. The night I saw it, the Paris audience responded enthusiastically to the play’s suggested parallels between Italy in the 1970s and contemporary France. France, Creuzevault seemed to be saying, is deploying its own « strategy of tension », with an enfeebled center-right trying (once again) to cling to power by persuading voters that it alone stands between the twin abysses of neo-fascism and an anti-capitalist Left. 

It’s a tactic we are seeing in every Western nation where the far right isn’t actually in power, and it’s tempting to reformulate for our own era and our own particular country Pasolini’s scathing indictment of those institutions — above all, the traditional parties of center-left or right — that haven’t managed to provide a bulwark against populist extremism. 

Today, Pasolini is a global brand: a gay martyr, a prophet of consumer capitalism’s ravages. In Italy, his authority is still more preeminent. His initials, PPP, and his image — the cavernous cheeks, the sunglasses, the quiff of dark wavy hair — have the omnipresence of a fashion icon. So powerful is his posthumous cultural cachet that even the neo-
Fascists are trying to claim him as their own. Last December, at Atreju, the Italian far-right’s annual Christmas festival, there was a panel devoted to his legacy that included two government ministers from Giorgia Meloni’s ruling Party. Some of the speakers seized on those stances of Pasolini’s that were genuinely conservative: his love of regional identities and rural tradition, his opposition to abortion; other speakers — working the strain of far-right contrarianism embodied by a Pim Fortuyn or a Steve Bannon — extolled Pasolini for teaching us « to rediscover the beauty of provocation ». (In an interview in La Stampa, his long-time friend, writer Dacia Maraini felt compelled to remind us that though Pasolini could be read many ways, he was « against every form of power ».)

What gained the most media coverage, however, was the fundamentalist Catholic journalist Camillo Langone’s claim that « Pasolini led the life of a hostage » in the Left’s « gilded prison », that he longed to voice his true conservatism, but feared his friends’ opprobrium. It was a strange claim, not least because Pasolini himself repeatedly sounded the alarm against such « prisons », including the echo chamber in which his progressive bourgeois friends confined themselves. He regularly accused his colleagues — « that wonderful troop of intellectuals, sociologists, experts, and journalists » — of being dangerously cut off from the rest of Italian society, incurious about the lives and motives of the people whose acts of criminal violence or political extremism periodically made front-page news. Pasolini’s own term for the gilded prison in which his friends were immured was « the Palace ». In his most trenchant newspaper essays, published in the months before his assassination, he describes the two « prisons » that define contemporary society. On the one hand, he writes, there is the Palace, inhabited by men of power — the politicians, the bankers, the industrialists, along with the media people who are their courtiers. On the other, there is « the penitentiary of consumerism » in which the poor and lower-middle classes are now confined, a void that leaves young people passive, unhappy, vicious — and vulnerable to what he calls the new « techno-Fascism ». 

All Pasolini’s late art and writings can be read as an instruction manual on how to destroy the walls of these twin prisons — the Palace of Power and the Penitentiary of Consumerism — how to escape into the real. The « real » being the world of rivers, insects, plants, storytelling, dialects, what you can make with your own hands. Fifty years ago, he proposed the abolition of television and of compulsory secondary school, which he felt were turning the young into conformist zombies, a « complex-ridden, racist
bourgeoisie ». Today’s technologies are far more « genocidal » in their destruction of nature and erasure of our humanity, and some of us might want to write our own updates to this manual. Item Number One? Smash all the devices, all the screens, and trust only in the flesh-and-blood. In other words: no theater that can’t be performed in a space so intimate that we can smell the actors’ sweat, where the border between spectator and participant dissolves. 

1. Walter Siti, in his postface to Petrolio, cites Carla Benedetti’s work on the subject, especially her book with Giovanni Giovannetti, Frocio e basta (Effigie Edizioni, Milan 2016), which argues that Cefis was behind both Mattei’s and Pasolini’s killings – a hypothesis that Siti somewhat equivocally agrees to. ↩︎
2. Sylvain Creuzevault, Sérieux-pas sérieux, Conversation avec Olivier Neveux, éditions Théâtrales, 2025. ↩︎
3. In 2000, an Italian parliamentary report — following admissions from long-time Christian Democrat leader Giulio Andreotti — confirmed Pasolini’s claims: « Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structure of United States intelligence » as part of a « strategy of tension » designed to prevent the Communists and Socialists from coming to power. (« US ‘Supported anti-Left Terror in Italy’ », Philip Willen, The Guardian, 24 June 2000). ↩︎