On 2 November 1975 the Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was found murdered in slumlands outside Rome. At the age of 53 he had been beaten beyond recognition and run over by his Alfa Romeo. Nobody knows for sure if this was a homosexual assignation gone fatally wrong or a planned political assassination. All his life Pasolini had excoriated the Italian bourgeoisie. His Roman poems and novels of the 1950s combined an intellectual Marxism with a Franciscan Catholicism: blessed are the Italian poor as they are exempt from the unholy Trinity of materialism, consumerism and property.
Olivia Laing’s new novel, The Silver Book, unfolds in Italy on the eve of the murder. Pasolini, a “sexy god” director with dyed black hair, is a key character in it. He is busy shooting what will be his last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a violent meditation on the shame of Italy’s Nazi-Fascist past. Pasolini is still at work on the film’s final edit when he meets his 17-year-old “kid” assassin in a pick-up bar in Rome. The left-wing Pasolini has become a curiously embattled figure; in a series of notorious newspaper polemics he has attacked divorce, abortion, student dissent, men’s long hair, offensive advertising (“Jeans Jesus”), the feminist movement – anything he thought undermined the sanctity of his beloved pre-industrial proletarian Italy.
Nicholas Wade, a young gay Englishman with pre-Raphaelite red “flaming hair”, arrives in this troubled Italy in flight from England, where his sexuality has got him in trouble. He is approached by the (real-life) costumier and set-designer Danilo Donati, who has helped turn Pasolini’s 1974 film Arabian Nights into a visually exquisite work of European orientalist decadence. Danilo is two decades older than Nicholas but a relationship soon develops; they flirt, cook meals together and have sex in a Venice hotel. When not working on the set of Salò, Donati is employed as production designer on Fellini’s Casanova in Cinecittà, the miniature Hollywood built by Mussolini in the Roman countryside. In a series of swift-moving vignettes, Laing conjures Cinecittà’s tawdry make-believe which Fellini loved: empty lots, stray dogs, clown-like apparitions in coloured wigs.
Donati’s flamboyant personality complements Fellini’s exuberantly unreal cinema. Meanwhile Nicholas, a graduate from the Slade School of Art, becomes both Fellini’s apprentice and an unlikely friend of Pasolini’s. In a touching scene, he calls on Pasolini at his home in the smart Fascist-era Roman suburb of EUR. In EUR, where he lives with his adored mother, Susanna, Pasolini types out the furious articles that decry what Laing terms the “terrifying ugliness of unchecked power”. Beneath the roseate flush of Italy’s booming consumer capitalism – the so-called miracolo italiano – Pasolini detects a deepening social malaise. There are rumours of a military coup and the Red Brigades have inflicted class war on the Italian people.
Laing introduces us to Pasolini’s working-class actor friend Ninetto Davoli, who physically resembles the rent-boy murderer Giuseppe “Joey the Toad” Pelosi. At the novel’s conclusion, sensing danger, Nicholas tails Pasolini and Pelosi on his motorino as they drive out at night towards the Ostia seaplane. There, on a filthy blackened beach, Pasolini will meet his end.
In recent years, Salò has taken on renewed life in queer film studies. The British artist and director Derek Jarman – a vital influence on Laing – deeply admired the film. Others see Salò as Pasolini’s most reactionary (and thus least subversive) work; gone is the vitality of his early Roman films Accattone and Mamma Roma: the Pasolini of Salò was a disenchanted man out of step with the Italian reality.
The novelist Italo Calvino (who revered Pasolini as a poet but gave Salò a negative review prior to its posthumous release in 1976) dared to speculate that Pasolini’s murder was the outcome of a “D’Annunzian” hankering after redemption through violence. The proto-Fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s obsession with eroticism and brutality unquestionably left a mark on Pasolini’s work. It may be that Calvino was repelled by what he saw as a D’Annunzian intermingling of the sacred and profane in the extreme Blackshirt violence of Salò. (D’Annunzio happened to be Mussolini’s favourite writer.) Laing has different views; The Silver Book, an absorbing amalgam of fact and fiction, exalts Salò as an admonitory horror masterwork for our times.
The Silver Book
Olivia Laing
Hamish Hamilton, 256pp, £20
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[Further reading: Olivia Laing’s Everybody is a sprawling meditation on freedom and the body]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, No More Kings