The film director, writer, and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini was a controversial figure, both in life and in death. His first book, Ragazzi di Vita (1955), about an amoral street urchin, got him indicted on charges of obscenity. His last movie, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), was similarly provocative and obscene. Time magazine would call it “the most controversial film of all time.” And then there was Pasolini’s murder on the beach at Ostia: he was run over multiple times with his own car, burned, and abandoned. Although a young man was convicted of the crime, the case was reopened when further evidence pointed elsewhere, then dropped, unresolved. This exhibition, a major retrospective coordinated by three museums in Rome, marks 100 years since Pasolini’s birth. —Elena Clavarino