Sergio Citti, a close friend and protégé of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, died on October 11, 2005, in Rome. He was 72.
Credited with introducing Pasolini to the denizens of Rome's rough suburbs, Citti acted as dialogue consultant on numerous Pasolini films, having written most of the dialogue for Accattone (1961). This tale of a Roman pimp starred his brother, Franco Citti.
As a director, Citti worked on about a dozen films, including Storie scellerate / Bawdy Tales (1973), Due pezzi di pane / Two Pieces of Bread (1978) with Vittorio Gassman, and Vipera (2001), starring Harvey Keitel and Giancarlo Giannini. He directed his last film, Fratella e Sorello (2005), from a wheelchair.
Citti had repeatedly claimed that Pasolini's 1975 murder was a consequence of his radical political views, and in recent years he had campaigned for the reopening of a probe into his former mentor's death.