In Salò, his last and most controversial film, Pasolini explores the relationship between fascism and sadism: “The whole film,” he wrote, “with its monstrous, almost unspeakable atrocities, is offered as a huge Sadean metaphor for the Nazi/Fascists' ‘detachment' in their ‘crimes against humanity.'” Pasolini transposed de Sade's novel 120 Days of Sodom from the eighteenth century to 1944, when a short-lived fascist puppet government was set up in Salò, in Northern Italy. Four fascists-a duke, the president, a magistrate, and a bishop-bring to a remote villa a crew of handsome soldiers and a number of beautiful adolescent boys and girls kidnapped from the town. They proceed to act out their sexual perversions on the young captives. Pasolini portrays these scenes in stark detail, maintaining a kind of distance, a false or emotionless quality that may be the most unbearable thing about the film.