In the early 1970s, the great Italian poet, philosopher, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom) brought to the screen a trio of masterpieces of pre-modern world literature - Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, Geoffrey Chauce The Canterbury Tales, and The Thousand and One Nights (often known as The Arabian Nights) - and in doing so created his most uninhibited and extravagant work, which he titled his Trilogy of Life.