Terrorismo italiano

Author: Giovanni Bianconi. With a text by Edoardo Albinati

350 dead and more than 1,000 injured: this is the death toll of Italian terrorism. The roots of this bloodstained chapter in Italy’s history can be traced back to over fifty years ago, in 1968. An agitated year, when the growth of student and worker revolts and violent street clashes revealed the first deep fractures in the country's political equilibrium. A crescendo of attacks was triggered, aimed at feeding a collective fear and which culminated, on 12 December 1969, in the dramatic massacre of Piazza Fontana, in Milan. And that was just the beginning. Giovanni Bianconi describes the key moments of this tragic phenomenon in our history – i.e. the deadly terrorist attacks in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, in Peteano, the Milan police headquarters and the Italicus train bomb. This period featured contacts between neo-fascist organisations and institutional agents, plus the birth of the Red Brigades and their fatal attacks, including the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the attacks on police officers and magistrates, until the last armed groups dissolved in the late 1980s. The long aftermath saw many contradictions, in cases like that of the former terrorist Cesare Battisti, detained since 2019 in the Oristano Prison, where he finally admitted having been part of "a disastrous movement that crushed a cultural and social revolution that had begun in 1968 ". The same phenomenon led to the "red shadows" arrests in the spring of 2021, when ten former revolutionary militants from the 1970s, who for decades had found refuge in France, were convicted of terrorism and returned to Italy. All of which reveals events of the past about which Italy struggles to write "the end".