Milan, December 12, 1969, 4:30 PM, a bomb explodes inside the Banca Dell'Agricoltura, killing 16 and injuring 89. It is the Piazza Fontana massacre that sparks the strategy of tension that will bloodied Italy for a decade, aimed at subverting its democratic institutions.

 

 

Despite the inexorable passage of time, it is our precise moral imperative to keep the memory of that day alive, not only to pay homage to innocent people who, at the hands of blind and senseless violence, were torn from their lives and loved ones, but, above all, to nourish the memory of our history against the culture of forgetfulness.

Piero Grasso

Bibliography:

1 – Piazza Fontana / Carlo Lucarelli; with an appendix edited by Nicola Biondo. – Turin: Einaudi, 2019. –

Milan, December 12, 1969. A bomb explodes at the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale Dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana. It's a massacre. It's the beginning of the strategy of tension that, with blood and violence, attempts to lead to an authoritarian coup. Lucarelli reconstructs this "black novel of Italian history," leading us on a journey strewn with lies, scapegoats, cover-ups, and red herrings. A book that keeps us awake at night, because it's all true. The appendix, edited by Nicola Biondo, includes a chronology of events, a summary of the trial phases, biographies of the key figures, and essential bibliography and filmography.

 

2 -  The Infamous Trial: A Story That Shocked Italy / Ibio Paolucci. – Milan: Feltrinelli, c. 1977.

The story of a trial that has shaped national life over the past seven years is presented here in the form of a concise pamphlet. Generals, admirals, high-ranking state officials, and government ministers are the protagonists of that "strategy of tension" that has seriously threatened the fate of democracy in our country.

 

3 - The Secret of the Republic: The Political Truth about the Piazza Fontana Massacre / Fulvio and Gianfranco Bellini; edited by Paolo Cucciarelli. – Milan: Selene Edizioni, 2005.

Two months after the Supreme Court of Cassation's ruling that definitively brought the curtain down on the Piazza Fontana judicial affair, a testimony to those troubled years for the country is back in bookstores. "The Secret of the Republic – The Political Truth about the Piazza Fontana Massacre" first appeared in 1978, too close to the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. For this reason, Feltrinelli, which had initially planned to publish the book, withdrew. Authors Fulvio and Gianfranco Bellini had no choice but to publish the book through a small publishing house, Flan, under a pseudonym, while Feltrinelli ensured its distribution. The book sold five thousand copies but never achieved fame. It is being republished today with the authors' names and a preface by journalist Paolo Cucchiarelli by Selene Edizioni. The scenario outlined by the two Bellinis is disturbing: a pact between President Giuseppe Saragat and Aldo Moro, then Foreign Minister, just days after the bombings in Milan and Rome in December 1969. The source who revealed the "secret of the republic" to Fulvio Bellini was GA, a British intelligence agent known from the time of the partisan struggle. In the final days of March 1969, GA told his Italian friend what was called the "Saragat plan." The agent recounted the visit of US President Nixon and Kissinger to Rome, to which the head of state alarmedly expressed his fears: the country's drift to the left. He outlined with them what the Bellinis dubbed "the Saragat plan": the dissolution of the PSU, the fall of the center-left government, and the dissolution of Parliament. Bellini recounts how, at the next meeting with his English friend in September 1969, only the last of the conditions was missing. But in the meantime, the April bombings at the Milan Fair had exploded. GA expressed growing concern about a decline and predicted further attacks. On December 12th, the massacre occurred: 16 dead, a country stunned and silenced. The demonstration organized in the following days by the union in Milan's Piazza Duomo, and the pressure coming from England (the Observer denounced the state of alert in Italy in two articles and even accused Saragat of being the political instigator of the massacre) convinced Saragat to abandon his liberticidal plan.

 

4 - The History of the “State Massacre”: Piazza Fontana: The Strange Story of a Book and an Attack / Aldo Giannuli. – Milan: Adriano Salani, 2019.

Can a book change the judicial and political history of a country? Can a journalistic investigation (a "counter-investigation"), conducted by an anonymous group of activists and published by a tiny, "heretical" publisher, alter the collective perception of events of crucial importance to the state? Indeed, the collective perception of the state itself? Sometimes it happens. And in Italy, the most significant case is undoubtedly "La strage di Stato," a book published in 1970 that first investigated the Piazza Fontana massacre and the involvement of far-right movements and institutions, and which ended up selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Today, fifty years after the massacre, Aldo Giannuli returns to that book and offers us an "investigation into the investigation," with all the passion and expertise of the researcher who, just then, began probing the darkest recesses of our Republic. With his usual meticulousness, Giannuli examines "The State Massacre," with its revelations and errors, and immerses us in a history much less distant than it might seem, retracing events, trial "truths" that have emerged over the decades, other less obvious truths, and mysteries still waiting to be solved. And perhaps they can be, thanks in part to books like this one.

 

5 - The State Massacre: A Counter-Inquiry / Eduardo M. Di Giovanni, Marco Ligini, and Edgardo Pellegrini; with an afterword by Guido Salvini. – Rome: Odradek, 2006.

Reading The State Massacre helps us understand today, where this country comes from, from what histories the present arises, and what infamies power is capable of in order to preserve itself. A book, but above all a method. Recommended for young people, who want to start thinking for themselves, and for those who are no longer young, to measure the progress they have made. A book, therefore, not to "remember," because the method it involves is not the exercise of "memory"—it costs a lot to cultivate and always lasts too short—but a way of looking at the present. A vigilant distrust, a non-contingent conviction of one's own reasons, constant questioning. Seeing with eyes wide open, not believing the media's fairy tales, learning to always distinguish (between the naively extremist comrade and the undercover agent provocateur, for example!). Because antagonism requires intelligence, above all. This disgusting world is already full of "anger."

 

6 - High Treason: The Secret War Against the Italians from Piazza Fontana to the Bologna Station Massacre / Antonella Beccaria … [et al.] ; preface and edited by Paolo Bolognesi. – Rome: Castelvecchi, 2016.

Licio Gelli was not only the one who misled the investigation into the Bologna massacre of August 2, 1980, but also the collector of $13.970.000, noted in a document headed 'Bologna'. That financing was then completed through transactions executed at banks controlled by Umberto Ortolani and Roberto Calvi, who attributed to the secret services a $15 million loan secured by the Pentagon that would have caused the world to explode. This carelessness led to his death sentence. The recent admissions made by the head of P2 regarding his involvement in a subversive plan carried out after the August 2 massacre are now inevitably destined to represent a key to understanding the destination of that funding as well. This book offers a documented reinterpretation of how in Italy, between the 1970s and 1980s, clandestine organizations, encouraged by institutional circles and international entities, carried out an unscrupulous attack on democracy based on 'unorthodox warfare.'

 

7 - Years of Lead and TNT: 1969-1980: Black Terrorism and Red Terrorism from Piazza Fontana to the Bologna Massacre / Gianni Oliva. – Milan: Mondadori, 2019.

"If we remember the names of the executioners and forget those of the victims, there is a short circuit in the collective memory: we risk reversing roles, forgetting what really happened. And history loses its meaning." From December 12, 1969, when the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura branch in Piazza Fontana in Milan exploded, until the assassination of Roberto Ruffilli by the Red Brigades on April 16, 1988, nearly four hundred people were killed in Italy, and over a thousand injured and disabled. These were the years of "lead and TNT," the season of armed attacks by "red" terrorism—which killed magistrates like Emilio Alessandrini, workers like Guido Rossa, journalists like Carlo Casalegno and Walter Tobagi, and kidnapped and sentenced to death DC president Aldo Moro—and of the "black" massacres, with the explosive devices in Piazza della Loggia, the Italicus train, and the Bologna station. What connection is established between these two ideologically opposing phenomena? How does violence fit into the history of an Italy poised between modernization and a stalled democracy? In a detailed and dramatic account, Gianni Oliva retraces the events of those years. He reconstructs the Italy of the previous two decades, a two-speed country, caught between the openness of the Constitution and the rigidity of the Rocco Code.

 

8 - The CIA and Italian Terrorism: From the Piazza Fontana Massacre to the 1980s (1969–1986) / Giovanni Mario Ceci. – Rome: Carocci, 2019.

What were the United States' assessments of the dramatic era of terrorism that Italy experienced from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s? What were the reactions of the CIA, the US Embassy in Rome, the State Department, and the White House to the Piazza Fontana bombings, the strategy of tension, and the attempted coups? When did left-wing terrorism first begin to be analyzed in Langley, Washington, and Via Veneto, and what assessments were made of its possible consequences for the Italian political system? What was their attitude toward the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro? Were the Red Brigades and other left-wing terrorist organizations considered a key component of an international terror plot directed by the Soviet Union, or a domestic and not externally directed phenomenon? How were the Italian state's response to subversive strategies and the evolution of terrorist groups from the late 1970s until their irreversible decline assessed? Drawing on extensive documentation, this volume aims to provide some possible answers to these questions, reconstructing the views, analyses, and assessments of the CIA and other US political and diplomatic actors regarding terrorism and subversive plots in Italy from the late 1960s to the latest reports drawn up in Washington in 1986.

 

9 - Black Shadows: Right-wing terrorism from Piazza Fontana to the bomb at < > / Daniele Biacchessi. – Milan: Mursia, c.2002.

In this book, Daniele Biacchessi addresses the issue of right-wing terrorism from 1969 to the present, bringing many of the investigations of the past to the fore. Narrated like a novel, the book offers the reader four stories that are deliberately aimed at the younger generations. "History on Trial" is the chapter dedicated to the trial on the Piazza Fontana massacre, which ended on June 30, 2001, with the conviction of several members of Ordine Nuovo. The book reconstructs the entire preliminary investigation, comparing documents and court records, and transcripts of witness statements, including the most recent reasons for the sentence filed by the judges. It contains hundreds of profiles of the most important figures linked to right-wing subversion.

 

10 - Pasolini. A Political Murder: A Journey Between the Apocalypse of Piazza Fontana and the Night of November 2, 1975 / Andrea Speranzoni; Paolo Bolognesi; preface by Carlo Lucarelli. – Rome: Oblòcastelvecchi, 2019.

On November 2, 1975, the brutally murdered body of writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was found at the Idroscalo in Ostia. Italian television blamed the murder on Giuseppe Pelosi's confession, which only in 2005 admitted the presence of other people. A few days later, Sergio Cittì also began speaking out about the theft of several reels of footage from the film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and the extortion demands that preceded the murder. The stolen reels unexpectedly resurfaced in 1976, but to date have never been examined. The latest investigation by the Rome Prosecutor's Office has acquired new, previously unpublished material, testimonies from those who witnessed at least six or seven people massacring Pasolini. The authors, analyzing the latest judicial investigation—unpublished documentation contained in the trials for the Piazza della Loggia and Piazza Fontana massacres—the correspondence that emerged between Pasolini and Giovanni Ventura—one of the two main defendants in the Piazza Fontana massacre of December 12, 1969, in 1974-1975—and the writer's "pirate interventions," identify the serious incidents of threat Pasolini had endured prior to the murder. These physical attacks are counterbalanced by the civil poet's decision to tell the truth about the dynamics of the new faceless Power and the pacts that were based on the massacres. Foreword by Carlo Lucarelli.

 

11 - Piazza Fontana: December 12, 1969: The Day of Lost Innocence / Giorgio Boatti; with a new introduction by the author. – Turin: Einaudi, 2019.

It's a sadly notorious day, that Friday, December 12, 1969: in Milan, a bomb explodes at the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura: sixteen dead, dozens injured—a massacre. It's the end of a dream, born in '68, faced with the first of a series of tragedies that will plague Italy for years, undermining civil coexistence and severely testing institutions. Giorgio Boatti recounts all this: not just a massacre, but a war born from that massacre, a war fought in peacetime, underground, waged with the aim of blocking any possibility of change in Italian political life.

 

12 - Piazza Fontana: The First Act of the Last Italian War / Gianni Barbacetto. – Milan: Garzanti, 2019.

On December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded inside the Banca Nazionale Dell'Agricoltura in Milan's Piazza Fontana, killing 17 and wounding 88. It was the "mother of all massacres," the prologue to a season of violent attacks that would bloodied Italy for years to come. But for Gianni Barbacetto, it also represented the first act of a much broader subversive strategy inspired by a systematic criminal plan. That bomb marked the beginning of an "unorthodox war": on one side, a hidden army, without uniforms or flags but ready for anything, believing it was fighting the communist "monster"; on the other, defenseless citizens guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time: a bank, a train, a square, a station. After years of horror and indignation, and after the almost complete failure of legal proceedings, those massacres have been reduced to an occasion for somber commemorative ceremonies. This book, the fruit of decades of research, gives firsthand accounts of the magistrates who investigated the subversion, sheds new light on some of the darkest events of our Republic, connects them, and emphasizes how the events are now clear, responsibilities established, and the plan and connections revealed. And it reaffirms that telling the story remains a duty so as not to forget.

 

13 - The Secret of Piazza Fontana: Finally the Truth About the Massacre: The Double Bombs and the Hidden Bombs, Valpreda, Pinelli, Calabresi, Feltrinelli, the Secret Services and the Parallel Services, the DC, the PCI, NATO, and the United States: The Shocking Investigation That Violated a Forty-Year Taboo / Paolo Cucchiarelli. – Milan: Ponte alle Grazie, 2012.

December 12, 1969, our Black Friday. In a country that believed itself innocent after fascism and the civil war, four explosions shatter the winter afternoon, one in Milan and three in Rome. Seventeen people died in the most serious explosion, at the Banca Nazionale Dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan. A total of one hundred and five people were injured. The strategy of tension began, the season of subterfuge and manipulation, corruption and abuse began: a season that continues to this day. Read, read this book. Its seriousness, its passion for the truth—in a country where these are rare qualities—led the author to investigate for ten years and penetrate the steel curtain of a secret cultivated by all political factions. The unspeakable secret of the double bombs, planted by anarchists and doubled by fascists; the secret of the other two missing bombs and the explosive used on that fateful day; What the DC knew, what the PCI knew, what the US and NATO knew. A secret that saves no one. And which also explains the tragic deaths of Pinelli, Calabresi, and Feltrinelli. After too many acquittals, after the latest ruling ordered the victims' relatives to pay the legal costs, our mess is finally being unraveled...

 

14 - Pinelli: A Window on the Massacre / Camilla Cederna. – Milan: Net, 2004.

It's December 15, 1969, just after midnight in Milan. For three days, all anyone has talked about is the attack on the Banca dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana. It's been a long day for Camilla Cederna, the day of the funerals in the Duomo for the seventeen victims of the massacre. She's just fallen asleep when suddenly the phone rings. It's her friends and fellow journalists Corrado Stajano and Giampaolo Pansa: "Be out on the street in five minutes, something's happened at the police station." Thus begins the book you are about to read. A book that Camilla Cederna wrote after her investigations of those days and destined to cause a stir for a long time to come. At its origin, Piazza Fontana: the place where an entire generation lost its innocence, where the enthusiasm and positivity of protest evaporated in the face of the strategy of tension. Searching for those responsible for the bomb, the police arrest several members of the anarchist movement, including Giuseppe Pinelli and Pietro Valpreda. After three days of questioning, Pinelli fell from a police station window, under circumstances that have never been fully clarified. Investigators and the public, all Italians, were divided: was it suicide, an accident, or perhaps something worse? Who was present in that room at the time of the incident, with an open window in the middle of December?

 

15 - The Echo of the Roar: A History of the Strategy of Tension, 1965–1974 / Mirco Dondi. – Rome; Bari: Laterza, 2015.

The "black massacres" began on December 12, 1969, with Piazza Fontana, and ended on August 4, 1974, with the Italicus train bombing. A few days after the Milan bombing, the British weekly "The Observer" spoke of a "strategy of tension," referring not only to the bombings but also to the way the attacks and social unrest were exploited, implicating the press and politicians. The season of massacres, unknown to Western European countries, undermined Italy's democratic institutions and social coexistence, aggravated by the fact that in forty years neither the instigators nor most of the perpetrators had been convicted. Only historically has some order been achieved. Mirco Dondi reconstructs the massacres, focusing in particular on their immediate impact.

 

16 -The Silence of the Lambs / Giovanni Fasanella, Antonella Grippo. – Milan: Rizzoli, 2006.

Nearly 600 dead and 5000 wounded. Plus the ordeal of their families. It's the human cost of a war declared not only against the state. This book gives voice to those who have never had one. Indeed, to those who have been denied it in a thousand ways. Only the perpetrators have been called to testify about those terrible years. Italy, then, risks becoming the only country in the world where, paradoxically, history is left to be written by the defeated, by former terrorists. By approaching the victims (those who escaped or survived massacres and attacks) and their families, showing interest and allowing them to speak, we hear stories of disappointment, loneliness, and institutional disinterest.

 

17 - Pinelli: the seventeenth victim / Amedeo Bertolo … [et al.] ; preface by Luciano Lanza ; with an interview by Lorenzo Pezzica with Cesare Vurchio. – Pisa : BFS, 2006.

Giuseppe Pinelli died on the night between December 15 and 16, 1969, falling from the window of Commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office, located on the fourth floor of the Milan Police Headquarters. He was one of many arrested on the afternoon of the 12th following the Piazza Fontana attack. The authorities immediately identified "left-wing extremists," including anarchists, as the "certain" perpetrators of the massacre, while the true culprits were well hidden by the manipulations and distortions immediately implemented. It is no coincidence that left-wing movements, led by libertarians and aided by a small group of democratic journalists, quickly launched a counter-information campaign labeling the Piazza Fontana massacre a "state massacre." The judiciary, after years of fruitless investigations, used a legal artifice to rule that the fall was caused by an "active illness." From then on, silence fell on the affair until the Sofri-Calabresi trial, but no attempt was ever made to clarify the political and material responsibilities for the anarchist railway worker's death.

 

18 - The Thin Black Line: Neo-Fascism and the Secret Services from Piazza Fontana to Piazza della Loggia / Mimmo Franzinelli. – Milan: Rizzoli, 2008.

Milan, December 12, 1969: a bomb explodes at the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale Dell'Agricoltura, killing 17 people and injuring 88. Brescia, May 28, 1974: during an anti-fascist demonstration in Piazza della Loggia, a bomb explodes, killing eight people and injuring around a hundred. The massacre is a key element in the strategy of tension, both because it had a specific political target (the Lombard city, which, along with Milan and Turin, was the laboratory of trade union unity) and because it was one of the turning points that would plunge Italy into the dark years of terrorism. Franzinelli begins with the anxieties on the eve of 1968 to recount, with an original approach—and using previously unpublished or little-known documents—the black subversion of Italy in the early 1970s, its protagonists, its dramas, and its clashes, an integral part of which are the misdirections and the rigorous investigative work that have marked the judicial proceedings to this day.

 

19 -  The Massacre: The Novel of Piazza Fontana / Vito Bruschini. – Rome: Newton Compton, 2012.

Milan, December 12, 1969. A bomb explodes with unprecedented violence, killing twelve people instantly and injuring nearly ninety. A mystery still unsolved. "Paradoxically, fiction becomes an effective means of reliably reconstructing reality. And it is Bruschini's book, "The Massacre: The Novel of Piazza Fontana," that takes a step forward. Thanks to fictional elements grafted onto a well-documented context, and above all, to the freedom that fiction allows, the massacre of December 12 and the horror of those days and of that crucial time for our country finally emerge clearly and convincingly."

 

20 - The Grand Old Man: Twelve judges recount their investigations into Italy's great mysteries, from Piazza Fontana to Gladio / Gianni Barbacetto. – Baldini & Castoldi, printed 1993.

There is a long period in Italian history in which underground and occult forces have intersected, combined, or clashed with the visible forces of politics, economics, and society in a secret war between the West and the Communist bloc. A low-intensity, unorthodox, unconventional war, which nevertheless claimed countless victims and forever tainted the life of our Republic. Today this war is over, but the truth remains unspeakable. And the trials—Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, Italicus, Gladio, P2—conclude and reopen, almost never definitively determining the perpetrators. Two generations of magistrates have devoted themselves to seeking the truth. They have always been stopped just short of revealing it. Yet, their investigations and sentences have demonstrated that, without the intervention of the intelligence services and international cover-ups, not a single Italian massacre would have been committed, and, if committed, could not have gone unpunished. And only by looking at them all together can one understand their meaning. Because the Great Old Man is nothing more than a system of power. Within the framework of the Cold War and Italy's limited sovereignty, official legality was replaced by a subterranean "legality" with unmentionable rules that, beyond its initial objectives, grew out of all proportion: state subversion fueled political corruption and became intertwined with organized crime.

 

Comics:         

 

21 - Piazza Fontana / Francesco Barilli, Matteo Fenoglio. -: Yellow Beak, 2009

Milan, December 12, 1969. The Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura, at number 4 Piazza Fontana, is crowded for the agricultural market, traditionally held on Fridays. At 4:37 PM, a powerful TNT bomb explodes in the bank's main hall, positioned to maximize casualties: it was placed under the table in the center of the customer lounge, opposite the tellers. The death toll is devastating: 17 dead and 88 injured. In the days following the massacre, in Milan alone, 84 people, including anarchists, far-left militants, and members of right-wing groups, are detained and questioned. The first to be summoned is anarchist railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli, called to the police station a few hours after the explosion. He is questioned by Commissioner Calabresi, who is leading the investigation into the massacre, which marks the beginning of the strategy of tension and raises the curtain on the ten most controversial and dark years in recent Italian history. That massacre, those antidemocratic plots, imposed a test on Italian democracy: to be able to look within itself and heal from its illness, or to accept living with it and being consumed by it. Italian democracy was unable to overcome that test: there is a debt of truth and justice to be repaid, but the Republic has never been able to repay it.” (From the Preface by Aldo Giannuli)

 

22 - Milan, December 12. Loose Guns. – Milan: Sergio Bonelli Editore, 2019.

Autumn 1969, strikes inflame tempers, and street protests become more brutal. Tensions in Milan are palpable, and everything seems to be leading toward tragedy... which arrives promptly on December 12th, the day of the Piazza Fontana massacre. A bomb explodes inside a branch of the Banca dell'Agricoltura. Where are our Cani Sciolti and what are they doing at that moment? A dramatic turning point in the history of the city and the entire country. The beginning of dark years and plots that still remain unexplained and resolved. Meanwhile, life, which continues in the small and large things of everyday life, pauses to bid farewell to the innocent victims. In a large-format, hardback volume enriched with a series of bonus features, Gianfranco Manfredi, with illustrations by Roberto Rinaldi, writes a new chapter in the Cani Sciolti saga, dedicated to the most heated years in our recent history, intertwined with the private lives of the protagonists.

                                         Filmography:

23 - Novel of a Massacre / a film by Marco Tullio Giordana ; [freely adapted from the book by Paolo Cucchiarelli; story and screenplay by Marco Tullio Giordana, Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli; photography by Roberto Forza; music by Franco Piersanti]. – [Rome] : Rai Cinema : 01 Distribution, ℗2012. – 1 DVD-Video (approximately 124 min.)

On December 12, 1969, at 4:37 PM, an explosion in Piazza Fontana, in the heart of Milan, devastated the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura, killing 17 people and injuring over ninety. It was the first episode of what would later be called the "strategy of tension," marking the beginning of one of the most turbulent and tragic periods in the history of the Italian Republic.

 

                                                                                                                     

          Sitography                 

Videography:

  • The news on the news at the time:

 

  • Funeral of the victims of Piazza Fontana, Milan (1969) Watch the video
  • Unreleased footage shot after the Piazza Fontana massacre (1969) Watch the video
  • What Really Happened in Piazza Fontana – Giovanni Fasanella Watch the video
  • Enrico Deaglio – The Bomb: Fifty Years of Piazza Fontana Watch the video
  • Benedetta Tobagi "Piazza Fontana and the Italy of Massacres" Modena 6/12/2019 Watch the video
  • Pinelli: a story” Adriano Sofri: Guarda video
  • Three hypotheses on the death of the anarchist Pino Pinelli: Watch the video
  • The Night of the Republic – The Piazza Fontana Massacre: Watch the video
  • Book Focus of the San Gavino Monreale Municipal Library – The Piazza Fontana Massacre: Guarda video

 

I immediately ruled out the anarchists' responsibility for several reasons: first of all, perhaps, out of a kind of instinct, intuition, but also because I know anarchists. Anarchists aren't averse to violence, but they use it differently: they never fire into the crowd, they never shoot from behind. An anarchist shoots at the target, usually the symbolic target of power, and head-on. He always takes responsibility for his actions. Therefore, that infamous attack was evidently not anarchist in nature, or even if it was anarchist in nature, it came from someone who usurped the title of anarchist, but who certainly didn't belong to the true category, which I have known to be very different and which I believe still is very different.

Indro Montanelli

[from La notte della Repubblica, 12 December 1989]