Milan, 12.12.1969, 4.30 p.m., a bomb explodes inside the Banca Dell'Agricoltura: 16 dead and 89 injured. It is the Piazza Fontana massacre that kicks off the strategy of tension that will stain Italy with blood for a decade with the aim of subverting its democratic institutions.

 

 

"Despite the inexorable passage of time, it is our 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 snatched from their lives and loved ones, but, above all, to nurture 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, 12 December 1969. A bomb explodes in the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale Dell'Agricoltura, in Piazza Fontana. It is a massacre. It is the beginning of the strategy of tension, which with blood and violence attempts the path of an authoritarian coup d'état. Lucarelli reconstructs this 'black novel of Italian history', guiding us along a path littered with lies, scapegoats, cover-ups and deception. A book that takes our sleep away, because it is all true. In the appendix, edited by Nicola Biondo, there is a chronology of events, a summary of the trial stages, biographies of the protagonists, and an essential bibliography and filmography.

 

2 –  Il processo infame : una storia che ha sconvolto l'Italia / Ibio Paolucci. - Milan : Feltrinelli, c1977.

The history of a process that has marked the national life of the last seven years is here presented in the form of an agile pamphlet. Generals, admirals, high state officials and government ministers are the protagonists of the 'strategy of tension' that seriously threatened the fate of democracy in our country.

 

3 – Il Segreto della Repubblica : the political truth about the Piazza Fontana massacre / Fulvio and Gianfranco Bellini ; edited by Paolo Cucciarelli. - Milan : Selene Edizioni, 2005.

Two months after the sentence of the Court of Cassation that has definitively brought the curtain down on the judicial affair of Piazza Fontana, a testimony of those tormented years for the country returns to bookshops. "Il Segreto della Repubblica - La verità politica sulla strage di piazza Fontana' (The Secret of the Republic - The political truth about the Piazza Fontana massacre) first appeared in 1978: too close to the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, and for this reason the Feltrinelli publishing house, which had initially decided to publish the book, had then stepped aside, and the authors Fulvio and Gianfranco Bellini had no choice but to publish the text with a small publishing house, Flan, under a pseudonym, while Feltrinelli ensured its distribution. The book sold five thousand copies, but did not achieve notoriety. It is 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 the President of the Republic Giuseppe Saragat and Aldo Moro, Foreign Minister at the time, a few days after the bombs exploded in Milan and Rome in December 1969. The source who reveals the 'secret of the republic' to Fulvio Bellini is G.A., a British intelligence agent, known at the time of the partisan struggle. In the last days of March 1969, G.A. tells his Italian friend about what he calls the 'Saragat plan'. The agent tells of the visit of the American president Nixon and Kissinger to Rome, to whom the Head of State alarmedly expresses his fears: the country's drift to the left and outlines with them what Bellini renames 'the Saragat plan': the dissolution of the PSU, the fall of the centre-left government and the dissolution of the chambers. Bellini recounts how, at the next meeting in September 1969 with his English friend, only the last of the conditions was missing. But in the meantime the April bombs had exploded at the Milan Trade Fair. G.A. became increasingly worried about a setback and predicted new attacks. On 12 December, the massacre: 16 dead, a stunned and dumbfounded country. The demonstration organised in the following days by the trade union in Piazza Duomo in Milan, and the pressure coming from England (the Observer denounced the state of alert in Italy with two articles and even accused Saragat of being the political instigator of the massacre) convinced Saragat to give up the liberticidal plan.

 

4 – 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 militants and published by a tiny 'heretical' publisher, change the collective perception of events of great relevance to the state? Indeed, the collective perception of the State itself? Sometimes it happens. And in Italy, the most significant case is undoubtedly that of 'La strage di Stato', a book published in 1970 that first investigated the Piazza Fontana massacre and the involvement of extreme right-wing movements and institutions, which ended up selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Today, fifty years after the massacre, Aldo Giannuli picks up that book again and offers us an 'investigation on the investigation', with all the passion and competence of the researcher who just then began to investigate the darkest meanderings of our Republic. With his usual acumen, Giannuli examines 'La strage di Stato' (The State Massacre), with its revelations and its errors, and plunges us back into a history much less distant than it might seem, retracing events, trial 'truths' that have emerged over the decades, other less conspicuous truths, mysteries that are still waiting to be solved. And that perhaps can be, also thanks to books like this one.

 

5 – La strage di stato : counter-inquiry / Eduardo M. Di Giovanni , Marco Ligini , Edgardo Pellegrini ; with an afterword by Guido Salvini. - Rome : Odradek, 2006.

Reading La strage di Stato serves to understand today, where this country comes from, from what stories the present arises, what infamies power is capable of in order to preserve itself. A book, but above all a method. Recommended for young people, should they wish to start thinking for themselves, and for those who are no longer young to measure the road travelled. A book, therefore, not for 'remembering', because the method it deals with is not the exercise of 'memory' - it costs a lot to cultivate and always lasts too little - but a way of looking at the present. A watchful diffidence, a non-contingent conviction of one's own reasons, a constant questioning. Watching with eyes wide open, not believing media fairy tales, learning to always distinguish (between the naively extremist comrade and the infiltrated agent provocateur, for example!). Because antagonism needs intelligence, above all. Of 'rage' this filthy world is far too full.

 

6 – High treason : the secret war on the Italians from Piazza Fontana to the Bologna station massacre / Antonella Beccaria ... [et al.] ; foreword and edited by Paolo Bolognesi. - Rome : Castelvecchi, 2016.

"Licio Gelli was not only the deporter of the investigations into the Bologna massacre of 2 August 1980, but also the collector of $13,970,000 noted in a document headed 'Bologna'. That financing was then completed through operations carried out on banks belonging to Umberto Ortolani and Roberto Calvi, who attributed to the secret services precisely a 15-million-dollar financing guaranteed by the Pentagon that would have blown up the world. A blunder that led to his death sentence. The recent admissions made by the head of the P2 on his involvement in a subversive project carried out after the 2 August massacre are now inevitably destined to represent a key to the interpretation of the destination of that financing as well. This book offers a documented rereading of how in Italy, between the 1970s and 1980s, clandestine structures, urged on by institutional circles and international realities, 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: thus we risk reversing the roles, forgetting what really happened. And history loses its meaning'. From 12 December 1969, when the branch of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura exploded in Piazza Fontana in Milan, until the assassination of Roberto Ruffilli by the Red Brigades on 16 April 1988, almost 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 such as Emilio Alessandrini, workers such as Guido Rossa, journalists such as Carlo Casalegno and Walter Tobagi, and kidnapped and condemned to death DC president Aldo Moro - and the 'black' massacres, with the explosive devices in Piazza della Loggia, the Italicus train and Bologna station. What is the interweaving between these two phenomena of opposite ideological sign? How does the violence fit into the history of Italy suspended between modernisation and blocked democracy? In an articulate and dramatic account, Gianni Oliva retraces the events of those years. And he reconstructs the Italy of the previous two decades, a country at two speeds, 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 was the United States' assessment of the dramatic season of terrorism that Italy experienced from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s? What were the reactions of the CIA, the American embassy in Rome, the State Department and the White House to the Piazza Fontana bombs, the strategy of tension and the coup attempts? When in Langley, in Washington and in Via Veneto did they start analysing left-wing terrorism and what were their judgements on the possible consequences on the Italian political system? What was their attitude towards the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro? Were the Red Brigades and other left-wing terrorist organisations considered to be the fundamental piece in an international terror plot directed by the Soviet Union or a domestic and not heterodirected 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? On the basis of vast documentation, the book aims to provide some possible answers to these questions, reconstructing the point of view, analyses and evaluations of the CIA and other US political-diplomatic actors regarding terrorism and subversive plots in Italy from the end of the 1960s up to the last reports drawn up in Washington in 1986.

 

9 – Ombre nere : il terrorismo di destra da piazza Fontana alla bomba al <<Manifesto>> / Daniele Biacchessi. – Milano : Mursia, c2002.

In this book, Daniele Biacchessi tackles the subject of right-wing terrorism from 1969 to the present day, bringing many of the investigations of the past up to date. Narrated as if it were a novel, the book offers the reader four stories that address, by choice, the new generations. "Trial of history", is the chapter dedicated to the debate on the Piazza Fontana massacre that ended on 30 June 2001 with the conviction of some members of Ordine Nuovo. The book reconstructs the entire investigation, compares documents and court documents, and uncovers the witness hearings. Up to the most recent motivations for the sentence filed by the judges. There are hundreds of files on the most important figures linked to right-wing subversion.

 

10 – Pasolini. A political murder : Journey between the Piazza Fontana apocalypse and the night of 2 November 1975 / Andrea Speranzoni ; Paolo Bolognesi ; preface by Carlo Lucarelli. - Rome : Oblòcastelvecchi, 2019.

On 2 November 1975, the massacred body of writer Pier Paolo Pasolini was found at the Idroscalo in Ostia. Italian television based the responsibility for the murder on the confession of Giuseppe Pelosi, who only in 2005 would admit the presence of others. A few days later, Sergio Cittì also started talking about the theft of some 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 reappeared in 1976, but to date have never been viewed. The latest investigation by the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office acquires new unpublished material, testimonies of those who saw at least 6-7 people massacre Pasolini. The authors, analysing the latest judicial investigation - unpublished documentation contained in the trials for the Piazza della Loggia and Piazza Fontana massacres -, the epistolary relationship that emerged between Pasolini and Giovanni Ventura - in 1974-1975 one of the two main defendants for the Piazza Fontana massacre of 12 December 1969 - and the writer's 'corsair interventions', identify the serious episodes of threats Pasolini had suffered before the murder. Physical aggressions counterpointed by the civil poet's choice to tell the truth about the dynamics of the new faceless Power and the pacts that were based on the massacres. Preface by Carlo Lucarelli.

 

11 – Piazza Fontana : 12 December 1969 : the day of lost innocence / Giorgio Boatti ; with a new introduction by the author. - Turin : Einaudi, 2019.

It is a sad day, that Friday 12 December 1969: a bomb exploded at the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan: sixteen dead, dozens injured - a massacre. And the end of a dream, the one born in '68, facing the first of a series of tragedies that would strike Italy for years, undermine civil coexistence and put institutions to the test. Giorgio Boatti recounts all this: not only a massacre, but a war that grew out of that massacre, a war fought in peacetime, underground, conducted with the aim of blocking any possibility of alternation in Italian political life.

 

12 – Piazza Fontana : the first act of the last Italian war / Gianni Barbacetto. - Milan : Garzanti, 2019.

On 12 December 1969, a bomb exploded inside the Banca Nazionale Dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 17 people and injuring 88. It is the 'mother of all massacres', the prologue to a season of violent attacks that will stain Italy with blood in the following years, but for Gianni Barbacetto it also represents the first act of a much broader subversive strategy inspired by a systematic criminal design. That bomb in fact marks the beginning of an 'unorthodox war': on the one hand, an occult army, without uniforms or flags but ready for anything, who believed they were fighting against the communist 'monster'; on the other hand, defenceless citizens with the only fault of being in the wrong place at the wrong time: a bank, a train, a square, a station. After the years of horror and indignation, and after the almost complete failure of the judicial route, those massacres have been reduced to an occasion for mournful commemoration ceremonies. This book, the result of decades of research, gives a direct voice to the magistrates who investigated the subversion, sheds new light on some of the darkest events of our Republic, links them together and emphasises how the events are now clear, the responsibilities ascertained, the design and connections revealed. And he reiterates that recounting remains a duty 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 deviated and parallel services, the DC, the PCI, NATO and the United States : the shock enquiry that broke a taboo lasting forty years / Paolo Cucchiarelli. - Milan : Ponte alle Grazie, 2012.

12 December 1969, our Black Friday. In a country that believed itself innocent after fascism and civil war, four explosions ripped through the winter afternoon, one in Milan and three in Rome. Seventeen die in the most serious, at the Banca Nazionale Dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan. The wounded total one hundred and five. The strategy of tension began, the season of subterfuge and manipulation, of corruption and abuse began: the season that still lasts today. 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 parties. The unspeakable secret of the double bombs, planted by the anarchists and doubled by the fascists; the secret of the other two missing bombs and the explosives used on that fateful day; what the DC knew, what the PCI knew, what the USA and NATO knew. A secret that saves no one. And which also explains the tragic deaths of Pinelli, Calabresi, Feltrinelli. After too many acquittals, after the last sentence condemned the victims' relatives to pay compensation for court costs, our mess is finally unravelling...

 

14 – Pinelli : a window on the massacre / Camilla Cederna. - Milan : Net, 2004.

It is 15 December 1969, just after midnight in Milan. For three days there has been nothing but talk of the attack on the Banca dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana. For Camilla Cederna it had been a long day, that of the funeral in the Duomo of the seventeen victims of the massacre. She had barely fallen asleep when suddenly the phone rang. It is her friends and fellow journalists Corrado Stajano and Giampaolo Pansa: 'Be on the street in five minutes, something has happened at the police headquarters'. So begins the book you are about to read. A book that Camilla Cederna wrote after her investigations in those days and destined to cause a stir for a long time to come. At the beginning, Piazza Fontana: the place where an entire generation lost its innocence, where the enthusiasm and positivity of the protest disappeared in the face of the strategy of tension. Searching for those responsible for the bomb, the police arrested some members of the anarchist movement, including Giuseppe Pinelli and Pietro Valpreda. After three days of interrogation, Pinelli flew out of a window of the police headquarters in circumstances that have never been fully clarified. Investigators and public opinion, all Italians are divided: was it suicide, an accident or perhaps something worse? Who was in that room at the time of the incident, with an open window in the middle of December?

 

15 – The echo of the roar : history of the strategy of tension, 1965-1974 / Mirco Dondi. - Rome ; Bari : Laterza, 2015.

The 'black massacres' began on 12 December 1969 with Piazza Fontana and ended on 4 August 1974 with the bombing of the Italicus train. A few days after the bombing in Milan, the British weekly 'The Observer' spoke of 'tension strategy', referring not only to the bombs but to the way in which attacks and social unrest were instrumentalised, calling the press and politicians into question. The season of slaughter, unknown to Western European countries, undermined Italy's democratic institutions and social coexistence, with the aggravating circumstance that in forty years neither the instigators nor most of the perpetrators have been convicted. Only in history has some order been made. Mirco Dondi reconstructs the massacre episodes, dwelling in particular on their immediate impact.

 

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

Almost 600 dead and 5,000 injured. Plus the ordeal of their families. This is the human cost of a war declared not only against the state. This book gives voice to those who never had it. Indeed, to those who were, in a thousand ways, denied it. Only the executioners were called to testify about those terrible years. Italy, then, risks being the only country in the world where, paradoxically, history is left to be written by the defeated, the former terrorists. Approaching the victims (survivors or survivors of massacres and attacks) and their families, showing them interest and making them talk, one hears tales of disappointment, loneliness and disinterest on the part of the institutions.

 

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 15 and 16 December 1969, flying from the window of the office of Police Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, located on the 4th floor of the Milan Police Headquarters. He was one of the many arrested, on the afternoon of the 12th, following the Piazza Fontana bombing. Immediately the authorities pointed to the 'left-wing extremists', and among them the anarchists, as the 'sure' perpetrators of the massacre, while the real culprits were well concealed by the manipulations and deviations immediately put in place. It is no coincidence that the left-wing movements, with the libertarians in the lead and with the help of a small nucleus of democratic journalists, soon launched a counter-information campaign that baptised the Piazza Fontana massacre as a 'state massacre'. The judiciary, after years of vain searches, with a legal artifice, ruled 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 shed light on the political and material responsibility for the death of the anarchist railway worker.

 

18 – The thin black line : neofascism and the secret services from Piazza Fontana to Piazza della Loggia / Mimmo Franzinelli. - Milan : Rizzoli, 2008.

Milan, 12 December 1969: a bomb explodes in the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale Dell'Agricoltura, killing 17 people and wounding 88. Brescia, 28 May 1974: during an anti-fascist demonstration in Piazza della Loggia, a bomb blast kills eight people and injures a hundred. The massacre is a fundamental piece of the strategy of tension, because it had a precise political objective (the Lombardy city which, with Milan and Turin, was the laboratory of trade union unity) and because it was one of the episodes of the turning point that would plunge Italy into the dark years of terrorism. Franzinelli starts from the anxieties on the eve of 1968 to recount with an original slant - and unpublished or little-known documents - the black subversion of Italy in the early 1970s, its protagonists, its dramas and its clashes, of which the deceptions and the hard investigative work that have marked the judicial process to date are an integral part.

 

19 –  La strage : the Piazza Fontana novel / Vito Bruschini. - Rome : Newton Compton, 2012.

Milan, 12 December 1969. A bomb explodes with unprecedented violence, killing twelve people instantly and injuring almost ninety. A mystery still unsolved. "Paradoxically, fiction becomes an effective means of reliably reconstructing reality. And it is Bruschini's book 'La strage. Il romanzo di piazza Fontana' that takes a step forward. Thanks to fictional elements grafted into a well-documented context, and above all, to the freedom that fiction allows, the massacre of 12 December and the horror of those crucial days and times for our country finally emerge in a clear and convincing manner".

 

20 – Il Grande Vecchio : twelve judges recount their investigations into the great mysteries of Italy from Piazza Fontana to Gladio / Gianni Barbacetto. - Baldini & Castoldi, printed 1993.

There is a long season in Italian history in which underground and occult forces have from time to time crossed, added to, 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 so many lives and polluted the life of our Republic forever. Today, this war is over, but the truth remains unspeakable. And the trials - Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, Italicus, Gladio, P2 - are closed and reopened, without almost ever being able to definitively ascertain the guilty parties. Two generations of magistrates have spent themselves searching for the truth. They have always been stopped just before unveiling it. Yet their investigations and sentences have shown that, without the intervention of the services and international cover-ups, not one of the Italian massacres would have been committed and, if committed, could not have gone unpunished. And that only by looking at them all together can one understand their meaning. Because the Grand Old Man is nothing but a system of powers. Within the framework of the Cold War and Italy's limited sovereignty, official legality was replaced by an underground 'legality' with unconfessable rules that, beyond its initial objectives, grew out of all proportion: state subversion fed political corruption and merged with organised crime

 

Comics:      

 

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

Milan, 12 December 1969. The Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura, at number 4 in Piazza Fontana, is crowded for the farmers' market negotiations traditionally held on Fridays. At 4.37 p.m., in the bank's main hall, an extremely powerful TNT bomb explodes, placed in such a way as to cause the maximum number of casualties: placed under the table in the centre of the hall reserved for customers, opposite the tellers. The death toll is devastating: 17 dead and 88 injured. In the days following the massacre, in Milan alone, 84 people were arrested and interrogated, including anarchists, extreme left-wing militants and members of right-wing formations. The first to be summoned is the anarchist railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli, called to the police station a few hours after the explosion. He is interrogated by Commissioner Calabresi, who leads the investigation into the massacre that marks the beginning of the strategy of tension and opens the curtain on the ten most controversial and darkest years of recent Italian history. That massacre, those anti-democratic plots, imposed a test on Italian democracy: knowing how to look inside itself and heal from its evil or accept to live with it and be consumed by it. Italian democracy has not been able to pass that test: there is a debt of truth and justice to be discharged, but the Republic has never managed to settle it'. (From the Preface by Aldo Giannuli)

 

22 – Milan, 12 December. Cani sciolti. - Milan : Sergio Bonelli editore, 2019.

Autumn 1969, strikes inflamed tempers, the charges in the squares became more brutal. In Milan, the tension is palpable and everything seems to be leading towards tragedy... which arrives punctually on 12 December, the day of the Piazza Fontana massacre. A bomb explodes inside the branch of the Banca dell'Agricoltura. Where are they and what are our Cani Sciolti 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 to this day have still not been fully explained and resolved. While life goes on in the small and big things of everyday life, it stops to bid farewell to the innocent victims. In a large-format volume, hardback and enriched with a series of extras, Gianfranco Manfredi, accompanied by Roberto Rinaldi for the drawings, signs a new chapter in the Cani Sciolti saga, dedicated to the hottest years of our recent history, which blends in with the private affairs of the protagonists.

                                         Filmography:

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

On 12 December 1969, at 4.37 p.m., an explosion in Piazza Fontana, right in the centre of Milan, devastated the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura, leaving 17 people dead and over ninety injured. This was the first episode of what would later be called the 'strategy of tension', the beginning of one of the most turbulent and mournful periods in the history of the Italian Republic.

 

                                                                                                                     

          Sitography      

Videography:

  • The news at the time:

 

  • Piazza Fontana victims' funeral, Milan (1969) Watch the video
  • Unpublished 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: Watch the video
  • Three hypotheses on the death of 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: Watch the video

 

"I immediately rule out the responsibility of anarchists for several reasons: first of all, perhaps, out of a kind of instinct, intuition, but then because I know anarchists. It is not that anarchists are alien to violence, but they use it in a different way: they never shoot in the heap, they never shoot while hiding their hand. The anarchist shoots at the target, usually the symbolic target of power, and in front of it. He always assumes responsibility for his gesture. Therefore, that infamous attack was evidently not of the anarchist brand, or even if it was of the anarchist brand, it came from someone who usurped the title of anarchist, but who certainly did not belong to the true category, which I have known to be quite different and which I believe is still quite different".

Indro Montanelli

[from La notte della Repubblica, 12 December 1989].