Introduction
This work considers a series of political conflicts that occurred in Italy between the 1960s and 1980s, focusing on state crimes (Kauzlarich 2002; Whyte 2015) connected to the so-called Stragi di Stato (strategy of tension), which included the mass killing of civilians through the explosions of bombs in public spaces (Ferraresi 1993; Di Giovanni et al. 1971). Milan in 1969, Brescia in 1974, the train Italicus in the same year, and the bomb exploding in the Bologna station in 1980 are the most well-known cases of this strategy. State slaughter is an example of “classic terrorism” (Green and Ward, 2004), that is the clandestine use of violence against civilian targets for purposes of intimidation or to create a climate of fear in pursuit of political goals. The Italian state was indeed involved in state slaughter to shift public opinion in favour of authoritarian upheaval, using the fear caused by the bombs as a means of social control.
In particular, this work examines the first episode of state slaughter, that is the explosion of the bomb in Piazza Fontana, in the centre of Milan, at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura (Bettin and Dianese 1999; Boatti 1999; Deaglio 2019; Morando 2019), causing the death of 17 persons, as well as the wounding of 84 more. The purpose of this state crime was part of the aforementioned strategy of tension (Clement and Scalia 2020), that is an embitterment of political conflict to the point of shifting public opinion in favour of authoritarian statecraft. The Italian left wing, as well as the more progressive parts of the liberal population (Cederna 1971), unmasked this strategy through resistance from below, despite the government insistence on blaming “left-wing extremists”, particularly the anarchists. Meanwhile the investigation by Milan magistrates ended up finding the active involvement of state officers in these atrocities. It was at this point that the government enacted a cover-up, either by moving the investigation away from Milan or by making some key witnesses leave the country. Evidence that could lead to the conviction of high-ranking officers, or even of prominent politicians (Ferraresi 1996; Nozza 2006), was thus covered up.
This paper will analyze the case of Piazza Fontana as a conflict between reactionary state power and progressive social mobilization. The discussion adopts an activist criminology perspective as outlined by Kramer (2016). First, it speaks in a prophetic voice, that is to engage in a social and political discussion by identifying and naming the crimes committed by the state. Secondly, it will aim to advocate for particular forms of political mobilization. The discussion of Italian state crimes in the context of Piazza Fontana, as well as the mobilization of civil society that followed, offers an impetus to spur mobilizations for justice and truth (Scraton 1999).
Lens (2003, in Kramer 2016: 524) points out that denial strategies which aim to cover up the atrocities committed by states often use a coat of morality. In the case of Italian state slaughter, and, specifically, in the case of Piazza Fontana, I will argue there also exists a peculiar kind of denial that is related to this morality framing which Lens points to. I am referring specifically to a process of moral obfuscation through manipulation that consists of an organized attempt to deflect state responsibility by accusing other actors. This echoes back to classic labelling theory which ties deviancy labels to power—manipulation here, however, is not simply a power of the state to label, but to manipulate the “facts” to which labels are applied. Manipulation, unlike other kinds of denial, is an outright act of misinformation and an unjust accusation against other actors, in order to construct a scapegoat which can take responsibility for state atrocities (Cohen 2001). By means of manipulation the state not only aims at avoiding its responsibilities but also is criminalizing dissent.
In the case of Piazza Fontana, the Italian governments have developed, through time, a denial strategy aimed both at blaming the left-wing activists and at denying the responsibilities of its apparatuses. As a consequence of this, those who planned, organized, and undertook/carried out these atrocities are still unpunished, whereas the families of the victims are still advocating for justice and a new generation believes that it was leftist activists who carried out the terrorist attack (Cucchiarelli 2006). This work will shed a light on manipulative denial enacted by the Italian state. On the other hand, the strategies of resistance enacted by civil society at the time will also be illustrated and discussed. It will thus be possible to achieve three goals that align with the concerns of activist criminology as discussed by Kramer (2016): first, to make public opinion aware of the manipulative strategies of denial the Italian state used; secondly, to lift the blame from the left activists accused of the attack; third, to keep the quest for truth and justice about Piazza Fontana alive, by showing the new generation that it is possible to mobilize against this form of state denial.
Hence the discussion will revolve around two opposite polarities: the first one is that of manipulation, that is, the attempt of power both to build up the official version of the anarchist responsibilities, and the fight to hide the real events from the public. The other polarity is that of resistance, referring to all the activities of counter-information carried out by civil society under the mobilization that was prompted by this atrocious event, thus opposing denial by manipulation and revealing it. Following Stanley and McCulloch (2013: 2), one can define the kind of resistance that took place in the case of Piazza Fontana as an example of struggling against forgetting. The mobilization of mass organizations such as parties and trade unions, the rejection of state manipulative denial by public opinion, and the independent investigation led by activists, will be discussed as part of the resistance to state crime denial. Under the analytical lens provided by Green and Ward (2019: 94), one can argue that the resistance to state manipulation that followed the bomb in Piazza Fontana is part of a dialectic process, that makes civil society resilient as it adapts to what it resists. The achievement of “partial democratization” of the state structure will emerge as a successful outcome of the widespread mobilization after the bomb.
By exposing the case of Piazza Fontana, this work aims to fulfil one of the aims of activist criminology, that is the engagement in social and legal justice issues that go beyond academic research (Belknap 2015). After a short historical contextualization, the work will analyze these dynamics, so as to show how important it is to build and wield counter-power in the domain of information, in order to achieve that revolutionary production of the truth (Lenin 1971) that enables the transformation of existing power relations through unmasking state crimes.
The analysis of this work relies both on historical data gathered in archives, and on the materials about the event gathered by one of the prosecutors, Dr Guido Salvini, who only recently managed to obtain firsthand material about the Piazza Fontana bombing, which he published on his personal website (Salvini 2022b). Other sources are drawn from the site of the Italian Parliament Committee on Terrorism, as well as from the Italian Senate archive. This paper aims to fill the vacuum related to the lack of activist criminology works on state crime (and on resistance to it) in Italy, a difficulty also due to the difficulty of accessing firsthand material. Moreover, the secondary literature dating back to the Piazza Fontana period provides useful tools to reconstruct the historical context of the time analyzed.
The historical background
Italy, between 1960s and 1980s, underwent an abrupt social transformation (Crainz 2005). More than 20 million Italians moved from the countryside, mostly in the South, to the metropolitan areas of the North, mainly Milan, Turin, and Genoa, to work in the manufacturing sector. Such deep socio-economic change resulted in the birth of new subjectivities. The first relevant one is that of women, who fought for the equality of rights in a country where Catholic Church still hegemonized social relations. Feminist struggles were arguably successful. In 1970 divorce was legalized, eight years before abortion. The reform of family laws in 1977 was also a meaningful step towards the emancipation of women, as the role of males as legally entitled family masters was repealed, like the crime of adultery committed by women. Another sexist law that was removed after the mass mobilization of women was murder by honour, a law that made it legally possible for husbands to kill their unfaithful wives or lovers due to the fact that they would likely get acquitted, or receive a milder conviction than someone convicted of homicide. Besides feminist activism, other relevant outcomes consisted of the abolition of asylums in 1978, the enforcement of a diversion-oriented penitential reform in 1975, and the Statute of the Workers, approved by Parliament in 1970, improved the rights of the workers against their employers. The Statute included such measures as restrictions on dismissals, as well as repealing the gabbie salariali (literally: wage cages), that is the difference of wages between Northern and Southern workers. Such reforms were the outcome of hard-fought struggles such as those led by the anti-psychiatrist movement (Basaglia 1978) and the protests within the prisons which were organized by the members of radical left movement who became the vanguard of anti-incarceration struggles, and who enjoyed a widespread support in society (Moroni and Balestrini 1998; De Vito 2009).
The struggle for democratic changes within the Italian social and political fabric that resulted in the creation of the so-called Italian anomaly (Ingrao and Tranfaglia 1993) was due to two different actors. First, the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI)) from 1944, when its leader Palmiro Togliatti returned from exile, began to relinquish its revolutionary, elitist structure, to create a “new party” (Spriano 1990). PCI thus became a mass political party which was rooted in grassroots society through its local branches, the control of Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL)), trade unions, and the Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana (Italian Cultural and Recreational Associations (ARCI network)). Very often, the party, union, and ARCI branches had their local headquarters in the same buildings which were called the case del popolo, (people’s houses), and were located in working-class areas where militants congregated and set up political, union, and cultural initiatives, such as the creation of libraries, or the screening of films (such as Bertolucci’s Last Tango which had been censored and banned by the magistrature) (Brunetta 2016). On the left of the PCI, from the mid-1960s, a cluster of different political groups, intellectual circles, and New Left organizations had been created. They criticized the PCI’s orientation towards the traditional working class, as well as its political culture, imbued with Stalinism and oriented towards a reformist stance (Panzieri 1962; Tronti 1963; Negri 1979, 1997, 2001). The Italian New Left, drawing on such journals as the Quaderni Rossi and the Quaderni Piacentini (Ginsborg 1994; Crainz 2005; Moroni and Balestrini 1998), was open to new issues such as environmentalism, sexual liberation, and a better quality of life, as opposed to consumerist ideology. Despite the different approaches, both the PCI and the New Left, as well as the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), aimed at a radical change of Italian society, as well as keeping the Italian public aware of the danger of a right-wing upheaval. The passage from the IV to the V republic in France in 1958 after a declaration by the French Army (Campus 2007), the persistence of dictatorial regimes in Spain and Portugal, followed by a coup in Greece in 1967, raised concerns in Italy over reactionary politics. Resistance was therefore both preventive and assertive, and the bomb of Piazza Fontana, as we will discuss in the following section, boosted this articulation.
Such an articulated, widespread, mass mobilization was both the consequence of the abrupt modernization process the country had undergone and a rebellion against an unequal society and an authoritarian state. Despite the democratic constitution of 1948, the penal laws enforced by the fascist regime, in particular those against the freedom of speech and assembly, were still in force. The police force was still militarized, and most of its middle and high ranks were appointed during the fascist period. Similar trends occurred in schools, at universities, and in courts, as the state administration had never been cleared of the senior officers trained and appointed by Mussolini (Tarrow 1989; Ginsborg 1994; Franzinelli 2007). Moreover, the Catholic Church continued to play a prominent role in social life, not only in the regulation of social mores, but also working as a parallel powerful welfare system, thus delaying the development of a modern state apparatus. The discrepancy between a formal democracy and a substantial authoritarianism was accepted by the Italian bourgeoisie that was reluctant to relinquish at least part of its power, as well as being afraid of socialist ferment. Preventing democratic changes allowed the ruling classes both to repress reformist demand for better life conditions and to reduce the cost of labour, leading to significant profits out of the cheap cost of manufacture. Ex-fascist agents were recruited to investigate Fiat workers, particularly the most politically active, who were isolated in the so-called “confinement wards” (Guidetti Serra 1984).
Another reason why democratic reforms were not enforced was the international context. After World War II Italy became part of the Atlantic Bloc, led by the USA and characterized by its anti-Communist stance. Washington heavily relied on the Conservative side of Italian society to prevent a communist victory in general elections. The paramilitary structure of Gladio, created within NATO, involved ex-fascists and former military staff who were trained to resist a supposed Communist coup, but, indeed, worked at preventing the electoral advancement of left-wing parties in different ways (Fasanella and Cereghino 2000). Italy had the strongest Communist party in Europe, as well as an articulated New Left that reflected most of the modernization stances within Italian society. A potential leftward shift of Italy worried both the USA and its NATO allies (Ferraresi 1993: 56), as the country was located on the border of the Iron Curtain and could influence its neighbouring countries, whilst enjoying the military support of the Soviet Union. For this reason, the growth of the left had to be stopped by the use of unconventional means. It is within this anti-Communist milieu that manipulation took place.
The three stages of manipulation: from the revolutionary war to blaming the anarchists
This section will analyse the process of manipulation in order to shed a light on the way the network, including the conservative political forces, some sections of the Italian bourgeoisie, the ex-fascists, state apparatuses, and the US political officers, managed to craft a manipulative strategy aimed at provoking a reactionary upheaval.
Between 3 and 5 May 1965, the Hotel Parco dei Principi, in Rome, hosted a special conference on The Revolutionary War (Dondi 2019). The event was organized by three right-wing journalists on behalf of the Institute for Security Studies “Pollio” (Senato della Repubblica 2022). The participants feared the alleged growth of the left, as both the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) had increased their electoral force in the general election of 1963. This leftward shift of the Italian electorate had persuaded the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro that it was necessary to involve the PSI in a government coalition. Consequently, the first centre-left government in Italian history was sworn in in summer 1963, with Moro as a premier and the PSI leader, Nenni, as his deputy (Ginsborg 1994).
The ambitious reformist plans of the new Cabinet, such as the nationalization of important societal infrastructures, the regulation of land estates, the taxation of stocks, as well as plans to introduce divorce, triggered panic among the most conservative parts of Italian society, such as the Church, which is also a prominent land developer and financial investor (Stajano 1989), the bourgeoisie, and the ex-fascists. The government collapsed one year later, to be replaced by another centre-left government, with a less reformist stance. Nenni argued that the government collapsed because of “sabre rattling” (rumore di sciabole), that is the threat of a coup. Two years later, the weekly magazine L’Espresso, published secret service documents that revealed the attempt to overthrow the government through a military intervention (Franzinelli 2012) in summer 1964. This coup was supported by the ex-President of the Republic, Antonio Segni, as well as by the US government and a section of the Christian Democrats. Only the opposition of Moro, who had become aware of the attempt, prevented the enactment of an authoritarian upheaval.
The May 1965 conference took place one year after Piano Solo, as the attempted coup of 1964 was called. The shrinking of the centre-left coalition’s initial reformist objectives was not a sufficient guarantee for the reactionary and conservative forces. Members of the intelligence services, ex-fascists, right-wing intellectuals, ex-communists turned to advocates of the US’ role, and members of the US military forces and intelligence participated in the conference. They concluded that the best way to tackle the Communist threat was by a low-intensity war. It was a radically different approach: as military coups might end up being too violent and ineffective, it was necessary to infiltrate the left-wing mass organizations, such as the trade unions and the parties, as well as the spontaneous movements, and support the most extremist stances. Right-wing activists should keep up with their activities, so as to raise tension and provoke the public into demanding an authoritarian upheaval.
The strategy of tension, as The Observer called it in 1969 (Ascherson et al. 1969) was being forged, consisting of a threefold manipulation strategy: misinformation, the task of those journalists, like Guido Giannettini, who supported a coup and actively worked for it by raising moral panics through the media, constantly pointing the finger at the excessive rise of social tension caused by the radicalization of politics and the growth of left-wing parties; infiltration, that is, right-wing militants joining radical left movements and parties and pushing for extremist and violent actions; intimidation, or the causing of public fear by committing violent and atrocious crimes.
As far as misinformation is concerned, all the centre and right-wing newspapers, as well as TV, which were firmly in the hands of the Christian Democrats in 1960s, worked in such a way as to raise the concern of the public at the growing mobilization that followed the outbreak of 1968 students’ movements and the 1969 “hot autumn” of workers’ struggles for better wages and quality of life (Scalzone 1989; Revelli 1993; Polo 2003). Besides the traditional channels of moral entrepreneurship, various journalists, most of whom, as magistrates eventually found out, were either members of the illegal masonic lodge P2 or its payees (Flamini 1996), either circulated false news about left-wing organizations or distorted the news concerning confrontation between demonstrators and police forces, blaming the former for committing violent acts. Another stream of misinformation consisted of the publication of books, essays, and other political documents by right-wing editors, like Giovanni Ventura in Padua. Ventura had a reputation for being a member of the right-wing organization Ordine Nuovo (New Order), but, soon after 1968, he started publishing left-wing authors, as well as attending the meetings of revolutionary organizations. Upon closer inspection, these publications were indeed part of the neo-fascist propaganda, as they focused on the need to cancel the left/right distinction and to fight together against “the system”, an ambiguous term under which it was possible to discern traditional anti-Semitic propaganda.
The immediate consequence of this system of media misinformation was to blame the anarchists for the bomb in Piazza Fontana. All the centre and right-wing newspapers immediately argued political extremism (a formula they used to refer to the left) was responsible for the bomb, and encouraged the police to investigate “the anarchists” and the “filo-Chinese”, terms that were used to refer to the radical left. A few days later, an anarchist dancer, Pietro Valpreda, who had come back from Rome to Milan to be tried for past matters, was stopped by two police officers on his way out of the court, and required to go to the Questura, that is, the police headquarters of Milan. After a short interrogation, he was forced to participate in an identity parade, where a taxi driver recognized him as the person holding a bag he had taken to the bank. This was enough for the police to arrest Valpreda and to implicate him as the bomber of Piazza Fontana. The taxi driver would later reveal the way the ID parade took place (Maltini and Fuga 2017: 62): “There were 4 men in suit and tie, with combed hairs. Then, in the middle, there was this guy with a scruffy countenance. I said in Milanese dialect: it’s him! Just because he looked different from the other four . . .”
This ID parade was enough for the Milan police to circulate news about the successful investigation that had found the bomber of Piazza Fontana. The national TV news echoed this claim immediately on a national scale. In order to underline the responsibility of the anarchists, on the same day (14 December 1969), Luigi Calabresi, a high-ranking police officer (Commissario) of the political branch of police, stopped on the street Pino Pinelli, a 41-year-old Milanese railway worker, and leader of the anarchist movement. Calabresi asked Pinelli to follow him on his Vespa to the Questura for a quick chat. The railway man never came back home alive. Two days after he was stopped he was thrown out of Calabresi’s second-floor office window. The Questore (Chief Constable) of Milan, Marcello Guida, a former director of a fascist confinement prison, told the press that Pinelli, being informed that Valpreda was guilty, had got a shock and after shouting “this is the end of anarchy!” had decided to take his own life. Antonio Allegra, head of the political branch, endorsed Guida’s declarations, adding that the position of Pinelli was growing more and more uncomfortable.
The misinformation campaign about the bomb, focused on the anarchist trail (pista anarchica), that is the theory of anarchist responsibility for the bomb of Piazza Fontana, was easily carried out because of infiltration. A right-wing militant, Mario Merlino (who had participated to the Istituto Pollio conference), and an undercover police officer, Antonio Polito, had been inserted by the police into the Rome anarchist movement. They had started opposing the alleged bureaucratization of anarchism, and persuaded other militants, such as Olinto Della Savia and Valpreda, that it was time to found another independent anarchist group, that is the group XXII March, which was more focused on confrontation with police forces by throwing Molotov bombs and stones, than on the construction of a political strategy. Valpreda and Della Savia had abandoned the group, which had not been recognized by the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI), after a short while, but their short stint inside the group was enough for Merlino and Polito to indict them as violent anarchists, and to put the blame for the bomb on Valpreda, and, indeed, on the whole anarchist movement. The Milan Chief of Police, Marcello Guida, a former fascist officer, came out publicly to state that investigations had provided such evidence (Corte d’Assise di Catanzaro 1979).
Finally, intimidation was also used to persuade the public that violence was escalating to a point that could make society degenerate into disorder. The bomb of Piazza Fontana was the only one to explode: another bomb in Milan, at the Banca Commerciale Italiana, and bombs in Rome, one at the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, and another one at the Unknown Soldier monument, both failed to explode. It is important to note the symbolic aspect of the places that were selected for the bombings: the banks embody capitalist power, while the unknown soldier monument is related to patriotism. Public opinion, given previous media agitation, would have easily been persuaded it was also the anarchists who were responsible for these bombings, had they been successful. Intimidation, however, was not completely successful, despite the fact that Merlino and other members of Ordine Nuovo, a few months before Piazza Fontana, had been to Greece on a training camp organized by those generals who had carried out the coup two years before (Sceresini 2017, 2019).
As organized as it could be, the strategy of manipulation was not, at least in the short term, successful. The aim to overthrow the democratic institutions failed, both because of the mistakes of the perpetrators, and because of widespread opposition in Italian society. This resistance will be discussed in the next session.
It’s a state slaughter! Resistance against manipulation
Michel Foucault (1978) argues that resistance, or those practices opposed to power, is a peculiar aspect of social relations. In this case, we define acts of resistance as all the mobilizations for truth that followed the terrorist attack of Piazza Fontana. The illustration and the discussion of the practices of resistance after Piazza Fontana fulfils one of the purposes of activist criminology to provide the public with material for reflection and mobilization.
Every domination-oriented strategy will stir a reaction of opposition by the subjected individuals or group, including state denial by manipulation. Foucault points to the relational aspects of resistance, referring to it as a relational practice, a widespread resource within society. According to Foucault, power and resistance are bound together, as the former cannot exist without the latter. The broadness of this definition, though, does not allow us to gauge its organizational aspect, as well as its effectiveness. For this reason, the Foucauldian concept of resistance needs to be reinforced with analytical categories that articulate its effectiveness in reshaping force relation between social groups and classes, like in the case that is being discussed in this work.
To do this, it is necessary to differentiate the concept of resistance to denial into three different constitutive elements: the first one is that of mobilization, that is the opposition of both the organized left and of the social movements (Ruggiero and Montagna 2008) to the state-organized manipulation of the truth and associated efforts to move towards an authoritarian upheaval; the second linked stage is that of counter-information, that is, the gathering and circulation of evidence that proves the manipulative features of the official truth; the final stage is that of counter-power, by which we mean those practices aimed at dismantling power relations both by supporting those who were unjustly convicted and by creating a network of solidarity active in different political directions: from anti-fascist patrols to media campaigns, from the legal support of defendants through to the struggle for the democratization of state apparatuses.
In doing so, we will follow the path outlined by Green and Ward (2019: 65), when they point out the importance of civil society organizations as a crucial resource to provide a counterweight to state crime, and to build up resistance. In particular, Italian civil society at the time of Piazza Fontana proved to be fluid enough (Green and Ward 2019: 81) to set up an articulated mobilization that foiled the attempt to set up an authoritarian upheaval carried out by the state. In order to develop a more in-depth analysis of this case of resistance, the categories of opposition, intention, communication, and transformation, proposed by Stanley and McCulloch (2013: 2–3) will be used.
The mobilization of the left-wing and liberal side of the Italian public, in opposition to the official truth provided by the state apparatuses and to oppose the risks of authoritarian upheaval, was immediate. Opposition would have been ineffective without the resource of intention (Stanley and McCulloch 2013), that is human agency that results in active reaction, involving the activation of social, moral, and political tools. Both the PCI and the PSI, as well as the trade unions, called for political demonstrations, claiming that bombing was not part of working-class political culture. This claim was echoed by the students and by the workers who had animated the hot autumn. Strikes broke out spontaneously against what was immediately labelled a coup attempt, while the local branches of trade unions and left-wing parties were guarded, both by their members and by ordinary citizens who feared a Fascist revival. A crowd of more than 200,000 people participated in the funerals of the victims in the Milan cathedral. This mass mobilization helped the Minister of Interior, Aldo Moro, to persuade the President of the Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, and the Prime Minister, Mariano Rumor, that it would have been a counter-productive move to sign the declaration of emergency decree (Boatti 1999; Sceresini 2017; Ginsborg 1994).
Moreover, the death of Pinelli worked as a catalyst for mobilization. Three journalists of liberal orientation, Giorgio Bocca, Camilla Cederna, and Giampaolo Pansa (Cederna 1971), were in the Questura of Milan when Pinelli fell out of the window (Deaglio 2019). They immediately went to see the corpse of the anarchist militant, and started putting Guida, Allegri, and Calabresi under pressure about his death. The three journalists wrote about the ambiguities of the senior officers of Milan’s police, shedding light on the connections some of them had with the right wing, as well as on the fascist past of others, such as the Questore Guida (Salvini 2022b).
This was the first stage of counter-information, or communication, insofar as it challenges the official truth and the control of information by the State. It was soon to be reinforced by investigations carried out by three radical left-wing professionals: two journalists, Marco Ligini and Edgardo Pellegrini, and a solicitor, Eduardo Di Giovanni, all of them based in Rome, exploited their professional connections to investigate deep inside the right-wing milieu in the capital city and in Milan. This provided enough material for a book La Strage di Stato (Di Giovanni et al. 1971), which would have proved influential both for activists and for a various set of analysts, such as scholars and journalists, and set the standards to both analyze and define Italian state crimes. The book makes up an example of ignored and spectacular communication (Stanley and McCulloch 2019: 5), because of the impact it had on the Italian public opinion of early 1970s, as it lifted the veil on the unexpected existence of a wide network of ex-fascists, intelligence and police senior officers, US agents, right-wing politicians and entrepreneurs, whose members had been active, at least five years before the bomb in Piazza Fontana exploded, in planning a coup against democratic institutions, or, at least, promoting a right-wing shift, for example, by introducing a presidential reform of the Constitution (Salvini 2022b).
All the actors of this reactionary network shared the view that it was necessary to have a breakthrough event (like mass killings through bombings) to orient public sentiment into accepting an authoritarian, or very conservative, shift within the political spectrum. Ligini, Pellegrini and Di Giovanni made the public aware of the Istituto Pollio conference of 1965, circulating the thesis that the bombs of 1969 were part of a long-planned reactionary plot.
The argument Ligini, Pellegrini and Di Giovanni put forward was soon to be endorsed when, at the end of 1971, a schoolteacher in the Veneto countryside, Guido Lorenzon, decided to meet the Padua prosecutors, Pietro Calogero and Guido Stitz, to release a “spontaneous declaration”. Lorenzon revealed that his long-time friend, Giovanni Ventura, had previously revealed to him that he was part of the plot which had organized the attack in Piazza Fontana. The magistrates immediately sent the police to search Ventura’s house. The documents they found more than endorsed what both Lorenzon and the authors of the book argued. Guido Giannettini, one of the speakers at the Istituto Pollio conference, and officially a journalist for the Corriere della Sera (a Milan-based newspaper, and the most important newspaper in Italy), was indeed an intelligence agent. He had trained Ventura and his fascist partners, and provided them with handbooks about low-intensity war and other material from NATO work-camps about how to make a bomb. Giannettini was the link between the extreme right, the Italian Military Intelligence (SID) he had been working for a long time, and the NATO officers based in Italy who were concerned about preventing the political advancement of the left.
As soon as the awareness of the manipulation spread across Italian society, the stage of counter-power was enacted. It was a pluralistic, scattered movement, without an organic connection or clear leadership. In any case, the stance for a fairer, democratic, egalitarian society got a boost from the Piazza Fontana mobilization. Consequently, the last stage of resistance, that is transformation, was possible, due to the mass mobilization and resistance that followed Piazza Fontana. The widespread network of mass organizations, independent press, social movements, worked together to produce a collective awareness about the attempts to manipulate the truth that were enacted by the government. Their effort proved to be successful, as it resulted in a widespread mobilization of Italian society.
On an institutional level, the quest for a more democratic state apparatus was endorsed by growing public awareness that state intelligence was too dependent on the military apparatus, as well as being too right-wing-oriented, and provided the chance for a reform of the Italian intelligence service (De Lutiis 1993). In 1977, parliament reformed the intelligence service, by creating a parliament committee controlling both the military branch (SISMI) and the civil one (SISDE), by appointing their presidents and producing an annual report on their activities. A more important reform concerned the police forces. As the demand for demilitarization grew stronger, more and more police officers sought and often found a dialogue with the left-wing forces, who supported their clandestine unions and advocated for their legalization. All these demands were met in the reform of 1981 (Palidda 1999), although Italy, like France and Spain, still has the Carabinieri, a branch of the army deputized to work as a police force.
Some forms of counter-power also developed inside the army, with the extra-parliamentary movement Lotta Continua (VV AA 1973) promoting the proletari in divisa (proletarians with a uniform) movement, whose members protested against bullying, as well as involving other soldiers in political activities. The most important counter-power initiative, though, was linked to prisons and rights in the penal system. A group of left-wing solicitors and academics, supported by other activists and by famous figures like Dario Fo and his wife, funded Soccorso Rosso (Red Rescue), a group providing legal support to the anarchists arrested and accused of having committed the terrorist attacks of 1969, as well as providing the Pinelli family with help. The group was soon to expand its interests, moving to cope with such issues as prisoners’ rights and the need to implement more radical, diversion-oriented reforms of the penitentiary system, leading to the reform of 1975.
Finally, the bomb at Piazza Fontana reinforced the awareness that fascism in Italy was not dead yet, and that a “democratic patrol” was necessary. Militant anti-fascism became an organizing theme for the radical left, providing the justification for setting up protection squads engaged in armed training and in the use of weapons. When the most important groups, such as Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio, were disbanded, some of the protection squad members promoted armed struggle or joined the Red Brigades (Della Porta 1996). However, some tragic episodes, like the death of the young right-wing militant Sergio Ramelli, killed in Milan in 1975 by some members of the Avanguardia Operaia protection squad, made some forms of militant anti-fascism publicly questionable.
The renewal of Italian politics and society, though, stalled because of the consequences of 1973 economic crisis (Clement 2016). The PCI secretary, Enrico Berlinguer (1973), argued that stagflation had to be faced through the collaboration with the “democratic forces”, that is, mainly, the Christian Democrats, whose prominent members had been involved in the Piazza Fontana plot, in order to prevent any anti-democratic upheaval. To endorse his political project, Berlinguer cited the military coup that had overthrown the Chilean left-wing government. The electoral success of 1976 made it easier for Berlinguer to enact this collaboration with the Christian Democrats, under the formula of “historical compromise”.
As unemployment and social despair rose, the rift between the old and the new left grew wider. The anti-fascist solidarity that had proved successful in the first half of 1970s cracked (Rossanda and Ingrao 1993): PCI and PSI called the left social movements mob squads (untorelli); and the latter replied by accusing the two main Italian left parties PSI of betrayal (Segio 2005). The Red Brigades attempted to bridge this gap in the worst way, by kidnapping the former prime minister and Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro. The anti-terrorist mobilization meant the approval of special legislation by the Parliament, which resulted in the mass prosecution of many New Left activists (Prette 1996), including through the use of torture and special detention. The resistance experience triggered by the bomb in Piazza Fontana was significantly impaired by these events.
In any case, the widespread counter-power activities that spread across the country as a consequence of the reaction to state manipulation provide an important example within the activist criminology rubric. For scholars, it is important to bring to these examples to the light, so as to provide the public with models of mobilization that have successfully remedied injustice and guarded against potentially disastrous reactionary movements. Moreover, an emphasis on such experiences serves the purposes of speaking in a prophetic voice insofar as the denial strategies are unearthed and deconstructed. Finally, it is also relevant to reconstruct and retrieve the story of Piazza Fontana to support the quest for truth and justice that still moves both the victims’ families and a large part of Italian public opinion. More reflection, though, is needed about the importance of creating strong, wide-ranging resistant coalitions: as what happened after 1973 demonstrates, a weaker network ends up producing ineffective resistance practices.
Conclusions
The Piazza Fontana case, like many other terrorist attacks in Italy, is still unresolved. On the one hand, the evidence of responsibility by the neo-fascists, the intelligence services, and the governmental parties exist. On the other hand, the strategy of covering up by the government, along with loopholes used by the solicitors of the defendants, has made it impossible to issue a verdict of guilt. For example, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura were evidently guilty, as the Court of Milan stated in 2005. But, since they had been acquitted in a previous trial, they could not be sentenced under double jeopardy rules. In the meantime, Ventura and Giannettini have died, social movements collapsed under the repression enacted in the early 1980s, and the left-wing opposition has become more moderate, thus reducing its interest in ascertaining the truth about the bombings. Finally, as the neo-fascists rose to power and also turned formally into “liberal-democrats”, they can rely upon a network of political protection that makes it even more difficult to carry on with new investigations and prosecutions. Fifty-two years have gone by since the state slaughter began, and a judicial truth has not been produced yet. New generations still believe it was the Red Brigades that committed the terrorist attack in Milan in 1969. Manipulation is an evergreen strategy that the dominating social groups use to control memory.
Truth and memory are two interrelated sites of struggle with respect to state crime. The initial resistance won the struggle for truth, but has arguably lost the struggle for memory. Also, the case points to the way in which resistance not only stops, but prevents. It prevents a wide-spread assault on the radical left, it prevents a lurch to authoritarianism. However, prevention is harder to observe or see than, say, where resistance stops an atrocity or ends a war. Thus, resistance that prevents state crime, because its emancipatory outcome is an absence of authoritarianism, can also be lost from public sight and public memory. And activist criminology is about documenting and commemorating these efforts.