The Dark Heart of Italy (13 page)

The musical chairs of parliamentary politics were unable to offer
any degree of stability or continuity which might have counteracted
the descent into guerilla warfare. In the aftermath of the ‘hot
autumn’ of 1969, a series of union leaders had been denounced for
‘delinquent instigations’. A general strike was called for 6 February
1970, and the following day the Prime Minister,
Mariano
Rumor,
resigned. After a governmental vacuum lasting fifty days, Rumor
formed another coalition, before resigning again in July. At a time
when the country cried out for a coherent leadership, the various
competing factions of the Christian Democrats were engaged in
futile feuding amongst themselves
.

That summer, as the Italian Azzurri reached the final of another
World Cup, there was a prolonged revolt in Reggio Calabria
(towards the toe of the Italian boot). It had been announced that the
seat of the new regional government, having been promised to
Reggio Calabria, was to be the neighbouring Catanzaro instead. In
an area of abject poverty and poor housing, where unemployment
ran at over 10,000 and many still lived in sheds dating from the 1908
earthquake, the removal of long-awaited and vital public sector jobs
was naturally resented. Reggio responded with a prolonged series of
strikes, demonstrations and bombings which quickly became political
in nature. Between July and September 1970, three people were
killed, 200 wounded and 426 charged with public order offences. In
that period there had been nineteen general strikes, twelve explosions,
32 barricades set up on roads and fourteen occupations of the
local railway station. The area also witnessed the second slaughter of
the ‘strategy of tension’: on 22 July, a bomb exploded on the
Freccia del Sud –
the Southern Arrow train – at
Gioia
Tauro, killing six
passengers and wounding another 72
.

Pasolini’s
documentary of the year following Piazza Fontana,
called 12
Dicembre
, shows the pulsating chaos of Reggio in those
months: wide, sun-drenched streets without cars or pedestrians, only
mounted police aiming bullets or water-cannons at protesters.
Blockades set up on street corners, black smoke from tyres and cars
that had been set alight. Occasionally, an ambulance careering
through the debris
.

The right began by denouncing the strikers and demonstrators as
hooligans and scoundrels, but later began to exploit the unrest. The
local secretary of one of the unions, Ciccio Franco, sided with the
protesters, using the infamous slogan
‘boia chi molla’
(execution for
quitters). ‘It’s our revolt,’ claimed
Ordine Nuovo,
‘it’s the first step in
the national revolution in which this obscene democracy will be
burnt.’ It was, indeed, a propaganda coup for the far right, which
was able to present itself as the champion of the impoverished,
marginalised south. It later reaped the rewards at the ballot box (in
1971, in Catania, the neo-Fascist
Movimento Sociale Italiano
garnered
21.
5
% of the vote, and a year later the leader of the revolt,
Ciccio Franco, became an MSI senator). In subsequent years, there
was a concerted attempt to export the street
squadrismo
of Reggio to
the largely left-wing, and more industrialised north, with Fascists
marching under the slogan
‘L’Aquila, Reggio, Milano sarà peggio’
(the rhyme boasting that things would get worse in Milan). The
rising toll of violence and the presence of two, increasingly extremist
movements, which appeared diametrically opposed, was ominous.

In December 1970 there was an attempt to impose on Italy the
‘authoritarian solution’. It was a strange coup d’état, so subtle and
secretive that when it failed many denied, as they still do, that it
had even taken place. Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the organiser
of the coup, is one of the most controversial figures of Italian postwar
history. During the Second World War, Borghese commanded
the infamous
Decima Mas,
a body of assault troops which was
responsible for raids on the British fleet in Alexandria and which,
after 1943, was savage in its treatment of Italian partisans. Borghese
was later tried as a war criminal and sentenced to twelve years’
imprisonment. On his (very early) release, he became President of
the neo-Fascist party, the
Movimento Sociale Italiano,
before
founding the
Fronte Nazionale,
a pseudo-military organisation to
‘build a dam against red terror’
.

Coming in the aftermath of the Piazza Fontana bombing, and the
subsequent polarisation of society, the coup itself was not entirely
unexpected. 1970 had witnessed reforms which, insufficient to satisfy
any but the most moderate on the left, were however adequate
enough to unnerve the traditionalists on the right: regional government
had been introduced in the spring, and in May, the Statuto dei
Lavoratori
, a workers’ charter, guaranteed various workplace rights.
Most importantly, days before the Borghese coup, the bill legalising
divorce (which had been passed in November 1969) became law. The
coup took place on the night of 7 December 1970 (it was known as
‘Tora-Tora,’ in memory of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on
the same date in 1941). Borghese had prepared a proclamation to
read to the Italian public:

Two hundred Forest Guards left their
Cittaducale
base in the northeast
of Rome and made for the city centre in a convoy armed with
sub-machine guns and handcuffs. Members and former members of
a parachute regiment remained at their base, under the command of
Sandro
Saccucci
(later to become a deputy for the MSI) awaiting
orders. Across the country, other groups were ready for action. The
Ministry of the Interior was occupied, and a stash of arms removed
(counterfeit ones were later found in their place). Suddenly, however,
just as the Guards were about to enter the state television studios,
they were met by two unknown men, who ordered them to retreat.
The operation was called off, with the bizarre explanation that it
was raining too heavily
.

The abortive coup was quickly dismissed as nothing more than
the work of crackpot eccentrics, ‘a jolly get-together among old
comrades’ according to General Vito Miceli, head of SID (the secret
services) and another future MSI parliamentarian. The notion that
there had been an attempted coup was ridiculed, indeed there was
barely any evidence, bar those counterfeit weapons at the Ministry
of the Interior, to suggest that it had even taken place. Gradually,
however, the seriousness of the coup attempt became clear. General
Miceli, it was revealed, had known about the coup well in advance,
as had the army Chief of Staff, who was ready to provide weapons
.

Indeed, within months another subversive organisation, Wind
Rose, had been created by veterans of
Borghese’s
abortive coup. It was
an alliance of senior army and intelligence officers hoping, again, to
take over the reins of government. ‘The objective,’ proclaimed one of
their early manifestos, ‘is to fight against the political, unionist and
governmental braggarts, and against all those who cooperate and
sustain the chameleons of this putrid democracy.’ Borghese died in
exile, in Spain, in 1974, the same year in which Miceli was arrested
for his part in that other, related organisation, Wind Rose. Those
who had taken part in the Borghese coup were accused of ‘armed
insurrection against the state,’ but by 1984 all had been acquitted on
appeal. As ever, there was not one conviction following the crime.
Indeed, since then the coup has been portrayed as nothing more than
a left-wing hallucination
.

In any other country, the coup, if that’s what it was, would be a
sort of historical cul-
de-
sac, an example of a few politicians or militarists
taking a wrong turning. But in Italy, because every intrigue is
so secretive, the subject is never satisfactorily resolved. Confessions
and revelations emerge from dubious
pentiti,
years and decades
after the event, usually bringing confusion rather than clarity. Just as
the Sofri case was reaching its conclusion, a
pentito
came forward
claiming to have the missing link to explain one of the country’s
many illustrious corpses: the disappearance and assumed murder of a
journalist in the autumn of 1970. The journalist, claimed the
pentito,
had been murdered because he had discovered plans for the coup. No
one, of course, knew whether the confessions of a
mafioso
over
three decades after the event were reliable, but they were certainly,
in the then political climate, poignant: the brother of the murdered
journalist was, at the time of the new revelations, Minister for
Education; at the same time, on the opposition benches, were two
members of the National Alliance who had been intimate colleagues
of Borghese, posing for photographs with him before the coup
.

In 1971 the iconography of Pino Pinelli, the anarchist who died
during questioning in the Milan police station, was becoming
evermore like that of Che Guevara: his name endlessly invoked on
thousands of banners and city walls. Meanwhile, the destinies of the
two men held in popular opinion responsible for their deaths (the
policeman Luigi Calabresi and a former colonel of the Bolivian
police, Roberto
Quintanilla
, respectively) became bizarrely intertwined.
The latter had been killed on
1
April 1971 in Hamburg, at the
residence of the Bolivian consul. The gun used by the killer, a Colt
Cobra 38, had been purchased by the publisher, Giangiacomo
Feltrinelli in Milan in 1968. Reports in the Italian press suggested
that Feltrinelli had met the killer, a German called Monica Ertl,
throughout the months preceding the murder. Others, of course, suggested
it was another, sophisticated put-up job by the Italian police;
more precisely, by that Office for Reserved Affairs at the Ministry of
the Interior who were desperate to frame the rich revolutionary. In
little over a year, both Calabresi and Feltrinelli would also be dead
.

In May 1971, Pinelli’s body was exhumed as evidence in the libel case
between Lotta
Continua’s
editor and Calabresi. On
4
October, an
arrest warrant was issued for Calabresi (though he was, posthumously,
declared innocent of all charges in 1975). The spring of 1972 is the
twisted, intricate knot of all the threads at the beginning of the anni
di piombo. On
3
March, the Red Brigades conducted their first,
highly publicised kidnapping. On the 16th of the same month,
Enrico
Berlinguer
was elected leader of the Communist party (the
funeral of his predecessor,
Palmiro
Togliatti, had been attended by
over a million people). The publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was
killed as he allegedly attached explosives to a pylon outside Milan. In
May, a young Anarchist, Franco Serantini, was killed in Pisa by
police at an anti-Fascist rally. It was, crucially, at a meeting to commemorate
the death of Serantini that Sofri allegedly ordered the
killing of Calabresi (another policeman accused, of course, of killing
another Anarchist)
.

The first warning of what had happened to Luigi Calabresi was a
call received at the central line of the Milan police station at 9.15 on
17 May 1972: ‘There’s a man shot in via Cherubini … it’s commissioner
Calabresi … he’s bleeding from his head …’ Calabresi was
slumped on the pavement outside his house, next to his red cinquecento,
with bullet-wounds to his head and left lung. One journalist
who arrived at the scene recalled the ‘leaden atmosphere … the
police and carabinieri considered themselves at war against groups
on the left.’ Calabresi was transported to the San Carlo hospital, but
pronounced dead within half an hour. He was thirty-five, and left a
pregnant wife and two sons. Witnesses claimed to have seen a blue
Fiat 125, number-plate Mi-
16802
, driven by a blonde woman. A man
described as near six foot had fired the shots. The killing was, wrote
Lotta Continua
the next day, ‘a deed in which the exploited recognise
their own yearning for justice’
.