The Dark Heart of Italy (6 page)

Traditionalists were, however, ‘clinking the sabres’. It was an apt
description of the threatening noises and rumours with which the
far right reminded the country of its presence. There had, as early as
1964, been a confused gambit to take power, a sort of crawling coup
by the secret services and their leader. Since Italy’s most obvious
Mediterranean paragons – Greece, Portugal and Spain – were in
the late 1960s and early
1970s
under military Fascist regimes, there
was an almost permanent hysteria on the Italian left regarding the
possibility of a right-wing coup. (The film,
Vogliamo i Colonnelli,
literally ‘We Want the Colonels’, was its most obvious expression.)
That noise of ‘clinking sabres’ and the hysteria it produced were the
permanent backdrop to the anni di piombo, a perception from both
sides that the country was on the brink of a violent turnaround and
had to be defended
.

As early as December 1969, Britain’s
Observer’s
Italian correspondent
coined a phrase which was to become standard usage in
reference to the far right: ‘the strategy of tension’, implying a sustained
campaign of destabilisation by Fascists to promote a coup, the
so-called ‘Greek’ – or later ‘Chilean’ – solution. ‘Elements from the
far right and from officialdom,’ the Observer journalist wrote, ‘are
plotting a military coup d’état in Italy, with the encouragement and
support of the Greek government’. Twenty-four hours before the
Piazza Fontana bomb had exploded, one magazine had emblazoned
its cover with the Italian tricolour, accompanied inside by the reassurance
that ‘the armed forces could be called upon to
restabilise
immediately the
Republic’s
legality. This wouldn’t be a coup d’état,
but an act of political will … isn’t the confusion we are now witnessing,’
posed the rhetorical journalist, ‘due to the fact that the
institutions are by now insufficient and outmoded?’ The head of
Confindustria,
an alliance of industrialists, had already exclaimed
that ‘the parliamentary system isn’t made for Italians’, and went on
to invoke instead ‘a mythical faith in order’
.

The months preceding the bomb had been dubbed the
autunno caldo,
the hot autumn, because of endless industrial disputes.
During 1969, the number of workers involved in strike action rose to
over seven and a half million, the hours duly lost increasing to over
300 million. At the same time, the country had witnessed, between
3
January and 12 December of 1969, some 145 explosions. Stand-offs
between the forces of order and protesters of various guises had
already claimed lives. Just one month before the Piazza Fontana
bomb, a policeman had been killed in Milan during a union meeting.
On 15th of that month, one colonel announced ‘given the present
situation of disorder in the factories and in the schools, the army has
the job of defending the internal frontiers of the country: by now the
army is the only bulwark against disorder and anarchy.’ Italy seemed
to have reached an impasse, a confrontation between
irreconcilables
:
a liberal country modernising at an exponential rate, and those traditionalists
and ‘forces of order’ who – after two decades – were still
struggling to come to terms with democracy. The climate, suggested
both left-wingers and foreign journalists, was self-evidently ripe for
a coup and – so the theory went – Piazza Fontana was to have been
its tragic starting gun
.

Much is known about what happened that Friday afternoon in
1969. The bomb had been placed in a black bag under a round table
on the ground floor of the bank. At the time it was crowded with
merchants from the rural suburbs. Seven kilograms of trinitrotoluene,
or
TNT
, exploded, leaving in their aftermath what someone
later described as a scent of bitter almonds. One eyewitness, a client
of the bank, described hearing a frightening explosion: ‘I saw that
everything was collapsing around and in front of me. The wooden
counters of the bankers had literally jumped into the air while the
room was filled with shards of glass. Many around me had fallen.
Some were certainly dead, others were wailing
.’
10
One newspaper the
following day wrote of ‘a hell of screams, of shouts, of desperation, of
panic, of lamentation
’.
11
Shoes were found with severed feet still
inside. In all, sixteen people died, fourteen on the actual day; 88 were
injured. On the same day, a bomb was placed at Milan’s Banca
Commerciale Italiana.
In Rome, bombs planted in the underground
walk-way of the
Banca Nazionale del Lavoro
, and at the
Altare della Patria
(the ‘Altar of the Fatherland’, the spiritual centrepiece of
Italy) caused further injury
.

Butterfly-net techniques of arrest were carried out, bringing in a
haul of Anarchists in Milan. Improbably, when one of their number,
Pino Pinelli, was asked in for questioning, he rode behind the police
escort on his scooter. At around midnight on the Monday night after
the bomb, a journalist in the courtyard of the police headquarters
heard a thud. The body of Pinelli had fallen from the fourth floor of
the building, hitting the corner of a wall, bouncing off another,
before coming to rest on the ground. He had been held in custody for
72 inconclusive hours. Marcello Guida, the
questore
coordinating
the Piazza Fontana bomb investigation, claimed that Pinelli’s alibi
had collapsed, and that his suicide jump had been ‘a desperate gesture,
a sort of self-
accusation’
.

February 2000. The first day of the trial for the Piazza Fontana bombing, and there’s a big presence outside the courtroom. Not just camera crews and journalists, but also a few hundred students in grunge uniform who are playing loud drum and bass, mixing their tracks with interludes of cod-history over the PA. Most are smoking grass, ignored by the insouciant
Carabinieri
.

Given the ferocity and indignation of the prosecution, and given the age and evasiveness of the defendants, the atmosphere of the court is like a Nazi war-crimes trial conducted decades after
the war. When I first started attending the trial, it seemed as if amazing revelations from the past were about to come out into the open, as if some long-absent truth had finally been found. That’s certainly how it was presented in the left-wing press, which spoke of decades of
omissis
(omissions) and
depistagg
i
(the deliberate derailing of investigations) coming to an end. The famous
muro di
gomma
(the ‘wall of rubber’ against which all previous investigations inevitably, impotently bounced) had been scaled, the omertà was at an end. The epic
segreto di stato
of Piazza Fontana was about to be revealed in all its grotesquerie.

Inside, the courtroom is an oval bunker. Lining the walls to the left and right are eight enormous and barred prison pens, a reminder of the maxi-trials that used to take place here against entire terrorist organisations in the 1970s. Two judges sit below an imposing crucifix. To their left and right on the dais are the so-called ‘popular judges’ or jurists, wearing tricolour sashes. They in turn are flanked by other jurists without the gaudy sash (each juror has to have a possible replacement, because the trial is expected to be so long). Accordingly, and this being Italy, the start of the trial is delayed by a lawyers’ strike. It begins a week later.

The first decision of the court is whether to move the trial to Catanzaro, over a thousand miles to the south in Calabria. It was on the basis of a law about public order dating from the era of
Il
Duce
that various Piazza Fontana trials were removed to Catanzaro during the 1970s. There accusations were blurred and confused, witnesses whisked abroad. ‘You see,’ explains one journalist next to me in the press gallery, ‘there’s nothing south of Rome which is left to chance.’ In a portent of things to come, the judge speaks for hours on the subject – a judgement described the next day by even the most sober newspapers as ‘very tedious’. The request for a transfer to Calabria is turned down.

The apparent trouble with the trial is that nobody (neither Amnesty International, nor the European Court of Human Rights nor the Italian populace in general) maintains much faith in ‘the togas’, the judiciary. For its snail’s pace and contrary decisions, the Italian judiciary has recently been blacklisted by
Amnesty International, and in 1999 the country topped the list of condemnations from the European Court of Human Rights. By the end of that year, the European Court still had almost 7,000 cases to deal with from Italy, making up over 20% of its impending workload. Moreover, since the judiciary is politicised to a degree unthinkable in most modern democracies, Italian justice often looks more like ‘revolutionary justice’, like Robespierre and his sans-culottes dispatching a whimsical terror in all directions. Political enemies can be laid low not by ideological debate, but by a timely accusation, thereby subjecting them to the near-stagnant waters of the legal system (there’s no habeas corpus, very rarely a jury). That habit of sordid smear and political finger-pointing is called
giustizialismo
, and is one of the reasons why there’s such a breezy attitude to the lengthy criminal records many politicians have: if you point out that the Italian parliament (of 650 senators or deputies) currently has fifty politicians
inquisiti
(under investigation), people simply shrug: ‘the magistrates must be out to get them, that’s all’. Most people I spoke to, especially with regard to the Piazza Fontana trial, said that it was probably a case of a grudge, and that magistrates didn’t know the difference between
perseguire
and
perseguitare
(between ‘to pursue’ and ‘to persecute’).

Moreover it became obvious that the courts, like the Slaughter Commission, are acutely politicised. No one pretends to believe that the judiciary is separate from the legislature, so if someone receives a conviction it’s often treated not as a moral indictment but rather, say, like an electoral defeat: it’s a temporary set-back. They haven’t committed a crime, just had a decision go against them. People will forget about it. Increasingly, the Piazza Fontana trial seemed less a historical reconstruction, less a righting of historical wrongs, and more simply a continuation of politics by legal means. It wasn’t coincidental that the case arrived in court at a time when Italy had its first left-wing government since the war. The right, too, had obvious interests in the outcome of the trial. Despite the acute political sensitivity of the trial, two of Berlusconi’s
Forza Italia
parliamentarians were acting as defence lawyers in the case. One proudly donned his
Forza Italia
lapel-pin each day. There was no sense of a conflict
of interest, no need to separate judiciary and legislature. Pino Rauti, the Fascist politician whose organisation is accused of planting the bomb, was also recently in alliance with Berlusconi’s party for the European elections in 1999.

The other reason anything emerging from the togas is taken with a spoonful of salt is the culture of
pentitismo
. Originally intended to weaken the Red Brigades and then used to break the silence of
mafiosi
, (by allowing criminals the opportunity to ‘repent’ and to point the finger),
pentitismo
has by now become a simple mechanism to stitch up enemies. There are, at the time of writing, 1,171
pentiti
, suddenly turned from poachers into the judiciary’s most revered gamekeepers, and many have produced convictions which are little short of staggering. In the south, the smear normally used is involvement with Cosa Nostra; in the north it’s the suggestion that the accused participated in the
lotta
armata
, the armed struggle of the 1970s. In one infamous case in the 1980s, a
pentito
pointed the finger at a famous television presenter, Enzo Tortora, who he accused of being involved in dealing cocaine along with the
Camorra
, the Napolitan mafia. The case became another absurd show-trial, and Tortora was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He was later absolved, but died soon afterwards. On his urn were written the words of Leonardo Sciascia:
che non sia un’ illusione
, ‘Don’t let it be an illusion’.

In between hearings I watch a documentary from the late 1980s. The journalist is asking an Anarchist, the ‘monster’ first accused of planting the bomb and who was absolved in 1975, where or when the truth got lost. Pietro Valpreda, with a shock of grey hair from each temple, looks stern and says: ‘Immediately after the slaughter, as soon as the judges arrived from the powers in Rome … I believe that since then, the truth has totally disappeared … even though something continues to emerge, not in an active form, but in a negative form … not “I did” but “I don’t remember”, “I couldn’t have done …”’

The prosecution in the new trial alleges that the slaughter at the bank in Piazza Fontana was part of the programmatic terrorism
of Italian Fascists. ‘It’s probable,’ wrote Guido Salvini in his
Istruttoria
, the lengthy prosecution document which precedes any trial, ‘that the bombs of 12 December 1969 had the end of promoting a coup which was already planned for the end of 1969 on a wave of fear and disorientation which, as with the bombs on trains and in banks, affected ordinary citizens.’ Salvini identified
Ordine Nuovo
, the Fascist party then led by Pino Rauti, as ‘the prevalent structure responsible in terms of material execution for the attacks of 12 December 1969, and for those which preceded them and continued to operate … causing … the slaughter outside Milan’s questura on 17.5.1973, very probably the slaughter of Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, and the chain of major and minor attempts, including some near-slaughters on trains from the beginning of the 1980s’. A more catch-all accusation could hardly have been hoped for: over a decade of bombings laid at the door of the avowedly Fascist organisation,
Ordine Nuovo
and, indirectly, its leader, Pino Rauti.