In other words, neo-capitalism proposes values, models and directions, which one section of the young people destined to become part of the future leading class, reject and, at first, even reject the great ideologies.
The unification of this area of protest begins on the campuses and erupts in Berkeley, Paris, Tokyo, Prague, Berlin, Rome, Milan and so on. The times vary because the political and social situations are different, but the protest demonstrations in the American universities in ‘64 are equivalent to those of May in France or in Italy in the winter-spring of ’67-’68.
The first question to ask is why everywhere, and, therefore, also in Italy, the “68” came to an end so quickly and, above all, why was it that only in Italy, a wave of violence was generated which lasted until the first years of the 1980’s.
A first element of understanding could come from the following considerations. The Italian ’68 movement – which originated, and here it is necessary to be precise, as a student movement with no Marxist identity, but as a spontaneous and unitary group joined in the common cause of anti-authoritarianism in all its forms – was not able to produce, in subjective terms, a political executive capable of dealing with all the new problems arising in a fully developing country, as Italy was in that historical period.
The movement, furthermore, found no openings in any sectors of the society; not in the State apparatus, which merely resorted to repression, neither in the Communist left, not even in the more socialist and libertarian areas and finally, not in the Right wing party, which made the historical error on the 16th March 1968, harbinger of awful developments, of storming the University of Rome.
This type of movement, so isolated and weakened from its youthful struggles, nearing the end of its existence, finds one sole partial partner in the Italian working class, which takes to the streets for the most massive union strikes season of the after-war period.
And it is here, in this partial contamination that something paradoxical happens: a veritable exchange of genes.
The ideas of assemblies, direct participation, rejection of authority, typical of the ‘68’ student movement, become the innovative patrimony of an old and bureaucratized trade union – capable of renewal through the creation of “works councils” – which, in turn, transmit to the juvenile movement, all the worst traditions of the workers’ movement. In the first place, the connotations of ideologies, the sectarian attitude and the team logic.
It is an osmosis which will end in the “hot Autumn” for the one side and for the other side, in the death of the students’ movement, and the birth of those which were derogatorily called ‘little clumps’ and which inevitably, went on to join the strongest Western Communist Party.
As if this were not sufficient, the dying ’68 movement will find at the end of its path, the initial stage of the darkest period ever known by Republican Italy; the season of the bombs and massacres.


The variable intimidation massacres

On the 12th December 1969, the massacre of Piazza Fontana, besides representing an epoch-making date in recent Italian history, traumatically interrupts the course that the ’68 movement had only just begun. After that bomb, it becomes obligatory for the movement to ask itself some unexpected questions.

Before the 12th December massacre, the last street casualties had been: the student, Ardizzone, in Milan in 1962, killed in clashes with the Police during a demonstration of solidarity with the Spanish people; then the death of Paolo Rossi at the University of Rome in 1966; then the farm labourers killed at Avola and Battipaglia, in 1968, the following year. The deaths, unexpected and brutal, create a completely new distress: the anguish of the coup d’état .
Today, no-one would think of waking-up with the possibility of finding tanks at the front door. At that time, however, after the Greek experience of two years previously, the military coup d’état was an everyday topic. The bomb in Piazza Fontana results in posing an enormous problem to large sectors of the young people: the defence of the conquered democratic liberties versus the hypothesis of a subversive Right wing solution, the military take-over.
It is in this context – which here, we are only able to synthesize – that the seeds of the most brutal violence start to germinate. In the young, both from the Left and the Right, the logic of political belonging begins to cloak itself with ideological fanaticism.
For tens of thousands of the young, the political commitment becomes political militarism. What was a variegated, but substantially united movement becomes a scattered archipelagos of acronyms and symbols, all with the hammer and sickle, each one dedicated to a single goal; the fight for hegemony.
At the same time, the cyclic phase of the fascism – anti-fascism clash begins. A struggle which, on the Left, is based entirely on the revival of the Resistance values, but a militant anti-fascism in which the spirit of the Resistance is understood only as a factor of force and hardness. An ideological revival with no innovation, following the old theme of the betrayed Resistance.
On the other side is the Right wing youth, besieged within their minority condition; besides being a physical siege, it is also a cultural and political one. The beginning of the 70’s, for the Right wing youth, represents an extremely poor period with regard to political penetration. What proposal can oppose the young Left movements which are permeating even the ‘fashion’; which find space in the media; which are certainly more able to attract with their revolutionary ideas. Are the traditional values of the Country, the flag, the family and honour sufficient, when from the other side of the barricade, concepts which have the merit of modernity and a certain transgression, typical of these values, are offered?
In this context, violence becomes the core of everything, both for the Left and the Right. The year of the turn to violence will be 1972.


A violent generation?

The Seventies: a violent generation? Or rather, violent years because they are thwart with tensions which are the result of a society in rapid transformation? Where does violence harbour? Where does it germinate? In ideologies? In the activities of a negligible subversive minority? Or is violence a necessity to oppose repression? Violence as part of a project? Or violence as a catharsis towards a world which is not liked? Is there a distinction between violence and violence? Is the violence of the masses right? And individual violence? And the violence of power? Does a necessary and justifiable violence exist?
The new Left, in their groups, will rack their brains over these questions for a whole decade, finishing up by distinguishing between the violence “of reaction” (and, therefore, “right” and “necessary”) and that of “initiative” (and, thus, “wrong”or, at least, to be discussed case by case).
The extreme and young Right, already impregnated – or at least, according to their profile image - with the concept of violence, does not seem to pose the problem from a theoretical standpoint, occupied, as it is, with self-defence which, often, takes the form of aggressive raids with an end in themselves.
Although there is someone who, from his point off view, has resolved all the relative problems. Someone who is at the Left, or better still, at the extreme Left.
On the 3rd of March 1972, a commando of three men kidnap Idalgo Macchiarini, an executive engineer of the SIT Siemens company. The Red Brigades, following a series of small actions, enter with great clamour on the Italian political scene, a stage they will hold for 12 years as foreground actors and still, at the beginning of the second millennium, as macabre figures of terror.
Eight days later, on the 11th March, 1972, Milan experiences ( for the first time in such a widespread way), a violent episode of urban guerrilla fighting. A street demonstration, organized by the extra-parliamentary Left, degenerates into clashes with the police. The militants of the Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power), in particular, respond blow for blow, transforming the centre of Milan into a battleground. A passerby, pensioner, Giuseppe Tavecchio, dies, after being hit in the head by a tear gas rocket, fired by the police.
It is certainly not the first time that militants from the extreme Left have clashed with police, but it is, absolutely, the first time that the clashes seem planned in advanced by the Left demonstration supervisors of the extra- parliamentary groups.
Yet something similar had happened, already although with less resonance, three months earlier, on the 12th December, exactly, 1971.
From 1970 on, the date of the 12th December, the anniversary of the Piazza Fontana massacre, becomes a difficult and dramatic date. The very same day in 1970, one year earlier in Milan, a student from Abruzzi, Saverio Saltarelli, militant of the Student Movement at the State University, was killed by a tear gas rocket, fired at man’s height, by the police.
The following year, the 12th December of 1971, coincides with the elections for the President of the Republic, at the end of Saragat’s septennial as President and the open question of the candidature of Fanfani. “Lotta Continua” (the Continuing Struggle) and The Manifesto, two more organizations which were then called the “New Left”, had launched the “Fanfascism” campaign against Fanfani as Head of State.
It was, therefore, a moment of particular political tension. On this 12th of December, a great street demonstration is organized in Milan. The town, on this occasion, is literally encircled by police and Carabinieri. From all over Italy thousands of people converge on Milan.
However, during the night preceding the demonstration, a double rift within the “Committee against the massacres of State” arises, composed off all the major groups of the extra-parliamentary Left. The dilemma is the following: The Police Force will not tolerate any procession, but will consent to a meeting at the University city, which is quite far from the centre of Milan. Then, what is to be done? To accept only the meeting, or physically defy the prohibition?
The first rift arises with the group of The Manifesto which, though not disassociating itself from the demonstration, abandons the Committee and no longer attends the organizational meetings. The second rift, instead, arises within the Committee itself, between ‘Lotta Continua’ and ‘Potere Operaio’. ‘Lotta Continua’ sustain that it would be folly to go to the confrontation. ‘Potere Operaio’, on the contrary, affirms the opposite and feels that a physical encounter is, by now, indispensable. There are indeed clashes the next day, but with no irreparable consequences. The final split which will happen in the subsequent years had its warning signals in that terrible night between the 11th and 12th of December, 1971. And the way in which this split commences to manifest itself is on the 11th March, 1972, with the guerrilla fighting in the centre of Milan.


That infernal march of 1972

In that month of March, three profoundly correlated episodes occur. Two we have already seen: the 3rd of March the Red Brigades kidnap Macchiarini; the 11th of March there are street clashes in Milan.
Just four days later, on the 15th of March, under a high voltage pylon, in Segrate, near Milan, the torn and broken body of the editor, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli is found, having died the night previously after the bomb that he himself was placing, exploded. Between these three facts - happening within the arc of 12 days - the connection is a very deep one. Not that there is any relation between the kidnapping of Macchiarini and the clashes of the 11th of March, but it is the third fact, the death of Feltrinelli which is connected to the other two incidents.
In the atmosphere of Spring 1972, close to the political election campaign of the 7th of May, the first elections in Italy to be held in advance, a fact to which we are now accustomed, but then it represented something quite traumatic. Feltrinelli has been obsessed with the idea of a coup d’état, a problem which he has been systematically pursuing since 1968-69.
When the Red Brigades come out into the open and the first concrete episode of mass violence takes place, Feltrinelli feels cut out of the scenario, and decides to mine a high voltage pylon to demonstrate that he is also capable of taking action.
It is then, between the Winter of ’71 and Spring ‘72, that the problem of violence, of its use, of its quality, becomes a very burning question, a problem to solve for the extra -parliamentary Left.


The Calabresi murder

Two shots fired at the nape of the neck of a police officer, on the 17th of May 1972, are a symbol, even today, of a mystery, both historical and political, perhaps, destined to stay unsolved, for a long time.
That 17th of May, exactly ten days after the early elections, Police Inspector Luigi Calabresi is ambushed, the man who had started the investigations on the Piazza Fontana massacre, by arresting Valpreda, accusing the anarchists and following the Red trail to the bomb in the ‘banca dell’Agricoltura’.
Calabresi was the policeman most hated by the whole extra-parliamentary Left, which considerd him responsible for the death of another anarchist, Giuseppe Pinelli – thrown out of a window.
The official had become, in a very short time, the symbol of a sullen, intriguing and obscure State, protecting its own immutability. The tangible symbol of: the persecution of the Left, the dangers of a coup d’état, the attack on any project for change (still chaotic and embryonic). Luigi Calabresi was for many, the “enemy of the proletariat”.
This is not the place to go over an assassination which has had a long and controversial judicial story, but it is without doubt that the Calabresi murder represents the affirmation of an ongoing and, seemingly, ceaseless violence in Italy.
Also in the sector of the young Right, at the time, street violence is the order of the day. But, certainly, it is not a topic to be discussed at the tenth congress of the MSI, held at the Palaeur in Rome from the 18th to the 21st of January 1973, where the party of Almirante chooses to wear the famous “double breasted jacket”.
It is the actual taking place of the MSI – DN congress which offers to the extreme Left, a pretext for mobilization. The “militant anti-fascism” returns to actuality. A huge demonstration is organized in the capital, on the password: “18th of January: red flags in Rome”.
A procession shouting “Andreotti, Almirante the gallows are many” moves from the doors of San Paolo, a place selected as an anti-fascist symbol, the place of an attack, in July 1960, against parliament members of the Left, who were leading a demonstration against the Tambroni government which intended to allow the MSI congress to be held in Genoa, a gold medal city of the “Resistance”. The procession attempts to enter the via Ostiense to reach the EUR district where the MSI congress is in course, but clashes violently with the police force.
On the 23rd of January, also Milan is involved in the theme of anti fascism: the student , Roberto Franceschi, a militant of the University Student Movement is killed by a bullet, in front of the Bocconi University, during clashes with the police, during the course of a demonstration against the neo-fascism which in Milan has, for some time, returned daily, to the streets.


The black thursday of Milan

The meeting place of Milan’s extreme Right: Piazza San Babila, in the heart of the city, where a large number of young people meet. They are called the “sanbabilini”. The fire is smouldering under the ashes. On the 7th of April, the massacre policy just misses a slaughter. In the toilette of the Turin - Rome train, a bomb explodes in the hands of Nico Azzi, a young Right extremist of the “Fenice” group. Azzi was placing the bomb, after walking along the compartments with other comrades, keeping well in sight the newspaper, “Lotta Continua” in the hope that his action will be attributed to them. The clamour raised by the near tragedy was like a sledge-hammer blow to the Right environment and from the Left, there were those who asked for the dislodgement of the MSI-DN from political life.
To react to the renewed sense of isolation, the Right wing militants (so-called missini) decide to organize for the 12th April, 1973, in Milan, a demonstration “against violence”, the likes of which had not been seen from the Right, for years. It is a story that deserves to be recounted in detail, a real boomerang initiative, a tragedy which will throw the MSI-DN into chaos, leaving on the pavement, in a pool of blood, a young policeman from the south: Antonio Marino, killed by a bomb thrown from the neo-fascist procession.


The fire of Primavalle

Only four days have passed and the horror rebounds on Rome from the opposite political front: three militants from the Potere Operaio, grouped in a so-called “Tanas Brigade”, decide to bring the revolution to the suburbs, setting fire to the house of the secretary of the MSI section of Primavalle.
The Mattei family, consumed with hatred, will see two of their six sons burn alive: it is the fire of Primavalle, a wound that is still open in the conscience of many, from both the Right and the Left. The Primavalle fire can be considered, beyond any doubt, the first terrorist attack in Italy with homicidal intentions.

It is strange that in a country which will see in the subsequent years, the exponential growth of the blackest and most ruthless Red terrorism, aimed at the physical elimination of its adversaries, that the first real incident of bloodshed will not be perpetrated by an organized clandestine formation, but by a small handful of violence lovers, who fit, perfectly, into the everyday life of society.
The Primavalle fire is also the causative factor of a political feud which, particularly in the Capital, will go on for years: one of the first effects will be seen on the 28th of February 1975, four days after the beginning of the trial, in the first degree, against the three responsible for the fire: during incidents created by Left militants, the Greek student, a Right militant, Mikis Mantakas, dies. Those who killed him were two future terrorists: Fabrizio Panzieri and Alvaro Lojacono. This last will be, three years later, one of the Red Brigades commandos who kidnapped Aldo Moro in Via Fani, after having exterminated his escort.
It is the Primavalle fire which produced a sort of genetic mutation in the training sectors from where the three arsonists came.
It is, in fact, the very group, Potere Operaio, in 1973 which generated, by its own dissolution, that violent zone, which will finish by being called the area of “workers’ autonomy”. It was not an organized group, but a sort of network of violence which took root, in a very short time, in towns like Rome, Milan, Padova, Turin and Bologna and that will have its own eruption within another movement, that of 1977.
1973 is also the year when another group, the Lotta Continua, suffers a severe haemorrhage of militants, particularly in the south, towards the area of the armed fight: NAP, (Armed Proletarian Nuclei), which will have a short-lived, but very bloody existence.
The Chilean coup d’état, in the same year, will furnish one more alibi to those of the Left who intend to follow the road of violence; the defeat of the democratic project of Allende convinces quite a few of the young far-Left that the parliamentary way has no future and that it is necessary to take-up arms. One more ‘leap in the dark’.


In the vortex of the feud

Violence punctually explodes again, in the first months of 1975, just when the Red Brigades, decimated by arrests, look like a phenomenon in the last phase of exhaustion.
It is singular, but perfectly explicable, this swing between vanguard actions (those of the R.B. or other little armed groups) and mass violence. The two phenomena are far apart: the first overwhelms the second, the second finds spaces of expression in the silence of the first. It will also be this way during the hottest period of the movement of ‘77.
Not even two weeks after the assassination in Rome of Miky Mantakas, on the 13th of March, in Milan, the student Sergio Ramelli, just 17 years old, militant of the Fronte della Gioventù (Front Line of the Youth) is attacked by an “order-keeping” group of the Avanguardia Operaia (Workers’ Vanguard) with an adjustable spanner.... (he will die after 48 days of agony).
Always in Milan, where iron-bar beatings between the Workers Autonomy and the Movement of Workers for Socialism (MLS, the group which has replaced the defunct Student Movement of the University) are now the order of the day; on 15th of April, a young boy of the Right wing, shoots and kills Claudio Varalli, militant of the extreme Left.
The prairie is ready for the great fire. As has not happened for long time, the cities are crossed by processions of the extra-parliamentary Left, and in their ranks, perfectly organized, the ‘autonomies’ have an easy chance. The day after the murder of Varalli, during an attempt to assault the MSI Milan Federation, by a part of a procession, consisting predominantly of toughs from the ‘autonomia’, there is another victim: Giannino Zibecchi, of the CAF (Anti fascist Committee), who dies after being run-over by a Carabiniere truck in tournament.
But the Spring of death is not yet finished. In the same April, in Turin, a manager of Lotta Continua, Tonino Miccichè, is shot dead by a watchman, activist of CISNAL, during a house occupation. In Florence, the police open fire during clashes with groups of the ‘autonomia’: Rodolfo Boschi, PCI militant is killed.
In Rome, during an assault on the Flaminio section of the MSI, Sirio Paccino, a militant of the ‘autonomia’, is paralysed after being hit by a bullet in the spine. Still in Rome, but in October, the 16 year-old Mario Zicchieri, militant of the Front Line Of Youth, dies: he is shot from a running car which passes in front of the peripheral section of Prenestino; for reprisal, the following day, another very young man, Antonio Corrado is killed, “guilty” of resembling a Lotta Continua member.
The “militant antifascism” , never completely extinguished, returns, once more, with the rising political tensions of the young. It is mainly, a physical response, which returns cyclically, in the 70’s, whenever a serious fact occurs that involves directly or indirectly, the Right wing. Yet this time, the phenomenon assumes a much more important character. It is an attitude which brushes up the “Resistance” values, not only at a political level but also in common behaviour. Many, in the ranks of the ‘autonomia’, but also in other groups, behave as if they wore the partisan clothes again, as if they there were still a war and the fascists were still in power. In Milan, in particular, beside the ‘autonomia’ buildings, gathered around the “Red” newspaper, different groups meet in the clubs of “Senza Tregua” (No Truce).
It is in this very period that, in Rome, the Workers’ Autonomy Committee of Via del Volsci, give themselves a para-military structure and lay down a hierarchical system for their political group. In this same period, in Turin, the haemorrhage starts, which from Continuous Struggle, through the autonomous circles, will bring many militants to the Front Line.


The political elections of 1976

The worst is yet to come. The 1976 turning point is the early political elections of the 20th of July. Italy is governed by the 5th Moro government (a DC one-party government) taken-over from the 4th Moro (DC – PRI), after which, in January, the socialists, withdraw their external support and the country has the incumbent shadow of the Lockheed scandal, with Rumor compromised and the DC and the centre parties very ill-at-ease.
In the wake of the Regional elections, the previous year, there are some who expect a communist victory; something that does not take place. Macroscopic, as much as unexpected, is the defeat of the new Left, all gathered, (also the Lotta Continua) under the symbol of Democrazia Proletaria (little more than half a million votes, equal to 1,6 % with only six parliament members).
At the beginning of November 1976, the Lotta Continua holds its national congress at Rimini: it will be the last. Also the Manifesto and the Avanguardia Operaia enter into a definite crisis. Overwhelmed by the break-up and death of the groups, by the growth of Autonomia Operaia and by phenomenon like the feminist movement, what is left of the ’68 movement is by now considered ineffectual and, therefore, lacking any reference point and political control.
The experience of the “new Left”, heir of the ’68, eight years after the students’ great movement, can be considered, definitively, ended.
The disappointment is deep everywhere. For some, it is even dramatic. Groups of the ‘autonomia’ – which, during the course of the year have become stronger, install themselves in the peripheral and poorest areas of the great towns, where they collect the electricity and telephone bills to affect self-made reductions and promote the occupation of houses – feel that they are the only winners.
During the election campaign the ‘autonomia’ jeer with the abstention policy: “Our vote is the struggle”. And now they were harvesting the first fruits. Between October and December of 1976, new circles in the ‘autonomia’ area are growing like mushrooms.
In Turin, Rome, Bologna, Padua, as well as in Naples, Florence and Genoa, a network spreads and attracts disappointed militants who acknowledge the political defeat of the project of the groups, who do not understand the “austerity” proposed by PCI, which now oppose the growing “national solidarity” . which advance ideas that are always more Utopian: that of the social opposition, of the revolutionary change.
Thus the marshes of ‘autonomia’ fill with political tensions and juvenile neuroses. The fogs of vague rebellions and existential frustrations rise, but the generalized violent option is not yet prevalent.
Looked at from afar, as a movement, the ‘autonomia’ area seems like a cane field beaten by the wind, but from close up, it seems like the circles in the pond when a stone is thrown. Everywhere, as an obvious consequence, violence sleeps under a heap of heterogeneous pulsations. However the “crazy elements”, in particular, in Milan, but also in Turin, are already on the attack.
In Milan, who rides the tiger of the Young Circles of the Proletariat are the magazine, “Rosso” and the selected group of “No Truce”; smithies of the future terrorists of Prima Linea (Front Line) who have the fixation of the militant anti-fascism.
On the 29th of April 1976, a commando of the Front Line, shoots to death a MSI member of the city council, Enrico Pedenovi. A ‘simple’ reprisal for the neo-fascist attack against extreme left militants two days previously (the young Gaetano Amoroso will die in hospital on April the 30th). The choice of Pedenovi is utterly casual - because he is an easy target. He is a bank employee, with fixed hours and habits. Similar to the Primavalle carnage of three years before, the Pedenovi assassination is another consistent symptom of diffused terrorism. The two facts have in common the refrain of antifascism “at any cost”, conceived as exemplary practice and facility of the objective.
It is a form of violence which will grow with geometrical progression on these two bases to which another characteristic will be added: it has no need of structures, discussions, strategies, documents, political or strategic direction. It is sufficient to be in three to start an armed fight, as liberating in its simplicity as it is in its futility.
On the 16th of December 1976, even the most sceptical can understand that the rebellion is about to explode: hundreds of young people, singing the “International” follow the funeral of Walter Alasia, a young R.B. militant, killed in a shooting with the police, in Sesto S. Giovanni. The same day, processions move through Milan protesting against the bomb exploded in Piazza Arnaldo da Brescia; they shout: “Walter, Martino, you have not died in vain, we shall soon take up your machine gun” (Martino is M. Zicchitella, died in Rome during a NAP ambush at the head of the anti-terrorism for Lazio, Alfonso Noce NDA).


The Prairie of the ‘77

The matches which ignite the prairie of the ’77 movement are many. But they are matches which transform small fires, apparently circumscribed, into an uncontrollable blaze. It is as if the dry and withered prairie is waiting for nothing else, but to be ignited.
As in ’68, the rebellion explodes within the Universities.
The first match is lit by a circular letter from the Ministry of Public Education, the “Malfatti” letter”. In January the minister informs the University Deans that the students will not be allowed to repeat more than one exam of the same subject, while the Andreotti government is inclined to propose a limited number of students for some Faculties.
The dissatisfaction explodes. The first University to be occupied is that of Palermo. Then the protest moves to Rome. It is the first signal.
The new cultural trends based on the “need theory” and on the superficial readings of Agnes Heller and Michel Faucault, gain ground rapidly.
Also in Rome, the “metropolis Indians” are born: they paint their faces, they dance ’ring around the roses’, singing and dancing they use the arm of irony. The force which units them is anguish, provocation, students’ fun and existentialism.
Beside the “metropolis Indians” are the feminists and then the ex-militants of the groups, the ’68 boys coming back and, further down the road, the ‘autonomia’; they all have the common dominator of being out of and against the political parties.
On the 1st of February, the prairie fire extends; a group of Right wing extremists, mostly of FUAN, some wearing masks, in two processions, enter the University of Rome throwing Molotov bottles in front of the Dean’s offices, and then pass on to the faculties of Law and Statistics.
They are all very young and, even if neo-fascists, they do not hate the budding ’77 movement, as their elder brothers did with the ’68. Certainly, they do not love it, but the opposition, this time, has new characteristics. It is not merely coincidence that after the raid of the 1st February, the hard clash between the Right and Left will reappear only on the 30th of September of the same year (assassination of Walter Rossi), when the ’77 movement is now in an open phase of regression.
In fact, for almost all of ’77, the Right will assume an attitude of “prudent observation”.
The neo- fascist raid at the University has the effect of a detonator: the extremely hard encounter leaves on the ground, dying from a gunshot wound to the head, Left wing student, Guido Bellachioma. On the 2nd of February, for the first time, the movement leaves the University as Minister Malfatti withdraws his ill-famed circular.
But by now, the fight has taken a new turn. Thousands of young people, in procession, trying to reach the “den of the fascists” in Sommacampagna street, not far from the University. It is a spontaneous demonstration, but the ‘autonomia’ know how to handle the procession. Molotov bottles are thrown in front of the seat of the Fronte della Gioventù (The Youth Front); Police charge and the students disperse; the balance of the day is appalling: the police agent Arboletti is wounded and will be paralysed for life; two young ‘autonomia’ of the Via Volsci Group, are seriously wounded: they are Paolo Tommasini and Leonardo Fortuna. They are 24 and 22 years old. A search reveals that they are carrying a Smith & Wesson cal. 38 and one cal. 7.65.
On the 15th of February, the PCI – which had charged the newly born movement with “diciannovismo” (reference to 1919 when the fascist party took to the streets) – made a big mistake of under-estimation: the militants of the PCI flood the University with leaflets, demanding “the restoration of democratic life” and announce a rally for the 17th of February, the last Thursday of Carnival, within the University campus with Luciano Lama, the CGIL union secretary as speaker.
The movement mobilizes: It is the “Black Thursday”. At 10 am, Lama arrives with a Head of State escort. During the Unions’ leader speech, a very violent erruption, lead by the ‘autonomia’ sweeps away the PCI control service. Calm is restored only when the escort has bodily dragged Lama out of the campus.
At 17,40 of that “Black Thursday” the police evacuate the University campus. For 11 days the University will remain closed. On the 5th of March there are still clashes between movement and police in the streets of Rome: Molotovs, pistol shots, cars capsized and set alight, shop windows broken. And in another explosion of blind irrationality, Police Agent Passamonti loses his life, where, once more, the ‘autonomia’ plays the card of violence in the shadow of the movement.
On the 11th of March, on the eve of the national demonstration of the movement in Rome, a student of the Lotta Continua, Francesco Lorusso dies in Bologna, hit in the back by a bullet fired by a platoon of Carabinieri, during an assault on an Assembly for ‘Communion and e Liberation’.
Bologna “the red”, Bologna “the fat and tranquil”, is hit by an unexpected wave of violence and rage.
The symbols of the opulence of Bologna are devastated. Police and Carabinieri evacuate the University and at night the armoured cars patrol Piazza Maggiore.

The next day, Rome is a city which breaths anguish. It is the 12th of March, a Saturday afternoon, rainy and gloomy. The town is silent when 100.000 youths, arrived from every part of Italy, start to march. Traffic is blocked, shops are shut. Police and Carabinieri, in fighting gear, wearing bullet-proof suits and jackets, garrison the town, but with discretion. The end of the procession has yet to move when the spark flies: a group of the ‘autonomia’ from Bologna, using the feminist trunk of the procession as camouflage, throws Molotov bottles against the seat of the DC party in Piazza del Gesù. At the first police charges, the procession wavers, backs up, and disperses.
Amidst the smoke of tear gas, violence spreads through the streets of the town centre. More shop windows smashed; improvised barricades and gun fire. A weapons shop will be looted.


The death of the ’77 movement

The 12th of March marks within the movement, the beginning of the crisis and a first substantial moment of regression. It is not only the use of violence which creates divisions, but above all, it’s the abusive use of power for an end in itself, as was done by the ‘autonomia’. It then emerges in many areas the sensation that one is becoming a prisoner of the spiral, ‘procession – repression – procession’ and that everything is being reduced to a losing contest of strength with the State.
At this point, the movement is in agony but its tragedies are not ended: on the 12th of May, during a demonstration forbidden by the police, but notwithstanding, organized by the Radical Party in Rome for the 3rd anniversary of the “NO” to the abortion referendum, a young student, Giorgiana Masi is killed. Two plain-clothes agents from the Police head-quarters of Rome will be charged.
Two days later, in Milan, a group of the ‘autonomia’ leave a procession which is protesting against the Rome homicide and fire at a police squad – Police Agent Antonino Custrà dies.
At this point, the only theme which will animate the juvenile groups that started the ’77 movement, will be that of the “armoured democracy” and of the “liberticide laws” (the suppression of civil liberty,) on which subjects, the Radicals start a signature collection for a referendum, while Lotta Continua calls for a “Meeting Against Repression”, on the 23rd, 24th and 25th of September in Bologna, with the participation of thousands of young people, together with many intellectuals from the other side of the Alps like Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beavouir, Felix Guattari.
In Bologna, the movement seems recomposed in its more gaily-coloured aspect. The ‘autonomia’ is relegated to the sport palace where they openly discuss the armed struggle with many R.B observers.
One last ember of tension flares up in Rome and during a clash among the young of the Right and Left, a militant youth of the Lotta Continua, Walter Rossi is killed.
But the next day, the horrible death in Turin, of Robert De Crescenzio, an immigrant from the south, guilty only of being in a bar considered a ‘fascists’ den’ will generate a long phase of reflection and self criticism by what remains of the once new Left.
De Crescenzio is burnt alive by a Molotov launched by some fragment of the procession manifesting for the death of Walter Rossi. An atrocious death.
From this moment, there will no longer exist in Italy, any mass movement to the left of the PCI.


A long wake of blood

In the years which remain until the end of the decade, there will only be ‘drop by drop’ incidents, but none the less atrocious, of personal vendettas between the two formations: still anti-fascism and anti-communism, both “militant”.
With a blood chilling close of 1980, practically the last incidents, except for isolated episodes, of youth violence manifests itself, in all its turgidity. One fact only is sufficient to recount that tragic year: in the first three month, there is one politically motivated murder every four days.
1980 is also the year, which will be revealed decisive as a starting point; for the defeat of any political hypothesis of armed strife. But above all, it is the year of the most alarming puzzles, of crimes where even the matrix of the murder becomes indecipherable.
The death load which terrorism has been carrying, as its interior essence, for the last ten years, has slowly shifted: from the largest armed organizations it has slipped headlong onto the flat level of the every-day life of hundreds, perhaps thousands of young people.
From the closed environment of strategic directions, of the columns, of large or small clandestine groups, the subversive phenomenon has started to spread in a disordered manner. It has fed the diffused terrorism first, that of the “it takes three to be an armed group” , then slipping into the little lives of the high school youth, into the most absurd feuds, all centred on traditional political rivalry, which becomes interminable gang warfare.
The dramatic representation of a head-on clash between an armed organization and the State, filters until it reproduces itself within the microcosm of the Left groups of the neighbourhood, who feel that they are still “the Movement” (with a capital M) even though the movement, emerging from the ruin of the ’77, has been dead and buried for a long time.
In the same way, on the Right, where the spontaneous foolish ambitions of the NAR reach the point of feeding the illusions of desperate young people who live in the exaltation of the myths of the past.
The clash between R.B. and the State ended by suffocating everything to the left of the Communist Party (PCI) and to convince people who are not terrorist – and perhaps, in their green years, never felt like being one – that their political space does not exist beyond possessing a gun and believing that to fight does not mean to build consensus around their ideas, but only to destroy the enemy.
The same thing has happened to the Right in all these years, perhaps with major acceleration, because to the right of the MSI there is nothing left and also before, there had always been very little. In those little worlds which are the many neighbourhoods of the large towns, every insignificant symbol is magnified out of proportion, by both one side and the other.
The innocuous DC section, almost always shut, becomes the Power; the barracks of the carabinieri with three men and a sergeant, the State, while in the “fascist” or “communist” who live around the corner and perhaps, even frequent the same school, materialize the idea of the ‘enemy’, which must be fought.
As if they were at war, who abandons the group is a “traitor” and the words ‘anonymous informer’ assume the connotation of the greatest infamy, punishable only by death. Then, of course, the “vendetta” is a plate which must always be served hot.
Little stories which become immense tragedies. And, in some cases, the tragedies remain obscure crimes, unsolved murders and real blood mysteries.