The Dark Heart of Italy (5 page)

Now, more than three decades after the original explosion, a new trial (the eighth) has started. Cynics within the press have denounced it as at best a chasing of shadows which left the scene a long, long time ago, or – at worst – an irresponsible rearguard action by the left, still bearing unfounded grudges against former Fascists and their friends in Berlusconi’s (then) opposition coalition. The trial, say the cynics, has come too late to be of either relevance or consolation. By now the events of 1969 are so distant that they appear like fossilised ancestors, to be regarded with nostalgia or ridicule, or else ignored. For others, though, Piazza Fontana contains a Shoah-like symbolism, such an obscene departure from normality that they are compelled to bear witness, repeatedly retelling the events and the accusations. Some of the weary campaigners on the left even suggest that there is an active, historical denial of the truth, and that Piazza Fontana has deliberately been turned into a distant event – Piazza Lontana, or Piazza ‘Far Away’.

The Piazza Fontana trial was, like the Slaughter Commission, an opportunity to watch history being written and rewritten, squabbled over by those politicians who were under accusation, or else defending the accused. The extraordinary thing was that nowhere was there anything resembling a consensus about the most simple facts. Everyone is agreed that the Piazza Fontana bomb changed forever the direction of Italian history, but thereafter the country’s left and right diverge irreconcilably. Even in debating an event from 1969, any compromise is impossible. The very mention of Piazza Fontana only serves to antagonise the country’s right and left and to set off snarling from both sides of parliament. I couldn’t understand why, so long after the event happened, it still meant so much to so many people. After all, the number of victims, in a crude mathematical count, looked small compared to other atrocities all over the globe.

There was only one phrase from the Slaughter Commission
that hinted at why Piazza Fontana was so important. During the entire post-war period (in the words of the President of the Commission) neither of Italy’s warring halves ever quite ‘took their fingers off the trigger’. It was a melodramatic sentence, but it was exactly what I had been told by endless Italians. Ever since 8 September 1943, they said, there had been (if only between the most extreme halves of the country) a civil war.

On 10 July 1943 the Allied powers landed in Sicily, from there to
begin the bombardment of Rome (on the 19th). Within a week,
Benito Mussolini’s twenty-one year rule was over: a meeting of the
Gran Consiglio del Fascismo
in Rome had passed a motion critical
of the Duce by nineteen votes to seven, and the next day, 25 July, King
Vittorio Emanuele III forced Mussolini’s resignation. After the s
o-
called ‘Forty-Five Days’ of limbo between opposing powers, and as
Eisenhower was disembarking his troops south of Rome in Salerno,
Italy signed an armistice of unconditional surrender to the Allies.
On the same day, 8 September, Marshal
Badoglio
announced the
armistice to the Italian people, urging them no longer to fight the
Allies. The
voltafaccia
was completed on 30 October, the date on
which the King declared war on Italy’s former ally, Germany
.

For the next eighteen months, until the liberation day proper of 25
April 1945, the country experienced the full throes of civil war.
Benito Mussolini had been arrested and imprisoned on the Gran
Sasso mountain in the Abruzzi. In a glider and parachute operation
headed by the SS commander Otto
Skorzeny
, he had been rescued
and established at the head of the
Repubblica Sociale Italiana,
or
‘Republic of Salò’, based near Italy’s northern border on the shores of
Lake Garda. Its dominion, protected by what became known as the
Gothic Line, reached as far south as Rome (which had fallen to the
Germans
) and Naples. Further to the south were the Allies, beginning
their tortuous advance up the peninsula
.

Italians were caught between the Allies in the south, and
Germany in the north: given the side-swapping of Vittorio Emanuele
and Marshal
Badoglio
, it was difficult for the Italian populace – both
civilian and military – to be sure quite which was now the legitimate
regime. It was in that almost existentialist vacuum that the civil war
was born: a sense of uncertainty as to what or who actually represented
the real Italy. The poignancy of the conflict was guaranteed by
the fact that both sides, those faithful to the German regime and the
partisans aligned against them, could present the other as the party
guilty of betrayal. For the former, the partisans were classic turncoats
(
voltagabbana
), simply opportunists who betrayed both
Mussolini and Italy; for those partisans, however, the supporters of
the Repubblica di Salò had betrayed king and country, preferring to
side with
Hitler’s
Nazi-Fascists
.

As many as 82,000 people took a direct part in the partisan war in
the north. The
Comitati di Liberazione Nazionale
established a few
independent republics in the north of the country. The pockets of
resistance were recognised by the Allies in the Protocols of Rome in
December 1944, granting the Resistance a subsidy of 160 million lire
a month; the
CLNAI
, for its part, became subject to the orders of the
Supreme Allied Command. The ferocity of the Fascist reprisals in
Italy is well documented, and succinctly epitomised in the German
commander
Reder’s
‘March of Death’. Beginning on 12 August 1944
at
Sant’ Anna
di
Stazzema
, where 560 men, women and children
were massacred, it continued until its conclusion on
1
October at
Marzabotto
, which lost
1
,830 of its population. Nor were the atrocities
simply committed by the one side: on 6 July 1945 (almost three
months after the Italian liberation) a group of former Resistance
fighters executed 51 Fascist prisoners in
Schio
. Long after the
armistice, partisans across Italy were still executing Fascists who
had been regional commanders during the war, or even the
‘philosophers’ of the regime
.

Those two years of civil war are central to any understanding of
Piazza Fontana, and of the subsequent era of ‘civil war’ (the terrorism
of the
anni di piombo
).
In both periods it was northern Italy that was
the battleground for the political soul of the country. The periods even
shared some of the same protagonists, because many of the Fascists
agitating for an alternative politics in the post-war years (Prince Junio
Valerio Borghese or Pino Rauti) had been ‘blooded’ during
Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. Moreover, the knee-jerk resort to violence
between 1943 and 1945 left ‘the country with a residue of political terrorism,
inspired by Anarchist, Fascist and Communist doctrines, as
well as some scores to be settled by the adherents of those doctrines’
.
2
Also, and vitally, the civil war offered a precedent of civilians taking up
arms against a rotten body politic, beginning a debate about the
morality of resistance. It was a debate invoked decades later, as people
began to ask ‘how and why violence is legitimate when it has to be
practised without an obvious institutional cover …
’
3

For many on the left, Italy’s post-war politics was the perfect
example that there was unfinished business from the civil war. So
quickly was Italian and German Fascism replaced by Russian
Communism as the international
bête
noire
, so keen were the Allies
to check Italy’s partisan ‘wind of the north’, that immediately after
the war ‘the social groups which had supported the Fascist regime …
managed to climb back into their former positions of influence’.
4
The
vast cracks in Italian society were swiftly papered over. An amnesty
for 40,000 Fascists who had committed horrors during the civil war
was announced in 1946; only those guilty of ‘especially heinous
crimes’ were excluded from the amnesty. In one, infamous example,
the gang rape by ‘Black Brigadeers’ of a partisan woman wasn’t considered
sufficiently heinous; in the words of the judge ‘such a beastly
act is not torture, but only the worst offence that can be made against
a
woman’s
honour and modesty, even if she was somewhat “free”
having been a partisan messenger
.’
5

The theory was to
colpire in alto, indulgere in basso,
to indict
Fascist leaders but indulge the foot-soldiers. Rarely, however, were even
those in the highest military and political ranks indicted. Studies of the
post-war period revealed a continuity of personnel between Mussolini’s
ventennio
(twenty years) and Italy’s First Republic: in 1960, for example,
of the 64 first-class provincial prefects, all but two had served under
Fascism, as had all 241 deputy prefects, and 135
questori
(provincial
chiefs of the state police). As late as 1973, 95% of senior civil servants
had been appointed to the service before the fall of Mussolini.
6
In
another example, a former officer of
OVRA
, Mussolini’s secret police,
was given a post at the Ministry of the Interior.

The stumbling block of Italy’s post-war democracy was thus a
widespread sense that there had been a
tradimento,
that Italy had
betrayed the partisan members of her population. There was a
belief, as one historian has it, that ‘the ideals of the Resistance
were excluded from the so-called democratic and parliamentary
compromise, which had even reached a pact with the neo-Fascist
right, represented by the
Movimento Sociale Italiano.’
7
The MSI
was for more than fifty years the symbol of the Italian state still
flirting with Fascism. To many, its very existence was an obvious
example of the inability of Italy to remember her dark past. In July
1960, for example, the party organised a conference in Genoa, and
announced that it was to be chaired by Carlo Emanuele
Basile
, who
had been the Fascist prefect of the city during the Republic of Salò and
who was responsible for the executions of partisans and anti-Fascists
.

Since the country still hadn’t been purged of its Fascist contingent,
the myths and symbolism of the resistance were endlessly invoked by
t
hose who later took part in the
lotta armata
, the armed struggle.
Renato
Curcio
, founder of the Red Brigades, lost an uncle who had
fought against the Fascists. Years later, in November 1974, he wrote
to his mother from prison at
Casale
Monteferrato
, recalling the uncle

who carried me astride his shoulders. His limpid and ever-smiling eyes that
peered far into the distance towards a society of free and equal men. And I
loved him like a father. And I have picked up the rifle that only death,
arriving through the murderous hand of the Nazi-Fascists, had wrested
from him …
8

Remembered and romanticised, Italian partisans became role
models for the next generation. The ranks of the left (be they armed
or artistic) were swelled in the 1960s and
1970s
by those from
northern Italy (such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giangiacomo
Feltrinelli) who had either fought themselves or lost relatives in the
resistance. It became a proud point of reference; when in the early
1970s
a new, left-wing guerilla force (the Partisan Action Group)
was formed, it published a magazine appropriately called New
Resistance. Another member of the Red Brigades, Alberto
Franceschini
(whose grand father had fought as a partisan), spoke
of the ‘red thread that tied us to the partisans’
.
9

The years after the Second World War, though, were initially
ones of
bonaccia
– what Italo Calvino called the years of calm
before another storm. The referendum on the monarchy in 1946
had narrowly decided in favour of a republic, and when the new
Italian constitution was ratified two years later, the male members of
the royal family of Savoia were barred from re-entering the country.
The following decades saw a lightning transition of Italian society
from one founded predominantly on agriculture to one based on
industry: between 1950 and 1970,
agriculture’s
share of the workforce
fell from 42% to 17%. In 1961 the abrogation of a Fascist law against
internal immigration meant that within years millions of Italians
had migrated either from the countryside to the cities or from the
‘Mezzogiorno’
(the agricultural south) to the industrialised north.
The Christian Democrats engineered an economic miracle, relying,
largely, on steel, cars and concrete
.