by Tobias Jones
And anyway, long before the end of that football season, the plight of one individual had become the complete negation of my theory of Italian impunity. Almost as if to compensate for the absence of justice, one man had been sentenced to an exemplary prison term for a murder committed decades earlier, in 1972. Here, finally, was an example of that rare thing, a genuine Italian punishment (with the irony that it had been meted out to the one man millions of Italians were convinced was actually innocent). Adriano Sofri had become the country’s most famous ‘murderer’, and – since his case overlapped so intimately with that of Piazza Fontana – I travelled to Pisa prison to meet him.
References - 3 Penalties and Impunity
1 Alan Friedman, Agnelli and the Network of Italian Power (London, 1988)
4
‘The Sofri Case’
He thought about those other informers, buried under a light layer of earth and dry leaves, high in the folds of the Apennines; miserable men, a mud of fear and vice. They had played their game of death, on a thread of lies between Partisans and Fascists, they had played with their lives …
Leonardo Sciascia
Heading out of Parma to the south-west you quickly reach the Cisa pass which takes you over the Apennines towards the Ligurian and Tuscan coasts. It’s a spectacular road that lifts you above the fog of the plain: supported on concrete stilts it struts over valleys, and its long tunnels puncture the mountains. A few hundred metres below the asphalt, picturesque mountain villages huddle around their bell-towers, appearing from above like random piles of matchboxes. Now, in October, the mountain colours are crisp and autumnal: white wood-smoke gusting between dark green pines.
I’m driving towards Pisa prison. A few days before, the first penal section of the Cassazione court had, on 6 October 2000 in Rome, pronounced the final judgement on a murder committed almost thirty years before, in May 1972. It had taken eleven hours for the court to reach their decision, which was then curtly announced to the gathered journalists at ten p. m.: ‘this court rejects the appeal for a retrial …’
It was the definitive, closing chapter of a case that has obsessed the country, one which had, throughout the 1990s, become every bit as politicised and emblematic as the Dreyfus affair almost a century before. The appeal to the Cassazione was the last resort: a final opportunity to reopen the case. That opportunity denied, the conviction (announced six months previously) for the ‘Calabresi crime’ stands, and Adriano Sofri will remain in prison until 2017, almost fifty years from the date of the crime.
‘The Sofri Case’ is, in many ways, the complementary inverse of the on-going Piazza Fontana trial: a tardy and dubious attempt to apportion blame (this time on the extra-parliamentary left) for one of the iconic moments from the anni di piombo; to indict not only an individual but also the wider movement of which he was representative. If evidence which is belated and confused in the Piazza Fontana trial has allowed the left to point an hysterical finger against various historical nemeses, the Sofri case has offered the same opportunity for the right. The Piazza Fontana crimes were the very reason for the Calabresi crime: Calabresi was the police commissioner in charge of interrogating Pino Pinelli, the Anarchist suspected of the bombing who subsequently fell to his death from a window of the police station. As with so much of the anni di piombo, Piazza Fontana appears the original sin from which all other crimes descend. ‘The anni di piombo started with Piazza Fontana,’ wrote Giorgio Galli in Genoa’s newspaper Secolo XIX, ‘and until the truth about that beginning has been ascertained, that about Calabresi will remain partial.’
Responses to the Sofri case tend to be knee-jerk assertions of either his guilt or innocence, and all commentators inevitably become colpevolisti or innocentisti, part of the guilty or innocent camps. For the left, Sofri is a cause-célèbre without compare, the sacrificial lamb of the right bent on judicial revenge for left-wing terrorism in the 1970s. ‘They’ve buried him alive,’ say his friends on the evening of the latest decision. Some hint darkly that Sofri, as a man of granite integrity (and one who knows his own symbolic value), might now resort to suicide, but he denies it in a press conference from Pisa prison the following morning: ‘There are two things I’ll never do: ask for a pardon [which would imply guilt], or commit suicide’. His brother, an academic in Bologna, declares: ‘This is an ugly country; if I weren’t an old signore nearing the end of my days, I would go away …’ An editorial in La Repubblica calls the decision ‘a monstrosity … the inhuman and uncivil vendetta of the State’. Sofri, runs the editorial, has to suffer the ‘infamy of being an assassin – still worse the sender of an assassin … he will consider this a death sentence, and will testify until martyrdom his innocence.’ Within days, a campaign for granting Sofri a Presidential pardon is begun.
Those on the right, however, were gleeful. ‘Justice has been done,’ declared one member of the National Alliance; ‘let’s hope that the Lotta Continua lobby [the movement of which Sofri was the leader] now shuts up, and remembers their history as killers, as definitively sanctified today by the Italian judiciary’. Another National Alliance spokesman says he hopes for an end to ‘the obsessive, apologist song which has transformed Sofri into an icon which even he doesn’t seem to recognise’.
The road comes out at the Golfo dei Poeti. I turn left, and stop in another small town, Bocca di Magra, and approach a man selling pancakes out of the back of a van. He’s got thick waves of greying hair. This is Leonardo Marino, the pentito whose confessions are responsible for the Sofri case. I explain that I’m a journalist, and ask him a couple of questions. He repeats the phrases I’ve read elsewhere: religious language about repenting, about the need, after all these years, to tell the truth. Marino, once in the rank-and-file of Lotta Continua in the 1970s, has become a figure of ridicule for the left. He is the pentito who has pointed a finger at Sofri, and his two ‘accomplices’. In 1988 he confessed first to his priest, then to the police, about his involvement in the murder of Luigi Calabresi. Almost every detail he recalled was wrong: the colour of the car, the place where the murder was planned, the weather conditions. There was little evidence, other than his, on which the accused could have been convicted. There was an eerie absence of the normally all-important documenti.
It’s strange, now, to see him: whilst Sofri is in prison, Marino is selling pancakes on the Ligurian coast as if nothing had happened. During Sofri’s first trial it was revealed that Marino had been in contact with the police long before his ‘official’ confession in the summer of 1988, leading many (not least Dario Fo in another invective comedy, Marino Libero, Marino è Innocente) to suggest that the whole confession was simply a put-up job by police.
An hour later I arrive in Pisa. The city is dominated by scholars and students and the atmosphere is very left-wing. Pisa’s ancient university (where Galileo Galilei once taught), and especially its Scuola Normale (founded by Napoleon in imitation of Paris’s Ecole Normale), have long been the educational cradles for future Presidents and Prime Ministers, for philosophers and scientists. During the 1930s, the city was a refuge of intellectual resistance to Mussolini: in 1937 Aldo Capitini published his Elementi di un’esperienza religiosa, an impassioned plea for non-cooperation with the regime, and two years later one of his colleagues published La scuola dell’uomo, a sort of paean to liberty. Walking around the city, back and forth across the bridges which criss-cross the river Arno, the political affiliation of the city is obvious: sprayed on walls at regular intervals, with what I’m told is typically Tuscan humour, is one recurrent sentence: Cacciamo i Fascisti della faccia della terra … e non solo! – ‘Let’s hunt fascists from the face of the earth … and not only from there!’ Another piece of urban graffiti is appended to the south wall of a church: an enormous mural, a collage of colourful, floating bodies, painted in Pisa by Keith Haring shortly before his death. Like Parma, everywhere there are monuments, memorials and plaques, always appearing more provocative than reconciliatory. In the heart of the city there is
a small park with the sculpted bust of a young man, Franco Serantini. Below the inscription explains: ‘20-year-old Anarchist mortally wounded by police at an anti-Fascist rally’. On the wall of the building opposite the bust someone has (evidently recently) sprayed: ‘Franco, we will avenge you’.
The Casa Circondariale di Don Bosco, Pisa’s prison, is a squat building, almost unnoticed from the road but for the perspex watch-tower inhabited by a bored, uniformed guard. Immediately inside the prison there’s another plaque, this time commemorating the agents of custody killed in the line of duty: ‘Repose with Christian piety’ it says (dated 1977). The prison guards are good-humoured and disorganised, struggling to find the flurry of faxes and photocopied documenti that I have, for months, been sending to them and the ministry in Rome. Finally everything is miraculously in order, and I’m ushered across a courtyard and through a series of slow, hydraulic doors. The interview room is cold. In the corner, plastic chairs are stacked to the damp, brown ceiling. I sit down on one of the chairs and wait for the arrival of Italy’s most notorious ‘murderer,’ Adriano Sofri.
Throughout the early 1970s, the anarchist Pino Pinelli and the police commissioner Luigi Calabresi became symbolic characters in Italy’s unusual morality play, invariably hero and villain respectively. Despite the fact that he had been unknown and anonymous during his lifetime, in death Pinelli had become, like Che Guevara, the focal point for left-wing malaise. He was invoked in slogans daubed on walls across the country: ‘Quando votate ricordatevi di Pino Pinelli’ (‘when you vote, remember Pino Pinelli’), and Lotta Continua issued a record of ‘The Ballad of Pinelli’. Calabresi, on the other hand, became the scapegoat for all the alleged injustices of Italian society, and of Piazza Fontana in particular.
As the libel trial continued between Calabresi and Lotta Continua, however, the process of blurring fact and fiction was well underway. A series of films and plays began to add to the symbolic accretions of the Pinelli–Calabresi case. In October 1970 Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist opened, with its unsubtle indictment of the police version of events:
Do you know what people are going to think of you? That you’re a bunch of bent bastards and liars … who do you think is ever going to believe you again? And do you know why people won’t believe you … ? Because your version of the facts, as well as being total bollocks, lacks humanity.1
In the same year, Elio Petri’s film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion won an Oscar for best foreign film, portraying a policeman who had murdered a suspect but was persuaded not to confess. The parallels with the Calabresi case (even though the film had been shot prior to December 1969) were obvious. As were those drawn a year later with the release of Sacco and Vanzetti, a film version of innocent (Italian) Anarchists put to death in America, in which another Anarchist, Andrea Salsado, fell from the fourteenth floor of a New York police station. The momentum of indignation was such that, in June 1971, 800 intellectuals signed a motion in L’Espresso magazine describing the police as ‘torturers’.
That polarisation of politics was underlined on 16 April 1970, when the television news was interrupted shortly after 8.30 p.m. in various cities by the announcement of a new, revolutionary formation. As the images of the day’s news rolled on, an inserted voice-over announced:
A new mass resistance has been born, the workers’ rebellion against the landlord and the State of the landlords has been born, the rebellion against foreign imperialism has been born, the rebellion of the populations and of the working-classes of the south has been born. Born are the Red Brigades and the Brigate GAP [Gruppi di azione partigiana] have been reconstituted. The way of reforms, the way of revolutionary Communism, the way of the definitive liberation of the proletariat and of the Italian workers from the domination and exploitation of foreign and Italian capital brings a long and hard war. But on this route the partisan brigades, the workers, the cooperatives, the revolutionary students march compact and united until the final victory.
The wording reflected the character of the leader of the GAP movement, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli: melodramatic, apocalyptic, above all desperate to inherit the mantle of the partisan movement. Feltrinelli is one of the many ‘fallen’ from the anni di piombo whose memory has been both lionised and ridiculed, his name becoming a reflection of both the violence and the farce of those years. Feltrinelli’s family was one of Italy’s richest, thanks to their acres of forests in Carinzia, and his grandfather’s road-building projects under Mussolini. Brought up ‘like a prince of the royal blood in olden times,’ Feltrinelli escaped from his family home in Turin during the civil war to fight with the partisans, later becoming a member and generous benefactor of the Communist party. Feltrinelli had, in 1950, founded a study centre and subsequently opened a publishing house and a chain of bookshops across the country. It was Feltrinelli who first published Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (a publication which soured his relationship with the Communist party in Italy and Russia). Increasingly, he travelled to Cuba and South America, duly publishing works on guerilla movements, on Che Guevara, and – as a close friend of Castro – commissioning the Cuban leader’s autobiography.
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:
