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Twelve years, and what is still argued about
The period runs from a bomb in a bank in Piazza Fontana in Milan in December 1969, which killed seventeen people, to a bomb in the waiting room of Bologna station in August 1980, which killed eighty-five. Between those dates there was political violence from two directions: armed groups on the far left, of which the Brigate Rosse were the largest, who killed individuals — judges, journalists, policemen, trade unionists, managers — and groups on the far right responsible for most of the bombings of crowds. The single event that defines the period is the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, five times prime minister, taken in Rome on 16 March 1978 after his escort of five was killed, held for fifty-five days while communiqués were published and the state refused to negotiate, and found dead in the boot of a car on 9 May. Around four hundred people were killed in total across the twelve years. Three things are worth knowing about how Italy holds this. The convictions are uneven: most of those who carried out the left-wing killings were tried and sentenced, often on the evidence of pentiti, while several of the largest bombings produced decades of trials, acquittals and documented depistaggi by parts of the security services, and for some of them no mandante has ever been established. The phrase anni di piombo is itself imported — it comes from the Italian title of a 1981 German film, Die bleierne Zeit — which is why it sounds literary rather than native. And the memory is carefully kept rather than closed: the names of the victims are read out annually, the Bologna station clock is stopped at 10:25, and Serra's last remark is the accurate one. The formula is agreed; almost nothing else is.