At four thirty on 12 December 1969 a bomb exploded outside Milan’s bank of agriculture killing 17 and injuring 88. No organisation claimed responsibility. The bombing, known as in Italy as the Piazza Fontana massacre, did not come out of the blue. Similar incidents had been increasing in the months and years leading up to it, and many more would follow.
This was a polarised and violent era, one which would culminate in the kidnapping and assassination of the Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro and another even more devastating bombing at Bologna train station which killed 85 and wounded 200 in 1980. The perpetrators of these kinds of attacks came from across the political spectrum, from extra-parliamentary communist groups to neo-fascists who sought to salvage Mussolini’s failed project. The sheer number of such organisations, the severity of their language, and the brutality of their tactics has long-been seen as the low point of Italy’s post-war history.
Piazza Fontana stands out amidst the other attacks from this period, though, for what it reveals about the nature of the Italian state and its relationship with so-called ‘occult powers’. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, anarchist groups were quickly identified as the culprits. In a climate of widespread fear and paranoia, 80 people were arrested on the basis of flimsy evidence and public conjecture. One man, a railway worker named Giuseppe Pinelli, ‘fell to his death’ from the fourth story window of a police station. Others were detained or placed under surveillance for years. And yet the immediate investigations led nowhere. It wasn’t until 1972 that new testimonies were taken seriously and a far-right organisation called Ordine Nuovo came under suspicion. Several of its members were called to trial alongside the anarchists. The process dragged on until the late 80s. Eventually two men, Giovanni Ventura and Franco Freda, were sentenced for other, smaller, attacks, but not for Piazza Fontana itself.
