If there is a month in Italy’s post war history that marked itself deeper in the cultural imagination of the country than any other it is surely December 1969. On December 12^th a bomb went off in a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana, killing seventeen and injuring 88. It was to be three days later sometime just around midnight of December 15^th/16^th  that the death of an 18^th victim would provide the real impetus for some of the most extraordinary works of political art and culture of the 1970s.

The eighteenth victim of Piazza Fontana was the anarchist railway worker, Giuseppe Pinelli, who ‘fell’ from the window of a police station after being interrogated for three days. While Italy underwent ever more traumatic and grimly ‘spectacular’ events in subsequent years (including the bombing of an anti-fascist meeting in Brescia in 1974, the kidnapping and eventual assassination of Italy’s Prime Minister, Aldo Moro in 1978 and worst of all, the bombing of Bologna’s railway station in August 1980, leaving 85 dead and over 200 injured), it was the bomb in Piazza Fontana and the death of Pinelli which signaled the real transition from a decade of economic boom to a decade of bullets and bombs. 

In the words of one Italy’s greatest political commentators, Franco Fortini, the onslaught of fear was rapid; so too was the desire for truth and justice. It would take decades to piece together the brutal truth behind Piazza Fontana. Even this autumn, for the fiftieth anniversary of the event a whole spate of books still attempt to reconstruct events from a whole series of judicial proceedings, which only gradually uncovered the brutal intrigues behind what has been called the ‘strategy of tension’ (the use of terror by neo-fascist groups colluding with and covered by significant sections of both Italian and American secret services, seeking to prevent Italy turning left during the Cold War). Even decades on many aspects of the truth are still being established. The fact that many perpetrators, particularly those in positions of power and authority, have never been jailed means that the country never attained any real closure. Nonetheless, the efforts of many cultural figures somehow managed to mold a kind of truth for posterity. 

A whole generation of intellectuals, journalists, poets, filmmakers, playwrights, novelists and historians participated in some kind of search for the truth of December 1969. One could also talk of certain ‘premonitions’ : a lesser-known film by Liliana Cavani, The Cannibals, imagined a hippy adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, with Britt Ekland as the Theban rebel pursued by police through Milan trying to bury her dead brother. It seemed something of a “tragic prophecy” when it was released just after the massacre (one of the scenes of the film had hundreds of extras lying dead in the streets of the city). Another film released in 1970 with its story of a police inspector turned murderer who being ‘untouchable’ continues to lead the enquiry into his own crimes – Investigations of a Citizen Above Suspicion – seems almost to foretell how the investigations and judicial inquiries into Piazza Fontana would be handled, with those responsible able to frustrate any authentic investigations. Elio Petri, Italy’s greatest political film director of the 1970s, would make a two-part investigative documentary on the death of Giuseppe Pinelli entitled Documents on Pinelli. Petri, actor Gian Maria Volonte’ and screenwriter Ugo Pirro would continue to collaborate throughout the decade in a series of films based on political and social issues.  

 It was a generation of journalists who began to uncover and reveal many of the details of Piazza Fontana and the death of Pino Pinelli in police custody (alongside the subsequent legal persecution of another innocent anarchist, Pietro Valpreda). While television journalists like the execrable Bruno Vespa contributed to the official monstering of Pietro Valpreda (a film entitled Slap the Monster on Page 1 by Marco Bellocchio, also starring Volonte’, spoke of this kind of scapegoating and press manipulation), a few journalists began to question the narrative and eventually overturn the false leads that were given to throw journalists and genuine investigators off the scent. Journalists such as Giorgio Bocca, Corrado Stajano and, especially, Camilla Cederna would question the official narrative and would establish the innocence of Giuseppe Pinelli and Pietro Valpreda, going to some length to reveal a wider and truer picture. Cederna’s book Pinelli: A Window Onto the Massacre is still a model of investigative reporting even though it was originally published less than two years after Piazza Fontana and Pinelli’s death in police custody. 

But in June 1970, a book coming from outside of the traditional field of journalism would have a powerful impact on a whole generation. Selling more copies than all other volumes on Piazza Fontana and the Pinelli case put together, the volume entitled A State Massacre offered what the authors, a group of militants from the extra-parliamentary Left, would call a ‘counter-investigation’. Indeed, such a samizdat-like publication by a small unknown publishing house would capture in its title the essential truth of what decades of judicial investigation would later gradually reveal. That this was, in effect, a state-sanctioned massacre, whereby significant state actors and agencies were either complicit or, in some cases, actively involved in the campaign of terror during the late sixties and throughout the seventies. 

Two very significant works, however, would concentrate on the figure of the anarchist Pino Pinelli ‘suicided’ by the Italian police. One was Dario Fo’s play Accidental Death of an Anarchist which would eventually reach many international audiences – an adaptation of the play has recently been made into an Indian film. Another was The Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli, a monumental work of art by Enrico Baj, partly based on Picasso’s Guernica – indeed, the subsequent fates of these two works were almost as intriguing as that of Picasso’s masterpiece. Baj and Fo were old friends who both studied at Italy’s Brera Academy of Art. Fo, although characterizing his own work as ‘throwaway theatre’, designed to intervene in the present, managed to compose one of the most important political plays of the second half of the twentieth century. There are at least six English translations and adaptations of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and it has been regularly staged in the UK. 

Baj’s painting The Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli was a monumental work of three metres by twelve, subdivided into thirteen parts. Close to the impulses of Dadaism and Surrealism, Baj later moved closer to the CoBRA art movement. Founding his own ‘nuclear art’ movement based on an obsession with the theme of nuclear war, Baj was very much a political artist, and made no secret of his anarchist leanings. Invited by Milan Town Hall in 1971 to stage a major retrospective of his work, he agreed but insisted that a major new work be hung at the Hall of the Caryatids in the Royal Palace in Milan. Almost two decades previously, a Picasso retrospective had been held there and in the Hall his world-famous denunciation of fascist violence during the Spanish Civil War Guernica had hung there. Baj’s new monumental work was an homage to Picasso’s masterpiece as well as to the Italian Futurist Carlo Carra’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911). The opening of Baj’s exhibition was scheduled for the evening of May 17^th, 1972 (a date chosen so that Milan’s anti-fascist mayor could attend). Yet an event happened that morning leading to the closure of the exhibition and Baj’s painting was not to be seen by the Milanese for another four decades. Luigi Calabresi, one of the police officers involved in the interrogation of Pinelli and accused by some of being implicated in his murder, was himself shot down in the street on his way to work. A notice at the entrance of the Royal Palace was quickly put up stating that “the exhibition was postponed for technical reasons” and Baj’s masterpiece, just like Picasso’s, would tour the world for decades, only appearing in the place where it was intended in 2012. 

Another work cut short by Calabresi’s assassination was a film that the renowned producer Carlo Ponti had planned to make on the death of Pinelli. Ponti had realized that the window from which he had fallen was the very same window of the room where he had studied decades earlier (the police station had previously been a college). Moved by this realization he contacted the filmmaker Giuliano Montaldo to make a film on Pinelli’s death. It was to star Sophia Loren as Licia the wife of Pinelli. However, after Calabresi’s death Ponti no longer wished to make the film. The assassination of Calabresi itself would be the occasion for a highly controversial trial of former leaders of the radical Left movement, Lotta Continua. One of Italy’s greatest historians, Carlo Ginzburg, later drew on his knowledge of sixteenth and seventeenth century witchcraft trials to write a study of the show trial of Adriano Sofri and other Lotta Continua members for their supposed part in the death of police chief Calabresi.

The death of Pinelli also left its traces in song. Perhaps the most celebrated song is the Ballad of the Anarchist Pinelli which was sung in different variations by different authors and interpreters. It itself was based on a melody of an anarchist song of the end of the nineteenth century, The Ferocious Monarchist Bava (referring to Bava Beccaris known as the butcher of Milan for his brutal repression of a workers’ revolt in Milan, an event covered in John Berger’s novel G). Another song on Pinelli was song by a Sicilian ‘story singer’ who emigrated to Milan and made his name there as a well-known street performer. His Lament for the Death of Giuseppe Pinelli was composed in Sicilian dialect. A Genoese poet, Riccardo Mannerini, who worked with the legendary singer Fabrizio de Andre’ composed and sung A Ballad for a Railway Worker. In more recent decades, rock singers such as Vasco Rossi and groups such as Modena City Ramblers have included mentions of Pinelli in their songs. A film adaptation loosely based on Puccini’s Tosca by Luigi Magni in 1973 also added a song in Roman dialect Nun je da’ retta Roma with clear allusions to the fate of Giuseppe Pinelli. The celebrated actor and singer, Gigi Proietti, often finished his concerts with this song, although Italy’s state television RAI would often censor it. Poets, too, would write of Piazza Fontana and Pinelli – Pasolini’s Patmos poem would talk of the victims of the bombing in Piazza Fontana and Julian Beck of the Living Theatre would write in his poem Pinelli Baader Manifesto a section on the body of Pinelli, whereas the poet Giovanni Raboni dedicated a poem to the piazza itself. 

The memory of mid December 1969 is still a contested one. Indeed, outside the Milan police station where Pinelli died there are two memorial plaques: an unofficial one (which though removed was later reinstated) stating that Pinelli, an innocent man, had been killed in the police station on the 16^th December 1969 (although officially he had left the police station before midnight) and the official plaque of the town hall stating that Pinelli, an innocent, died tragically on the 15^th December 1969 (though the official time of his death was 1am on the 16^th December). Both plaques testify to the fact that fifty years on memory remains divided. In my own experience I recall a watching a play on the Valpreda Case at Trieste’s School for Interpreters one evening. During the presentation of the play a number of people gave short introductory speeches. One speaker informed the audience that two members of Italy’s DIGOS (a special operations division of Italy’s police which deal with serious crime including terrorism offences) were sitting amongst them. 

More recently in 2017, in Moscow, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary film made with Lotta Continua in 1972 was screened on the occasion of a translation of Pasolini’s Friulan poetry by the Russian socialist poet, Kirill Medvedev. The Moscow section of the Italian Cultural Institute and a vice consul at the embassy were fuming that this film on this subject had been selected to present Pasolini. “How dare they show this film? This is our Beslan!”. It seems that an agitprop documentary film from 45 years previously has still retained its power to perturb – and that the attempt to reveal the authentic story behind the Piazza Fontana bombing and the whole strategy of tension is still, in some circles, too sensitive to handle.