Il Sessantotto

Abstract

In the early 1960s the Christian Democrats were luxuriating in a warm sea of encouraging statistics. Finally, after centuries of frustrated hopes, Italians had witnessed the disappearance, within an astonishingly brief time, of the underdeveloped Italy. Not only had the devastation of the war’s end been overcome, but the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and early 1960s had transformed an agricultural economy into a predominantly industrial one, and, in the process, had revolutionized life for millions of ordinary people. In a self-congratulatory mood, the Christian Democrats concluded that a class of technocrats should be created to manage the new prosperity, and thus some Christian Democrats brought about the establishment of an Institute of Sociology in Trent, a conservative Christian Democratic stronghold in northern Italy. But one objection — that the proposed instruction might degenerate into raw politicization — proved prophetic, if understated. In the turbulent late 1960s the institute became a training ground for an unwanted kind of leader. It was there, and in a collective of disaffected young Communists at Reggio Emilia, that much of the first generation of the Red Brigades began their political careers. It was in Trent that the two most influential of the founding brigatisti, Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol, took their first steps on the road to the revolution.