Abstract
According to critical consensus, contemporary Italian writers’ and filmmakers’ attempts to narrate the Italian terrorism of the 1970s have left a great deal to be desired. Differently from the literature and film that came out of the antifascist Resistance, it is generally agreed that there is neither a great novel nor a great film that has dealt with Italy’s and Italians’ experience of terrorism. The same could be said about historiography as there is no extant history that covers the whole span of Italian terrorism, although there are plenty that touch on various segments of the subject, i.e., history of the Red Brigades, the Piazza Fontana bomb, and so on, but as Cinzia Venturelli’s bibliography of studies dedicated to terrorism shows, significantly titled in the plural as Terrorismi, most of them have been published only since 2000.1
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- 1.
Cinzia Ventroli, Terrorismi (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2013). See also the volume by Giovanni Maria Ceci, Il terrorismo italiano. Storia di un dibattito (Rome: Carocci Editore, 2013), which offers an overview of the approaches historiography has taken to Italian terrorism from the 1970s to the present.
- 2.
The Becco Giallo publishing company, based in Parma, has published a series of graphic novels on the terrorist attacks of the 1970s. See: http://main.beccogiallo.net/.
- 3.
In this chapter, I will make reference to the following critical works, all of which focus on narrative: Gianluigi Simonetti, “Nostalgia dell’azione. La fortuna della lotta armata nella narrativa degli anni Zero,” Allegoria 23:64 (July/December 2011): 97–124; Raffaele Donnarumma, “Storia, immaginario, letteratura: il terrorismo nella narrativa italiana (1969–2010),” in AA. VV., Per Romano Luperini, ed. Pietro Cataldi (Palermo: Palumbo, 2010), pp. 438–465; Gabriele Vitello, L’Album di famiglia: Gli anni di piombo nella narrativa italiana (Massa: Transeuropa, 2013), preface by Raffaele Donnarumma; Demetrio Paolin, Una tragedia negata: Il racconto degli anni di piombo nella narrativa italiana (Nuoro: Maestrale, 2008). I draw amply and freely from these scholars’ work in the pages that follow.
- 4.
See Alan O’Leary, Tragedia all’italiana: Cinema e terrorismo tra Moro e Memoria. Trans. Lucia Angelica Salaris (Tissi [Sassari]: Angelica Editore, 2007), p. 181 on the film La mia generazione directed by Wilma Labate in 1996. English version, Tragedia all’italiana. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms 1970–2010 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
- 5.
For critical comment on the memoirs of ex-terrorists see: Daniele Giglioli, All’ordine del giorno…. Il terrore (Milan: Bompiani, 2007); Silvia Dai Pra’, “Lo sterminato romanzo degli anni settanta,” Lo Straniero 60 (June 2005), online at: http://www.lostraniero.net/archivio-2005/53-giugno/402-lo-sterminato-romanzo-degli-anni-settanta.html. For an idea of how much anger the public profile enjoyed by ex-terrorists can generate see, Maurizio Fiasco, “La storia scritta dai carnefici,” in Sedici marzo: Ragioni delle vittime e diritto alla verità sul delitto Moro (Rome: Sapere2000Edizioni), pp. 9–16.
- 6.
Nicoletta Marini Maio, “Unbury that Body: The Tragic Palinode of a Generation in Marco Baliani’s Corpo di stato,” in Remembering Aldo Moro. The Cultural Legacy of the 1978 Kidnapping and Murder, eds. Ruth Glynn and Giancarlo Lombardi (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), pp. 122–134. Baliani’s text has been translated into English by Marini Maio, Ellen Nerenberg and Thomas Simpson as Body of State: A Nation Divided (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).
- 7.
Rossana Rossanda, “Il discorso sulla Dc,” il Manifesto, March 28, 1978.
- 8.
For one such baldly stated theory, see Gianfranco Sanguineti, Del terrorismo e dello stato.La teoria e la pratica del terrorismo per la prima volta divulgate (Milan: Prima Edizione, 1980).
- 9.
O’Leary makes the same point in “Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema,” in Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence, eds. Pierpaolo Antonello and O’Leary (New York: Peter Lang, 2009) pp. 48–62.
- 10.
See Ruth Glynn, Women, Terrorism, and Trauma in Italian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Glynn, Alan O’Leary and Giancarlo Lombardi, eds., Terrorism Italian Style: Representations of Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 2012); Glynn and Lombardi, eds., Remembering Aldo Moro: The Cultural Legacy of the 1978 Kidnapping and Murder (London: Maney Publishing, 2012); O’Leary and Pierpaolo Antonello, eds., Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric of Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969–2009 (Oxford: Legenda, 2009); O’Leary, Tragedia all’italiana: Cinema e terrorismo tra Moro e memoria and Tragedia all’italiana: Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms, 1970–2010.
- 11.
Glynn, Remembering Aldo Moro, p. 79.
- 12.
O’Leary, Remembering Aldo Moro, p. 157.
- 13.
Pellegrino took over the presidency of the Commission from Libero Gualtieri, who had presided over the investigation from 1988 to 1994. That Commission had been preceded by another one charged with investigating the Moro kidnap and murder (“Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sulla strage d via Fani, sul sequestro e l’assassinio di Aldo Moro e sul terrorismo in Italia” [Parliamentary commission to investigate the massacre in via Fani, the kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro and terrorism in Italy]). The documents produced by both Commissions can be consulted on the Italian Senate’s website. Commisione stragi: https://www.senato.it/documenti/repository/leggi_e_documenti/raccoltenormative/30%20-%20stragi/AVVIO.pdf; Commisione Moro: http://storia.camera.it/organi/commissione-parlamentare-d-inchiesta-sulla-strage-via-fani-sul-sequestro-e-l-assassino-aldo-moro-e.
- 14.
Giovanni Fasanella and Claudio Sestieri with Giovanni Pellegrino, Segreto di Stato (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), p. 6.
- 15.
Giovanni Pellegrino, Settima relazione semestrale sullo stato dei lavori, October 12, 2000, Document: XXIII, n. 45, online at: http://www.senato.it/service/PDF/PDFServer/BGT/301502.pdf.
- 16.
Among De Lutiis’s publications are: Giuseppe De Lutiis, Il golpe di via Fani. Protezioni occulte e connivenze internazionali dietro il delitto Moro (Milan: Sperling and Kupfer, 2007); I servizi segreti in Italia. Dal fascismo alla seconda Repubblica (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1998); Storia dei servizi segreti in Italia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984); I servizi segreti in Italia. Dal fascismo all’intelligence del XXI secolo (Milan: Sperling and Kupfer, 2010).
- 17.
O’Leary, “‘In pieno fumetto’: Bertolucci, Terrorism and the Commedia all’italiana,” in Terrorism Italian Style: Representations of Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema, pp. 45–62.
- 18.
Ducio Cimatti, Piombo. Nell’ultima isola, 1980 e dintorni (Casale di Monferrato: Piemme, 2005), unnumbered page.
- 19.
Bruno Arpaia, Il passato davanti a noi (Parma: Guanda Editore, 2006), p. 487.
- 20.
For a detailed analysis of this novella see the chapter “Brunelleschi’s First Masterpiece, or Mean Streets, Familiar Streets, Masculine Spaces, and Identity in Renaissance Florence,” in Guido Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 85–107.
- 21.
Marco Briziarelli, The Red Brigades and the Discourse of Violence, Revolution and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 55.
- 22.
Mario Barenghi, “Domenico Starnone e il coraggio di raccontare,” in Dieci libri: Letteratura e critica dell’anno 07/08, vol. I, ed. Alfonso Berardinelli (Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 2008), p. 92 and 97.
- 23.
Antonio Celanosu, Prima esecuzione, in L’Immaginazione 236 (January–February 2008): 46–47.
- 24.
Luciana Viarengo, “La cappa di piombo,” review of Piove all’insu, in Paginauno. Bimestrale di analisi politica, cultura e letteratura 3 (June–September 2007), on line at: http://www.rivistapaginauno.it/cappadipiombo.php. See also, Vittorio Giacopini, “La memoria che guarda in avanti. Un romanzo di Luca Rastello,” review of Piove all’insu, in Lo straniero: arte, cultura, scienza società 71 (May 2006), online at: http://www.lostraniero.net/archivio-2006/40-maggio/316-la-memoria-che-guarda-in-avanti-un-romanzo-di-luca-rastello.html.
- 25.
See Giorgio Garuzzo, Fiat: The Secrets of an Epoch (New York: Springer, 2014).
- 26.
David Ward, “Fifty Years On: Resistance Then, Resistance Now,” in Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4:1 (1999): 59–63.
- 27.
See Demetrio Paolin, “Intervista a Giacomo Sartori: this is a novel on the war and on fascism and on the unconscious permanence in the following decades of the war and fascism,” quoted in Sabina Gola, “Terrorismo e identità in Anatomia della battaglia di Giacomo Sartori,” in Colloque. Littérature et “temps des révoltes” (Italie, 1967–1980) novembre 27–29, 2008, online at: https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/101531/1/TerrorismoeidentitainAnatomiadellabattagliadiGiacomoSartori.pdf.
- 28.
Andrea Inglese, “Giacomo Sartori, Anatomia della battaglia, in Allegoria, 3rd series, 25: 68 (July/December 2013), online at: http://www.allegoriaonline.it/index.php/raccolte-tremila-battute/allegoria-55/218-g-sartori-qanatomia-della-battagliaq.html.
- 29.
Giambattista Scirè, “Il caso Moro. Frammenti di una verità indicibile,” in Italia contemporanea 255 (June 2009): 273–305, online at: http://www.giambattistascire.it/255_itcontscirenotamoro.pdf.
- 30.
- 31.
- 32.
Quoted in Marco Paolini and Gabriele Vacis, Il racconto del Vajont (Milan: Garzanti, 1997), translated into English by Thomas Simpson as The Story of Vajont (Boca Raton, LA: Bordighera Press, 2000). In his introduction, Simpson draws on Paolini and Oliviero Ponte di Pino, Quaderno el Vajont: dagli album al Teatro della Diga (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 46.
- 33.
Simpson, p. vii.
- 34.
See Paolini, Itis Galileo: “you can never possess truth, you can only look for it,” quoted in Cristina Perissinotto, “Diga, stazione, scalo merci: Marco Paolini e il teatro della realtà,” in Negli archivi e per le strade. Il ritorno alla realtà nella narrativa di inizio millennio, ed. Somigli (Rome: Arachne, 2013), p. 451.
- 35.
Claudio Milanesi, “Enrico Deaglio, Bella ciao, Besame mucho, Patria: dalle storie minime alla storia per frammenti,” in Finzione, cronaca, realtà. Scambi, intrecci e prospettive nella narrativa italiana contemporanea, ed. Hanna Serkowska. See also, Remo Cesarani, “Il caso di un montaggio di cronache, ricordi, documenti e interpretazioni della realtà che sembrano costruire un romanzo italiano: Patria di Enrico Deaglio,” in Finzione, cronaca, realtà, ed. Serkowska, pp. 81–94.
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Ward, D. (2017). Family Albums and Conspiracy Theories. In: Contemporary Italian Narrative and 1970s Terrorism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46648-4_3
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