From 1969 to 1983 Italy experienced the most highly concentrated period of violence that it has ever seen. These years were named ‘gli anni di piombo’ or ‘the years of lead’. It was a period of extreme political terrorism that can be described by words spoken by Christopher Hitchens who said that “terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint”. These years were incredibly influential on the future of Italy and have put a mark on Italy
The name ‘gli anni di piombo’ that encompasses these years has many associations and potential roots. The film Die bleierne Zeit (1981) was released in America as Mariane and Juliane but it was released in Italy under the name Gli anni di piombo. It follows the lives of two sisters Marianne and Juliane who are large advocates for women’s rights and are thus very politically active. However, they both go about demonstrating this advocacy in different ways. Julianne is a very benign activist whereas Marianne becomes a member of the Baader-Meinhof, which was an extreme left-wing terrorist group that could be likened to the Brigate Rosse in Italy. This is a potential origin of the name of the period as the film exhibits similar events that were taking place in Italy at a similar time.
On the other hand, it seems more fitting for the origin of the name to be centred around the physical uses and characteristics of lead. Lead is one of the heaviest metals and thus the period is being described as an emotionally heavy time. Lead is also the main metal used in bullets, which reflects the violent nature of these years. However, it is interesting to take into account that guns were only readily used by the left-wing groups especially the Brigate Rosse. The naming of the period is thus more suggestive of violence that originated from left leaning groups (6). The right-wing groups tended to focus on the use of bombs such as that of the bombing of Piazza Fontana.
The bombing took place on 12th December 1969 and has been described as the commencement of ‘gli anni di piombo’. It took place at la Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura and resulted in the death of seventeen people and the injury of eighty-eight. The attack was carried about by a right-wing militant group known as the ‘Ordine Nuovo’ and was an attempt to prevent the spread of left-wing ideologies as they blamed the attack on a leftist insurgency. There were many controversies that surrounded the bombing for this reason, particularly surrounding the investigation of potential suspects (1). A left-wing worker, Giuseppe Pinelli, was initially held and questioned under suspicion of having commited the atrocity. During questioning, he mysteriously fell from the fourth floor of the police station and consequently died. The three policeman that were responsible for questioning him were investigated and subsequently found innocent of any foul play. Pinelli was said to have committed suicide or accidentally fallen. The supposed lack of justice angered leftist militants and resulted in the assassination of a policeman working the case, Luigi Calabresi.
This was an example of an event that had a large impact on Italy as a whole as it demonstrated the divide between the left and the right. In 1970 a man named Dario Fo wrote a play entitled Morte accidentale di un anarchico, or Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Dario Fo was a left-leaning playwright that hoped to indirectly express his view on the unexplained death of Pinelli. He sets up a similar situation to that of Pinelli, where there is a man known as the ‘maniac’ being questioned by the Milanese police on the third floor of a police station. We can see that Fo believes the interogators of Pinelli to be guilty when the maniac says to the policeman “You're not head warden of a fascist penitentiary any longer”(2). This line shows that Fo believed the policeman of the time to have sided with the right-wing group that were the perpetrators of the Piazza Fontana bombing and initially tried to setup anarchists for the crime. The play is representing an extremely heavy series of events that took place and is demonstrating a variety of different opinions on the matter. However despite this, Fo still manages to portray the events that took place in an extremely satirical manner. A Guardian review of the play described the play as a “heavy blend of vaudeville and politics”(3). The events that took place over this period had a large impact on Italian culture and have since been explored further in different forms of art.
Furthermore, there has been a recent cinematic depiction of the events that took place in the film Romanzo di una strage (2012) by Marco Tulio Giordana. It is an incredibly insightful film and manages to display the confusion and diverging stories that surrounded the events that took place. Furthermore, the film shows the hopeless journey of Luigi Calabresi as he begins to learn that the state is not on his side but rather using him to cover up their involvement in the bombing. We see the sense of hopelessness he feels when he realises that his life’s work as a policeman was futile and that he should change professions.
The bombing of Piazza Fontana and the circumstances that surrounded it were very interesting as they could be likened to the events that took place in Berlin thirty-six years before. On 27th February 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire and the blame was put on a left-wing individual named Marinus van der Lubbe. In the same way as the Piazza Fontana bombing was blamed on communists in order to surpress a so called ‘communist insurgency’. Adolf Hitler claimed that the plot to burn down the Reichstag building was a plot by the communists to seize power. This allowed the Nazis to pass an emergency decree that seized all power available to the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or German Communist Party (4). People have argued that the Nazi Party was involved in this event as it was a major catalyst to their seizing of power. Marinus van der Lubbe also suffered the same fate as Pinelli, and he was sentenced to death and executed.
This decade in Italy was a clear manifestation of premediated and organised murder rooted in extreme political ideologies. There were eleven extremist groups that were responsible for the violence. They were very clearly distinguished by their political leaning of either far-right or far-left. The two main groups were the Brigate Rosse and the Avanguardia Nazionale, which were left-wing and right-wing respectively. A lot of violent clashes also took place between these groups and the government. We could see the events that took place as a trifecta of violence that comprised of clashes between any combination of the groups.
However, Italy was not the only country that was experiencing this extent of politically charged violence. Two countries that were experiencing a similar form of violence at the same time were Germany and Turkey. Turkey experienced political clashes that spanned from 1976 to 1980, which were rooted in the disagreement between the right-wing Grey Wolves group and various left-wing groups. The violence consisted of shooties and murders such as the 1978 Maras bombing. However, the violence that took place in Turkey seemed much more similar to systematic warfare than scattered terrorist attacks that took place in Italy.
Italy’s attacks were much more similar to those that were committed in Germany from 1970 through the 1990s. The Brigate Rosse and the German group the Baader-Meinhof were both notoriously violent extreme left-wing terrorist groups that were founded in 1970. They both had a similar modus operandi, focusing on the kidnapping and murder of influential individuals that were not direct supporters of the left-wing initiative. The most famous act by the Brigate Rosse, was the kidnapping and subsequent murder of the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Like the bombing of Piazza Fontana, the murder of Aldo Moro had a large presence in Italian cinema. There were a variety of documentaries and films produced, including Il Caso di Moro (1986) and Piazza delle Cinque Lune (2003).
Italy experienced many terrible acts of violence during this period but it is also interesting to explore the more general impact that these years had. We saw a clear presence of extremely polarised political views and consequently this was guaranteed to cause conflict between people that would not have fought in the past. The presence of violence forced many people to take extreme viewpoints that they would not have otherwise. This is the same phenomenon that takes place when countries are struggling either economically or socially. An example of this is the spread of anti-semitism in Germany, where people were quick to put the blame of economic hardship on a race that they would not have in the past. In Italy we saw individuals – particularly students – take extremely strong left-wing viewpoints and other individuals – particularly soldiers – taking extremely right-wing opinions. This caused divisions in families and resulted in conflict that would have been avoidable had people not been drawn into the hatred that surrounds extreme political views.
We see the subtle presence of low-level political extremism in the film La Vita Agra (1964) by Carlo Lizziani. Despite this film being produced prior to the commencement of the ‘anni spezzati’, we can see the beginning of extreme left-wing views in Anna, Luciano Bianciardi’s lover. She has politicised left-wing posters in their room and expresses subtle left-wing opinions. We see the development of political tension in other areas of Italian cinema, for example in Marco Tulio Giordana’s La Meglio Gioventù (2003). In this film we see Giulia – the young girlfriend of the protagonist Nicola – get brainwashed and brought into the Brigate Rosse. She was a young student that was readily available to be brainwashed and taken to support an extreme cause. Her situation worsens when she chooses to leave her family and subsequently plots the murder of a close friend of her family. This is a clear example of how families were broken apart as a result of political extremism during the years of lead. Another example of this type of situation was the two different paths that both Mariane and Juliane chose to take as political activists in Germany.
The years of lead also had a very interesting element of fear within them, which could be attributed to the social destruction that took place as well as the clearly unexpected terrorist attacks that resulted in multiple deaths. A French paper by Gregorie Le Quang (5) found that the presence of fear increased dramatically as the years progressed and we can see this by the number of times ‘paura’ was mentioned in certain publications. Fear has always been a tool used by politically extremist groups in order to try and evoke change in the way that a country is being run. A clear demonstration of the instilling of fear was the kidnapping and subsequent murder of the Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro.