Italians are still haunted by the Years of Lead

By A.V.

ON a bitter day in December 1969, a bomb exploded at a bank in Piazza Fontana, near Milan’s cathedral. Seventeen died. The young anarchist arrested in connection with the atrocity mysteriously died in custody. Three years later, the policeman accused of his murder was executed on the street. Things dragged on like this for years: six people were killed in December 1976 alone. All told, Italians suffered the nightmare of the “Anni di Piombo”—“The Years of Lead”—for 15 bewildering years. Hundreds died in the numerous attacks. The country’s films, books and music are still contemplating its significance.

The Years of Lead, so named for the number of bullets fired, emerged from the optimism of the economic miracle. While industrialisation gave Italians unimagined prosperity, it also kindled social disruption. Millions of peasants moved to scruffy apartment buildings in the city, smashing traditional family bonds and intensifying class tensions. Powerful new unions meant massive strikes became common. Mainstream politicians flapped, in part because cold war tensions made collaboration between rival parties so difficult.

As the 1960s ended, some Italians decided liberalism was doomed. Marxist extremists, notably the Red Brigades, began kidnapping and assassinating “anti-worker” officials: policemen, judges, journalists. Their right-wing opponents bombed civilians to “drown democracy under a mountain of corpses”. Both sides hoped to weaken the state and to spark revolution or a military takeover. Members of the Italian secret service nudged things along, working with neo-fascist killers to frame the left.

Italians used art to cope with the chaos, and early attempts were streaked with humour. Fabrizio De Andrè, a left-wing folk musician, mocked the pretentions of some radical terrorists in his 1973 song “The Bomberman” (despite promising “revolution”, his narrator only manages to blow up a newspaper kiosk). That year also saw the release of “We Want The Colonels”, a satirical film imagining a right-wing takeover. After a bombing in Milan, a group of generals decide to strike before the left takes power. The plot fails: one of the conspirators ends up hawking his plan to would-be African despots.

Inevitably, as the killing went on, people stopped laughing and Italian culture moved to reflect this darker mood. “San Babila 8PM: A Useless Murder” (1976) hauntingly captures the slapdash terror of the age. The movie follows a gang of neo-fascist children over an afternoon. Before the day is over, they rape a friend and stab a man to death. Italian politics was equally cruel. In 1978, Red Brigade militants kidnapped Aldo Moro, a former prime minister, apparently to disrupt plans to bring moderate communists into government. Police found his body several weeks later, crumpled into the boot of a car. “The crime of the Red Brigades offends the civil conscience of all Italians.” Giorgio Gabar, a popular musician, was just as bitter. “The Red Brigades have really gone mad,” he sang in 1980. “If I were God, I would retire to the countryside.”

Though the murders slowed by 1985, they have haunted Italians. Historians pump out studies on the Years of Lead, while ex-terrorists have published memoirs. Writers fictionalise the violence, too. “Time On My Hands”, a novel published in 2008 by Giorgio Vasta, shadows a group of schoolboys who grow naively obsessed with the Red Brigades. Francesco Piccolo, a Neapolitan novelist, explores similar ideas. The protagonist of “The Desire To Be Like Everyone” (2013) slowly loses his hunger for revolution. After Moro’s kidnapping, the young man is appalled at his utopian friends. “They weren’t sorry,” he says. “I watched them, I envied them; and at the same time, my stomach ached with nausea.”

If Italians still battle to understand how their country became so brutal, the violence itself is another focus. The fogginess of many attacks––with conspiracy theories and government meddling either suspected or proved––is perfect for looser fictions. “Romanzo Criminale” (2005) is an acclaimed gangster flick linking the state to an infamous neo-fascist bombing at Bologna train station, where 85 people died. Alex Boschetti and Anna Ciammitti have published a graphic novel on the massacre. The preface hopes the book can help uncover the “nasty secrets” behind the slaughter. This position is echoed by Mega Blaqaut, an Italian rapper. “No one criticises the events,” he declares in one song. “The Years of Lead…are here forever”.

This lack of closure helps explain Italians’ continued fascination with the Years of Lead. The randomness of the slaughter still feeds national worries about government conspiracies, what locals call dietrologia (literally “behindology”). At the same time, the violence of that period still has practical political consequences—the government was recently caught up trying to extradite a Red Brigade militant on the run in Brazil. Some analysts see the experience of the 1970s as a bulwark against modern violence: Italy is the only major western European country yet to suffer seriously from Islamist terrorism. The Years of Lead live on, even as commuters hurry to Bologna station, or Christmas shoppers weave through the pigeons from the Duomo to Piazza Fontana.