1977

May 12, Rome
Giorgiana Masi, 18 years old, student

Rome, May 12, 1977. A girl falls hit by a bullet in the middle of an intersection, as she escapes towards Trastevere. On the other hand, on the Garibaldi bridge, the police are attested. She is croasing. They help her. There is no blood or shells. They stop a car. They take her to the hospital. The emergency room doctor finds the death. Giorgiana Masi was killed by an armored bullet fired from a considerable distance that pierged her from side to side at 8 p.m. At the end of a day of violence arising from a peaceful demonstration by the Radical Party. It was May 12th. Pannella and his people wanted to celebrate the third anniversary of winning the divorce referendum and collect signatures for more referendums. Cossiga, Minister of the Interior, had banned any demonstration in Rome, after the killing of the non-commissioned student of Ps Settimio Passamonti, which took place during the clashes of April 21, which began at the university (next to the smear of his blood will appear, on the asphalt, the inscription: “There was a caramba here, Comrade Lorusso is avenged”). The center of Rome was armored by 1,800 men. Pannella had not accepted the ban, which in fact suspended the Constitution in the capital for a month. ‘It is a duty to disobey unjust orders,’ he had said during a dramatic parliamentary session, while clashes flared up on the street.
She was with her boyfriend, Giorgiana. He wanted to go and sign in Piazza Navona for the radical referendums in the early afternoon and then enjoy the sunny day. He found the zone militarized and all access prohibited. Even the radical deputies had been rejected by the formidable deployment of policemen and carabinieri. Mimmo Pinto of Lotta continua, elected deputy for proletarian democracy, had been pushed, thrown into the ground and misled by the guardians of the order. Giorgiana, who had reassured her (barber father, housewife mother) saying that she was quite shrewd and that she would not get involved in accidents (they were on the agenda of the day) goes around the city, looking for other access to the signature banquets, clearing between the numerous foci of clashes, lit by police charges and resistance of the self-employed, in the surroundings of Piazza Navona and up to the “lungo Tevere”. In his handbag you will find, among other things, a sandwich.
Then it happens at the end of the Garibaldi bridge, towards Piazza Belli and Trastevere, at the moment when the police and carabinieri have just dismantled a barricade and are embarking on a fight with the protesters, attested towards Trastevere. A young carabiniere was smeared by a gunshot. Two young people, Francesco Lacanale and Elena Ascione, are hit more or less at the same time that Giorgiana is mortally injured.
Various witnesses declare that the shots come from the side of law enforcement. Yet the weapons supplied to the wards have not been fired, it will be declared by the managers and ascertained as judicial truth. Visual testimonies of newspaper photojournalists and various other sources show that on the side of policemen and carabinieri in uniform there were various individuals in armed plainclothes. All afternoon, starting from the first fires lit in Piazza della Cancelleria, in the parts of Campo dei Fiori. In the various shots is also recognized a policeman, Giovanni Santone, in a white t-shirt with a black line and a ‘autonomous’ pocket. Here the situation is starting to get confused. Minister Cossiga in a first parliamentary statement will deny the presence of plainclothes military personnel. Then, in front of the photographic evidence, he admits them, declaring that they were elements in service to report crimes, not required to intervene. Who shot?
Questions remained unanswered.
The investigation into his death will be closed on May 9, 1981. The investigating judge will write: ‘Impossibility to proceed because those responsible for the crime have remained unknown’.
When the investigation is closed, lawyer Boneschi is the only one to end up in the desk of the accused. He commented on the sentence by re-proposing the unanswered questions, the photos, the videos, the found cases of weapons supplied to the police, the reconstructions of the denous police experts and those of the party experts with the demonstration that a bullet fired on the side of the bridge occupied by the guardians of the law pierced Giorgiana’s back. His reasoning, his outburst, was turned into a statement by the Radical Party, in a written charge against the investigating judge of not going to the bottom. In order to be able to support his position in the following defamation trial, brought to him by Judge D’Angelo, he does not accept the election as a deputy, renouncing to entrench himself behind parliamentary immunity.
The story is grotesque and painful. so many degrees of judgment, with contradictory sentences, up to a definitive civil conviction for slander against the judge in 2008, the only judicial truth certain decades later.