1978

September 28th, Turin
Piero Mario Coggiola, 46 years old, manager of the painting department of the Lancia Fiat in Chivasso

The tragedy of Piero Coggiola, head of painting at the Lancia di Chivasso, an unwanted murder, are told by Stefano Caselli and Davide Valentini in the volume Anni merciletati, published by Laterza in 2011

Via Servais resembles a transplanted mountain tourist village close to the North Tangential: low houses and gardens surred by evergreen trees, another of those small refuge oases of the middle bourgeoisie that abandoned the center. Piero Coggiola, 46, has everything but the face of the enemy. He lives at number 200 with his wife, two daughters (the oldest disabled) and a dog that he walks every morning, before the company bus takes him to the Lancia in Chivasso, where he directs the Painting department. It also happens on the morning of September 28, 1978.

The heartbreak of his wife

Myrna, the wife, accompanies her husband in a robe to the stop, where she leaves him shortly after 7.20. Piero Coggiola remains only on the street in the sparkling air of the first autumn, he looks up to see if the bus is on its way when he hears the call: ‘Coggiola della Lancia?’. He barely has time to turn around before a 90 caliber Beretta discharges on him twelve shots: five reach him to his legs, one sharply cuts his femoral artery. When Myrna, who heard the gunshots, returned to the bus stop, Piero Coggiola is already semi-conscious in a pool of blood. He dies shortly after, bleeding, at the Molinette.

“Here Red Brigades…”

A very young voice calls the switchboard of the Press: ‘Here Red Brigades, we have crippled Coggiola Piero…’. No, Coggiola Piero is dead, bled. At about the same time, in Rome, the nuns in charge of the pontiff’s person discover Albino Luciani corpse in his bed. Pope John Paul I reigned only thirty-three days. The news of the pope’s death comes like a spilgrims among the pilgrims queuing for the Shroud. And like a lightning light, the news of Piero Coggiola’s death plunges over the city: “A few weeks of a break in the dripping of routine terrorism – writes La Stampa on the front page – has given the illusion of having returned to live in normalcy. It was just an illusion. ‘They start agive,’ people say. We suddenly realize that we always knew that this day would come, that sooner or later we would start again.’