1978

January 07, Rome (Acca Larentia)
Franco Bigonzetti, 19 years old, university student
Francesco Ciavatta, 18 years old, high school student
Stefano Recchioni, 19 years old, student

Franco Bigonzetti, Francesco Ciavatta and Stefano Recchioni are the three boys killed on January 7, 1978 in what is known as the ‘Strage di Acca Larenzia’.
The two young people Franco Bigonzetti and Francesco Ciavatta, both between 18 and 19 years old, were in front of the section of the Italian Social Movement in Via Acca Larenzia when they were killed in an ambish of a terrorist nature that was claimed by the Armed Nuclei for the Territorial Counterpower. In the following hours, a crowd of MSI militants gathered in front of the section, and precisely in this context some tensions were created with the police: some gunshots were fired, one of which hit the 20-year-old Stefano Recchioni, also a young Missino militant, killing him. Although it is a separate episode, the death of Recchioni is generally inserted in the collective memory as part of the Massacre of Acca Larenzia.
The dynamic:
Around 18:20 five young Missini militants, who were preparing to leave the headquarters of the Italian Social Movement in via Acca Larenzia to advertise with a flyer a concert of the right-wing alternative music group Amici del Vento, were hit by the shots of several automatic weapons fired by a firegroup of five or six people. One of the militants, Franco Bigonzetti, in his twenties, enrolled in the first year of the faculty of medicine and surgery, was killed on the spot.
The mechanic Vincenzo Segneri, wounded in the arm, returned to the party’s headquarters and, together with the other two unharmed militants – Maurizio Lupini, head of the neighborhood committees, and the student Giuseppe D’Audino – managed to close the armored door behind him, thus escaping the ambed. The eighteen-year-old student Francesco Ciavatta, although wounded, tried to escape along the staircase located next to the entrance of the section but, chased by the aggressors, was hit again in the back; he died in an ambulance while transporting to the hospital.
In the following hours, as the news spread of the ambow among the Missini militants, a dismayed crowd of activists organized a protest sit-in at the scene of the tragedy. Here, perhaps because of the distracted gesture of a journalist who allegedly threw a cigarette butt into the blood raptured on the ground of one of the victims, clashes and clashes were born that, among other things, damaged the video equipment of the Rai journalists and provoked the intervention of the police, with charges and throwing of tear gas. One of these also hit the then national secretary of the Youth Front, Gianfranco Fini.
According to some testimonies, denied many years later by ballistic expert reports, the Carabinieri fired some shots into the air while Captain Eduardo Sivori fired aiming at the height of a man, but his weapon jammed; the officer then had his gun delivered to his attendant and fired again, this time hitting in full forehead the nineteen-year-old Stefano Recchioni, a militant of the Colle Oppio section and guitarist of the alternative music group Janus. This version turned out to be completely unfounded so much so that several years later the officer was acquitted for not committing the fact. The young man would have died after two days of agony.
The investigations have never clearly identified the culprits of the attack claimed by the Armed Nuclei for the Territorial Counterpower. The weapon of the crime, a Scorpion machine gun, was found in 1988 in a den of the Red Brigades in Milan, and it was discovered that between 1985 and 1988 the same weapon had been used against the economist Ezio Tarantelli, the former mayor of Florence Lando Conti and the senator of the Christian Democracy Roberto Ruffilli, all three killed by the BR.