1975

April 15th, Milan
Claudio Varalli, 17 years old, student

Claudio was a boy son of his time, involved since he was a teenager in the climate of active participation that prevailed at the time, engaged in the life of the neighborhood, in the activities of the oratorio. Student-worker, at 15 years old, attending high schools in Milan, is passionate about politics, joins the Workers’ Movement for Socialism, attends the training courses of the ACLI, throws himself into the social network supporting mobilizations against layoffs in the many factories of the Baranzate occupied, in favor of the rights to work, to study and to claim better wage conditions. Right at the end of a demonstration for the right to housing, called by the Milanese committees of Ticino, Claudio and his companions come across, near Piazza Cavour in Milan, a group of far-right activists belonging to the University Front of National Action. A violent raffering arises: one of the young Missini, 21-year-old Antonio Braggion, barricades himself in his Mini Minor and, at the assault with bursts, responds with revolver shots, killing Varalli. Painful confirmation of the historical thesis that ‘the fascists walked around armed with guns, the left-wing extra-parliamentarians with spenches and wrenches, settling the accounts with clashes and deadly ambsts’. After an abeiding abroad, in 1978, Braggion will be sentenced to 5 years in prison ‘for excess of legitimate defense’, and another 5 for ‘abusive possession of a firearm’, a penalty that will be reduced to the second degree. Released in 1982, he disappeared in September 2018.