1969
February 27, Rome
Domenico Congedo, 23 years old, student

Saturday 27 February 1969 Rome is under lockdown for Richard Nixon’s official visit. A harsh protest was announced against the president of the United States, a country involved in the Vietnam War in those years.
The climate in the city is scorching. In the previous months the student movement occupied various faculties, to protest against the university reform project presented by the Christian Democratic Minister of Public Education Fiorentino Sullo, while the squad actions of the right increased, with attacks on offices and places of reference of the left, occupied schools and faculties, vandal attacks against commemorative plaques of anti-fascist martyrs.
On the afternoon of February 27, small groups and marches form in various points of the city. The students of the movement try to leave the occupied university, but are blocked by the police and carabinieri, to prevent them from joining the procession called by the Peace Committee, made up of the main organizations of the official left, starting from Piazza della Repubblica, with at the head of parliamentarians of the PCI and the PSIUP. The demonstrators are repeatedly forced by the police to change their route. Stopping again near the US embassy, they head towards Largo Chigi.
The first violent attacks start under the editorial office of the right-wing newspaper “Il Tempo”, from whose editorial office the journalists provoke the procession by giving the Roman salute. The protesters respond by throwing stones and cobblestones. In the center of Rome the barricades, the clashes with the police and the carabinieri lasted for hours.
In the meantime, the neo-fascist groups act undisturbed. The first assault is against a radical party headquarters, which displays a banner against Nixon’s visit.
Towards the evening, the squadristi attacked the occupied Magisterium, throwing stones and rockets at the building and setting fire to the entrance door. The police present do not intervene. The few occupants left to guard the building, while the other students took part in the procession, took refuge on the upper floors, barricading themselves with a metal wardrobe against the door. Domenico Congedo, twenty-four years old, a student of Foreign Languages and Literatures, climbs onto the ledge of a third floor window, looking for a way out for everyone. The marble gives way and the young man from Puglia, who recently moved to Rome, with anarchist sympathies and a militant of the student movement, crashes onto the pavement. Transported late to hospital, he died during the night at the Policlinico Umberto I.