1974

Italicus massacre

The “forgotten massacre”: this is how some historians have renamed the tragedy that occurred exactly 48 years ago, on Sunday 4 August 1974. That day, a terrorist attack on the Italicus Rome-Monaco train caused 12 deaths and 48 injuries on the train. Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, in San Benedetto Val di Sambro, not far from Bologna. A massacre whose perpetrators are still unknown: all the defendants subsequently tried were acquitted. At 1.23am on the night between 3 and 4 August the fifth carriage of the Italicus Rome-Monaco was torn apart by an explosion about one hundred meters after exiting the long Apennine tunnel. The Express 1486 left the Rome Tiburtina station at 8.35pm and passed through Florence Santa Maria Novella at half past midnight, 23 minutes late: it was precisely this slippage on the scheduled time that prevented the bomb from exploding at the established point originally by the attackers, with predictably even more serious consequences. In fact, from examining the bomb’s timer, it was discovered that it should have exploded while the train was passing through the Great Apennines Tunnel and not 50 meters from the exit. The delay accumulated during the race, however, allowed numerous lives to be saved. It seems that Aldo Moro should also have been on board, it was said later, but a sudden commitment made him miss the train with which he was supposed to go on holiday. Ten years later, another attack inside the same tunnel, that of the rapid 904 (23 December 1984), cost the lives of 16 people and injured 267.
On 5 August 1974, the attack was claimed with a flyer, found in a telephone booth in Bologna, on which it was written: “Giancarlo Esposti has been avenged. We wanted to demonstrate to the nation that we can put bombs wherever we want, at any time, in any place, wherever and however we want. We’ll see you again in autumn; we will bury democracy under a mountain of deaths.” Giancarlo Esposti was a right-wing extremist, killed in 1974 by a carabiniere during an escape. He was a figure within the far right in Bologna. The flyer was followed by anonymous phone calls to Resto del Carlino from the same point. The author of both the flyer and the phone calls turned out to be Italo Bono, who was identified by the police on the same evening of August 5th.
Initially, there were four main defendants in the trial for the Italicus massacre and they were all exponents of the neo-fascist group “Black Order”, the same one that had claimed responsibility for the attack through the flyer. But on 20 July 1983, the president of the Assize Court of Bologna acquitted all the accused due to insufficient evidence. In the appeal, on 18 December 1986, two of the four defendants in the first instance were sentenced to life imprisonment: Mario Tuti and Luciano Franci. The investigations had verified the possibility that the bomb had previously been positioned, when the train was parked in Florence at Santa Maria Novella, on the fifth carriage. On 16 December 1987, however, the judge of the Court of Cassation annulled the convictions of both Mario Tuti and Luciano Franci. Four years later, on 4 April 1991, both defendants were acquitted by the Court of Appeal of Bologna, acquittals which were definitively confirmed by the Court of Cassation on 24 March 1992.
The culprits were therefore never found but, according to the Parliamentary Commission in 1984, “the Italicus massacre can be attributed to a terrorist organization of neo-fascist or neo-Nazi inspiration operating in Tuscany; that the P2 Lodge carried out the work of instigating attacks and financing groups of the Tuscan extra-parliamentary right; that the P2 Lodge is therefore seriously involved in the Italicus massacre and can even consider itself responsible in non-judicial but historical-political terms, as an essential economic, organizational and moral background”.