1972

August 25, Parma
Mariano Lupo, 19 years old, worker

On the evening of 25 August 1972, in front of the “Roma” cinema in Parma, a Lotta Continua militant, Mariano Lupo, was attacked and killed with a stab to the heart by a group of neo-fascists.
Lupo’s assassination is part of a long trail of murders of movement militants, and is the peak of the attacks promoted in the Emilian city. In this sense, rightly, at the time, it was said that Lupo’s death was “announced”: between 1968 and 1972, intimidation, beatings, violence and neo-fascist explosions had a dizzying rise. To these actions, the groups of the extra-parliamentary left responded with “militant” anti-fascism: the fight had to be “of attack and no longer just of vigilance in defense of the constitution”. The young people of the revolutionary movements bluntly criticized the “institutional” anti-fascism of the democratic parties, attacked the traditional idea of the defense of republican legality, invited the historical left to break relations with the Christian Democrats (accused of “fascistising the state” ), mobilized their organizations to remove any political and physical space from the subversive right. The mass mobilisations, the protests at MSI rallies, the attacks on right-wing offices, the “popular trials”, the movements’ order services, the use of political violence were the different faces with which militant anti-fascism presented; but they cannot be understood if they are not placed in the historical scenario of massacres, squad provocations, clashes with the police forces, complaints to the judiciary, “announced deaths”.
While the police commissioner of Parma, Edgardo Gramellini, declared that Lupo’s murder was nothing more than the epilogue of a brawl between thugs over “women’s issues”, the crime started a new series of democratic mobilisations. On August 27, a procession of several thousand students and workers, called by the extra-parliamentary left, ended with the assault and devastation of the MSI headquarters (of which Lupo’s assailants were – or had been until a few days earlier – leaders and activists). In the flyer announcing the demonstration we read: “In the face of this criminal assassination, in the face of the progressive increase in fascist violence, it is criminal to say and think of relying on the State, on the police forces, on fascists in uniform, to stamp out the gangs of Almirante, protected by the DC, paid by the bosses, grown in the shadow of that same State which should now eliminate them”.
The controversy was clearly aimed at the leaders of the PCI and the PSI. Nonetheless, on August 28, Lupo’s funeral took place as a unit, in an official form. From 11am until 5pm, a continuous stream of citizens paid homage to the body of the young Sicilian, in the funeral chamber set up in the Town Hall. The coffin was carried on the shoulders of the young man’s companions and the garbage workers, while a silent and emotional procession of tens of thousands of people followed it slowly along the streets of the city, from Piazza Garibaldi to the Partisan Monument, from the Ponte di mezzo to Piazza Picelli. Here, in the heart of the popular neighborhood of Otretorrente, Giacomo Ferrari – the old communist mayor and “Arta” partisan commander – held the funeral oration in front of the mourning flags of the parties, the banners of the democratic associations and the municipalities, the banners of movement. The funeral for Lupo’s body, therefore, turned into a great anti-fascist demonstration: the young Lotta Continua militant became the last fallen in the democratic struggle of the people of Parma.
The trial was supposed to begin in 1974, but on the eve of the trial, accepting the requests of the defenders, the judicial authority transferred him for “alleged reasons of public order” from the Court of Parma to that of Ancona. A year later, on 30 July 1975, the Court of Assizes of Ancona, accepting the theory of manslaughter, issued a lenient sentence: Edgardo Bonazzi was given a sentence of 11 years and 8 months, and Andrea Ringozzi 6 years and 10 months, to Luigi Saporito aged 4 years and 5 months. The end of the trial was greeted by protests from the extra-parliamentary left and harsh clashes with the police broke out outside the court. Finally, on 15 June 1976, again in Ancona, the appeal trial ended with a tightening of the sentences: Bonazzi was sentenced to 14 years and 8 months, Ringozzi to 9 years and 4 months, Saporito to 6 years and 3 months. According to the judges, the attack of August 1972 had been “decided, pre-ordained and implemented by one party against the other which limited itself, however, to defending itself with very little effectiveness”. In the final sentence we read again: “There can therefore be no doubt about the fact that the young Missini, that evening, had the intention of doing something and had prepared in this sense”. The murder was voluntary. It should be noted that in the Lupo family’s board of lawyers there was present, in addition to the Parma lawyer Decio Bozzini and his collaborators, the elderly communist leader Umberto Terracini, testifying to the value that the trial also had for the PCI and for traditional anti-fascism had hired.