1969
December 12th
Piazza Fontana massacre

Around 4.30pm on Friday 12 December 1969, a high-powered bomb exploded in the central hall of the National Bank of Agriculture of Milan, in Piazza Fontana, where direct farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs had gathered from the province for the weekly market. The floor of the hall was torn open and the effects were devastating. The bomb killed seventeen people and around ninety others were injured.
A few minutes before the explosion, another bomb was found, unexploded, in the headquarters of the Commercial Bank in Piazza della Scala, also in Milan.
Between 4.55pm and 5.30pm, three other explosions occurred in Rome: one, inside the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in via San Basilio; two others, on the Altare della Patria in Piazza Venezia. These attacks caused injuries and damage.
The five attacks on the afternoon of 12 December 1969 marked the beginning of that period in the life of the country which goes by the name of the strategy of tension.
Due to its gravity and political relevance, the Piazza Fontana massacre became the highest moment of a subversive project prepared through the other attacks of that same year and aimed – as emerges from the sentences – at using disorder and fear for outlets of an authoritarian type or for a neocentrist stabilization.
“Collusive agreements with institutional apparatus” have been ascertained, as written in the report of the Massacre Commission.
After initially taking the “anarchist path”, the investigations focused on some members of the Paduan group headed by the black terrorist Franco Freda and the far-right organization Ordine Nuovo, and involved leading members of the secret services.
The long and tormented procedural process, which consists of three trials, ended in 2005 with overall acquittals, but certifying that the massacre is attributable to the far-right subversive organization Ordine Nuovo. The convictions for conduct aimed at misleading two SID officers and the involvement of the Ordine Nuovo weapons expert Carlo Digilio (confessed criminal and collaborator of justice) remain definitively confirmed. Furthermore, the last trial considers the involvement in the massacre of the black terrorists Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura to be proven, from a historical perspective (no longer prosecutable because they were already definitively acquitted in the first trial).