1973

January 23, Milan
Roberto Franceschi, 21 years old, university student

“He was a comrade, he was a fighter
for Socialism and Freedom:
for this reason the government sent a platoon
and a gunman shot from behind.”

It is the first verse of the song that the musical commission of the Student Movement wrote in 1973 to remember the sacrifice of Roberto Franceschi. A song that in the 70s in Milan had become a bit like what 10 years earlier had been “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia” dedicated to the five workers killed by the police on 7 July 1960: the popular expression of affection and denunciation for a murdered comrade and the oral transmission of the memory of his sacrifice.
Thus it was that, also thanks to “Compagno Franceschi”, over the course of almost a decade, many thousands of young and less young people became acquainted with the figure of Roberto and the circumstances in which he lost his life.
Today, however, no one sings that song anymore and even the memory of Franceschi, despite the size of the monument to his memory – a mammoth mallet placed in front of the Bocconi University – risks fading year after year in the collective conscience of democratic Milan.
Roberto Franceschi was 21 years old in 1973, studying political economy at Bocconi University and was a militant of the Student Movement.
On the evening of January 23 of that year the M.S. collective Bocconi, of which Roberto was a manager, had called an assembly between workers and students in the university’s main hall; the rector Gaetano dell’Amore, contrary to established practice, had prohibited non-members from entering the university, i.e. he had effectively prohibited the assembly; to enforce that decision a police department (which was then called “quick police”) was deployed in front of the entrance to the university.
As soon as the students and workers who had arrived to take part in the assembly indicated a protest, the “cops” did not hesitate to charge them: there was a brief clash and when the demonstrators were already moving away, police officers and officers repeatedly opened fire on them with the service revolvers.
Two young people were hit from behind: Roberto Franceschi in the head and Roberto Piacentini, a worker at Cinemeccanica in Milan, in the collarbone.
Piacentini survived despite the severity of the wound, Franceschi died on January 30 after seven days of agony.