1970

12 December, Milan
Saltarelli Saverio, 23 years old, student

On Saturday 12 December 1970, on the first anniversary of the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan, Saverio Saltarelli, 23 years old, from Pescasseroli d’Abruzzo, a third-year law student at the University of Milan, a communist, was killed by the police during a demonstration. internationalist.
Saverio was killed by the police while demonstrating to reiterate the reactionary and fascist nature of the massacre the previous December; report the death of Giuseppe Pinelli due to defenestration in the Milan police station; stand in solidarity with the anarchists Valpreda, Bagnoli, Borghese, Di Cola, Gargamelli, Mander, blamed for the massacre without any proof or clue and imprisoned awaiting trial for almost a year.
At the end of the rally of the “Committee for Republican Order”, immediately after leaving Piazza Duomo and without any reason, at 5.45 pm the anarchist procession, made up of 5-600 people, was severely attacked by the Carabinieri at the beginning of Via Torino, from Via Speronari and Via Spadari, right on the ranks of the internationalists, where Saverio Saltarelli was deployed.
The internationalist group and the anarchist procession immediately found themselves shattered into very small groups, dispersed both towards Piazza Duomo, Piazza della Scala, Piazza Diaz, and towards Piazza Missori, through Via Mazzini and the streets connecting with Via Torino.
What followed were sporadic and limited clashes that were little more than individual in Via Torino and then in Via Albricci, where the windows of the Spanish state airline were smashed.
In via Larga, where he had moved from the nearby Piazza Duomo after the dispersion of the procession and the internationalist group, Saverio found himself in the contiguity of a friction between a veil of demonstrators (some of whom had been there for some time, some of whom had already participated in the procession dispersed in via Turin) and about forty Carabinieri, sent there from Piazza Missori to get the traffic flow, which had just stopped, to resume in Via Larga.
The friction developed into a real clash due to the involvement of members of the Student Movement’s security service, as per agreements with the Police Headquarters deployed in Via Sant’Antonio and Via Bergamini.
That half platoon of Carabinieri found itself in difficulty from which it emerged by exploding numerous gunshots fired at eye level (a journalist about twenty meters away was injured); in the charge to their aid which in any case immediately followed by all the police and Carabinieri forces available between Piazza Missori and Piazza Fontana (we believe around 300 men), Saverio found himself in the midst of the attacking Carabinieri.
In circumstances never clarified, while he was around 6.30 pm in the clearing at the confluence of Via Bergamini, Via Sant’Antonio, Via Larga, Saverio, according to the two sentences of 1976 and 1977, was hit in the chest by a tear gas canister fired by the police; he remained lifeless on the ground for approximately 10 – 15 minutes; he was then rescued by demonstrators (presumably from the Student Movement’s security service) who took him inside the University; a doctor tried to resuscitate him but immediately requested hospitalization at the nearby Polyclinic where, however, Saverio arrived already dead, around 7.00 pm.