1974

The Piazza della Loggia massacre
May 28, 10.12 am, Brescia

It was raining that morning. In the city you could feel the uneasiness of the wrong days. Or maybe just the tension of great occasions. May 28, 1974, Tuesday: Gianpaolo Zorzi, a final year law student, was at home that morning. He hears, like everyone else that day in Brescia, the roar. At 10.12 the sound of a powerful explosion tears apart a gray sky that looks like autumn. Gianpaolo leaves the house and rushes towards Piazza della Loggia, where the anti-fascist rally was being held. On the street he meets a friend, his face distorted: he comes from the square, he witnessed the explosion, he saw with his own eyes the horrible scene of the wounded screaming and the dead no longer complaining. It’s a bomb. (…) Zorzi is as precise as a computer. He lines up names, dates, facts from memory. He connects episodes. He draws the map of Italian neo-fascist groups. He tells, without missing a single detail, a piece of the recent history of this country. «The trade union demonstration in Piazza della Loggia is scheduled for Thursday 23 May. Made on Tuesday 28th. The dates are important » he explains. Here because. And here’s what happens in the city on those crucial days. “Democratic and anti-fascist” Brescia, as they used to say in those years, wanted to take to the streets to show a “mass and responsible” response to the series of right-wing attacks that characterized the first months of 1974. An endless series of black bombs had strained the city’s nerves. Bombs had exploded in a Coop supermarket. In a butcher’s shop. In front of the door of the Brescia headquarters of the CISL union… Brescia and its province are in this period an area of high subversive density. The periodical «La Fenice», organ of Giancarlo Rognoni’s Milanese Ordinovist group of the same name, was printed in the Eros Fiorini printing house in Nave, in the province of Brescia. It is from Brescia that the investigation against Il Mar, the revolutionary armed movement of Carlo Fumagalli, who will later be convicted of political conspiracy, begins. It is in the province of Brescia, in Sonico in Val Camonica, that the carabinieri of Captain Francesco Delfino, commander of the Brescia investigative unit, stopped two young members of the Mar in March 1974, Giorgio Spedini from Brescia and Kim Borromeo from Milan: the two in trunk of their Fiat 128 have a good quantity of explosives. Only a year earlier, on 4 February 1973, Borromeo, together with six other comrades of the National Avant-garde including Alessandro D’Intino, had participated in an attack, without victims, against the Brescia headquarters of the PSI. But the last, dramatic subversive episode happened on the night between Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th May 1974. Silvio Ferrari, a twenty-year-old neo-fascist, was blown up in Piazza del Mercato. He was standing on his Vespa 125, with the gearbox in neutral and his feet on the ground. Tipsy, returning from a party in a villa on Lake Garda where he had been drinking a little, Silvio was handling a high-explosive bomb that he held between his legs, on his scooter. At 3 am, by chance or by mistake or by a malicious intention of the same comrades who had entrusted him with the device, the bomb explodes. His body is torn apart, thrown upwards. Only the feet are intact, protected on the ground by the metal base of the Vespa. A funeral follows with fascist hymns and Roman greetings and flower cushions that draw the double axe, symbol of the New Order. Piazza Mercato is immediately patrolled, day and night, by groups of the extra-parliamentary left, Lotta continua in the lead, who want to prevent the fascists from transforming the theater of Comrade Ferrari’s death into a place of vigil and celebration. It is in this climate that the decision to organize the demonstration on May 28th matured. A few days earlier, on the 12th, the progressive front had won the referendum on divorce, putting the Christian Democrats in the minority, for the first time in republican history, which in the referendum battle had been supported this time only by the Italian Social Movement. The circles of the right, the radical and bomb-mongering one, but also the “Atlantic” one installed within the parties, the armed forces and the bodies of the State, are in alarm; they fear a shift to the left of the political axis, they experience the anti-divorce campaign and the referendum defeat as the last trench, now overwhelmed, of legal resistance to the country’s subversion. (…) Tuesday 28 May: the bomb explodes in Piazza della Loggia. Eight dead, 94 injured. At the site of the explosion, traces of ammonium nitrate were found, one of the components of an additive for explosives called amfo, which comes in the form of a granular powder. Traces? It is difficult to find significant traces, useful clues, in that poor square visited by death. The one in Brescia is the only massacre of which there is a sound document: the recording of the rally, interrupted by the roar, followed by the screams, the confusion.

From the book of Gianni Barbacetto Il grande Vecchio, Bur 2009
online in
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Il-grande-vecchio.pdf