December 12, 1969 is a date indelibly printed on the pages of recent Italian history. On that cold winter’s day, at 4:37 in the afternoon, a bomb exploded inside the crowded Banca Nazionale dell‘Agricoltura situated in piazza Fontana in downtown Milan. In the carnage that resulted, 17 people lay dead and another 88 wounded.
Around the same time that day, a second unexploded bomb was found at the Banca Commerciale Italiana in Milan’s piazza della Scala. Shortly afterwards, another three bombs exploded in Rome: one in an underground passage in via Veneto near the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, injuring 13 people; another in front of the monument of Vittorio Emanuele II; and the third at the entrance to the Museum of the Risorgimento, wounding another four people.
Those five attacks, which all took place within less than an hour, were clearly aimed at striking Italy’s two most important cities. They were all part of what was later known as the ‘strategy of tension,’ which ended a year that saw 145 bombings, the equivalent of one every three days.
Reacting quickly to public outrage following the piazza Fontana massacre, police rounded up 84 people for questioning in Milan alone. On the same day as the bombing, an anarchist railway worker, Giuseppe Pinelli, was one of the first to be questioned by police. Three days later, still in police custody, he fell to his death from a fourth floor window at the police headquarters, an event that would inexorably instigate members of the extreme left-wing group Lotta Continua to murder, in May 1972, Luigi Calabresi, the police superintendent in charge of the interrogation.
Pietro Valpreda, another anarchist and founding member of a group known as March 22, after the 1968 insurrection of French students at Nanterre University, was also arrested in Milan and several affiliates of the same group, whose truculent motto was ‘bombs, blood and anarchy,’ were taken into custody in Rome. Subsequently, Valpreda was charged with strage (massacre) for the piazza Fontana bombing. A taxi driver identified him from an old photo as the person carrying a large briefcase he had driven a short distance to the bank just before the explosion. Another founder of March 22, Mario Merlino, who, at the time, claimed to be a convert from neofascism to anarchism, was also indicted along with Valpreda.
Born into a family of artisans in Milan on August 29, 1933, Valpreda, who trained as a dancer, worked on and off in a theatre chorus line. Politically active, he attended meetings of the Ponte della Ghisolfa anarchist circle in Milan. After moving to Rome in 1969, he became a member of the Bakunin anarchist circle there. Considering the latter too moderate, he, together with Merlino and others, established March 22. Unfortunately for him, he was in Milan on the day of the bombings: he was there to appear in court over an anarchist pamphlet defaming the pope. Proclaiming his innocence, he told investigators that he was nowhere near piazza Fontana. Instead, he said, he had seen his lawyers the morning, but because he had influenza and a high fever, he had gone to his aunt’s place, where he spent the rest of the day in bed.
With his radical beliefs and background, he was an ideal suspect; the press immediately branded Valpreda a ‘monster.’ Facing a life sentence in prison, his judicial nightmare was about to begin. Although the case against him and his co-defendants was based on flimsy circumstantial evidence, they spent the next three years in jail, awaiting trial. Describing in Letters from the Prison of the System what it was like for an innocent man to be incarcerated, Valpreda wrote that, unlike in the movies, there was nothing romantic about it and that ‘what comes out [of prison] is a tired person who stinks or is tubercular.’ Although not guilty, Valpreda was not fully acquitted by the Supreme Court until 1985.
During the next three decades, police followed two other main investigative paths. The first involved neofascist right-wing extremists Franco Freda, Giovanni Ventura and the ex-agent of the secret services, Guido Giannettini. The second focused on several members of Ordine Nuovo. Despite five preliminary hearings and eight trails, to date, no one has definitively been convicted of the crime.
After his acquittal, Valpreda became a bookseller and then managed a bar in Milan, but he also took every opportunity to tell his story and dedicated much of his time to writing. He and journalist Piero Colaprico wrote several successful thrillers. On July 6, 2002, he died, aged 69, of Brugher syndrome. True to his political convictions, his funeral service, attended by 300 people, was held at the Ponte della Ghisolfa anarchist circle.
