On May 17, there is a single line. On that day he had been more punctual. “Gigi leaves at 9:10.”
My only memory of my father is from the last Sunday that we spent together. The Dutch date book also helped me to reconstruct what we had done that day. “May 14. Gigi takes Mario to see the Alpine Soldiers parade. He comes home with pastries, ice cream, and roses.” My mother still has a rose from that bouquet. It’s dry, but you can still get a sense of its color—pink tinged with red. She keeps it in a box together with the thousands of letters she has received over the years.
The diary that came back to life and played such a significant part in the trial also brought my mother and me to the memory of that day. The first time we had spoken about it was actually two or three years before the first trial, when I was in junior high school. One afternoon in the kitchen, after having kept it to myself for years, I told her, “Mama, I have a memory of Papà Gigi. It’s a strong, beautiful sensation, but I can’t place it. If I tell you, can you help me?” I told her about a crowd of people, a public square, and a marching band. I was sitting on his shoulders, a little frightened of the crowd and the noise, but incredibly drawn to the big golden horn of a trombone. He asked me if I wanted to touch it, but I was shy and no one was going anywhere near the band. People were lined up and down the street to watch the parade. No one crossed the imaginary line. Except him. He climbed over something and passed the police barriers. I held on to his hair while he gripped my legs: I was afraid. I felt like we were breaking the rules, but he gave me confidence. We approached the band. He had a word with someone, asked something, leaned toward the trombone, and made me touch it, for just a second. We turned back. I was happy. I felt grown-up, strong, proud to be on his shoulders. I felt like we were doing something very brave. I wasn’t afraid of the crowd anymore. Everything felt sunny and warm.
I can still feel that sensation today: vivid, sharp, clean. A feeling of calm and fullness that has descended on me often since then. At school. Amid the crowds exiting the soccer stadium. At Rockefeller Center in New York, when people were fleeing after someone found an envelope containing anthrax spores at the NBC studios. On March 11, 2004, when we were putting together a team of reporters to send to Madrid a few minutes after the bombs had exploded on the trains. On the night we put together the special edition marking the beginning of the war in Iraq.
On all these occasions, different though they were, I felt a warm sensation and I thought of him. It is the legacy he has bequeathed to me. He gave me tranquillity in the midst of chaos, a serenity that settles over me when everything around me is accelerating. The faster it gets, the more things inside me slow down, become clearer, simpler. Maybe it was only the Alpine Forces marching band, but it’s a memory I’ve been carrying around inside for almost thirty-five years.
When I finished telling the story, my mother smiled at me, shaking her head. “How can you remember after all these years? … And why did you wait so long to tell me? For days and days after, you couldn’t stop talking about that trombone and how you’d touched it. It’s incredible that you still remember.”
5.
graffiti
SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN ROME. A group of youths breaks away from a protest rally. They’re wearing bandannas over their faces and carrying cans of spray paint. On a wall in the center of the city, they spray in large letters Calabresi Assassino—Calabresi the Murderer.
From their actions, you would never guess that it is November 2006, not 1970. Telephone booths have long disappeared from the streets and young people are listening to iPods. There are pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the streets, and controversial slogans attacking the victims of Nassiriya, the Iraqi city where a truck bomb killed seventeen Italian soldiers in 2003. And not far away from the rally, a new president, Giorgio Napolitano, has been installed in the Quirinale Palace. The elder statesman of the Italian Communist Party until its dissolution in 1991, his appointment to the highest office in Italy—the first former Communist to be so honored—is a rare moment of reconciliation between the right and the left.
• • •
One year earlier, again in the fall. I’m heading to the international photography biennial in Viterbo with my friend and colleague Omero, to see an exhibit by the Iranian photographer Abbas, whose amazing pictures tell the story of the Khomeini revolution. The show is at the Palazzo Calabresi. I joke that I’d forgotten that I owned a palazzo. But we can’t find it. People explain that it’s on Via Calabresi. “And a street, too,” I add. We start laughing but stop the minute we turn the corner. On the street sign, right beneath the name Calabresi, someone has written Assassino with a Magic Marker. Omero starts to say how sorry he is. I shrug my shoulders and explain to him that I’m used to it, not to worry. We go on to have a good time at the exhibit.
July 2004. I’m in Genoa. I walk down the alleys that descend from the Ducal Palace to the Porto Vecchio. I’m looking for a bakery that makes chickpea focaccia. A wall covered with posters and leaflets grabs my attention. I stop to read. There are community center initiatives, newspaper articles under the banner “THE COMMUNIST PARTY,” a poster of a missing child with an appeal for help, and a weight-loss ad. Then I notice a handbill with a picture of my father. The title: NO MORE LIES! LUIGI CALABRESI WAS A BRUTE. I remove it gingerly, to avoid tearing it. Although it looks like a relic from another era, it turns out to be new. “HE’S THE ONE WHO KILLED PINELLI, THROWING HIM OUT THE WINDOW OF POLICE HEADQUARTERS IN MILAN. TRAINED BY THE CIA, HE WAS ONE OF THE MOST COLD-BLOODED KILLERS IN ITALIAN HISTORY. MURDERING HIM WAS AN ACT OF JUSTICE. WHO CARES WHAT HIS WHINING RELATIVES HAVE TO SAY. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT EVEN KILLERS HAVE FAMILIES.” At this point, I almost feel like laughing, but I keep reading. “MAY THERE BE MANY MORE MAY 17THS, AND MAY ALL THE EXECUTIONERS LIKE HIM QUICKLY MEET THE SAME END.” I fold it, put it in my pocket, and try to imagine who could have written it, but it’s impossible for me to envision the kind of life that could produce such a leaflet.
Freshman year of high school. December 12, 1984, the anniversary of the Piazza Fontana massacre. There is a memorial march that I attend with my classmates. I thought the event was sacrosanct, but no sooner do we enter the Piazza than a small group starts chanting, syllable by syllable, the slogan “Ca-la-bre-si as-sas-si-no.” I don’t know what to do, where to go. I break away and head toward the cathedral. Thank goodness my schoolmates follow me.
Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the effectiveness of a press campaign that began shortly before I was born. The simple, clear slogan coined in the early 1970s has outlived its original purpose and been passed down from decade to decade and generation to generation. It has proven to be as marketable as today’s name brands. But this campaign was not designed by a public relations person: it was the brainchild of many thinkers, including some of the most illustrious names in journalism, theater, culture, and activism. Fueled by indignation, their vindictive fury created a monster. Despite the lack of evidence, motive, or any basis in reality, they decided that my father had murdered Giuseppe Pinelli, nicknamed Pino.
I’ve often asked myself how I would have felt if I had been a journalist back in that period. My response is immediate: I, too, would have been indignant. The top brass of the police had the duty to explain what had happened to Pinelli, without stonewalling or withholding information. He had arrived at police headquarters on his motorbike, been held for questioning for three days, and died shortly after a fall from a window while still in custody. How was this possible? The police should have conducted a careful and thorough investigation. Instead they were vague and uncommunicative. Their secrecy was an insult to the country and it fanned the worst suspicions. The conclusion is inevitable: the police—my father’s employer and a governmental agency reporting to the Ministry of the Interior—had failed to do its duty.
This failure led to indignation, outrage, and ultimately a public lynching. Not of the police commissioner, Marcello Guida, who had quickly announced to the press that
Pinelli had committed suicide, claiming that he had thereby implicated himself and admitted tacitly to complicity in the Piazza Fontana bombing. Not of Antonino Allegra, the head of the political office, the man responsible for holding Pinelli so long. No, the public outrage was directed at Luigi Calabresi, the youngest member of the political office. A policeman truly worthy of distinction, he believed that the police should focus their efforts on dialogue with the protesters, not repression. He used to visit the home of the publisher and militant Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (who blew himself up accidently while trying to dynamite electric power installations near Milan), argue with the protesters, and walk alongside the marchers.
In a January 28, 1998, hearing of the Parliamentary Committee on Terrorism and Massacres, the former leader of the Radical Party, Marco Pannella, gave the following testimony: “Between Milan and Gorgonzola on a beautiful day—I think it may have been August 11, 1967—I marched in a peace rally for at least forty-five minutes with Calabresi to my left and Pino Pinelli to my right … Pinelli criticized me for telling Inspector Calabresi—politely, mind you—that if he, too, would carry a protest sign, then he could continue to march beside me. Otherwise he could not, even though I was happy he was there. Pino Pinelli protested, telling me that Calabresi was a great guy.”
Luigi Calabresi’s face was also well-known because he had a soft spot for reporters. He always found the time to speak with them, no matter how busy he was, according to Giampaolo Pansa, who had seen him a few days before the murder. They stopped to talk at the bar across the street from police headquarters. Later on he stopped to chat with another reporter closer to home.
But in the heated atmosphere of those years there was no room for truth. What flourished instead was a series of dark myths about a truth serum administered, a karate chop to the victim, a belated phone call to an ambulance, and an “Inspector Window” who threw Pinelli to his death in the courtyard. While all these legends have long been disproved, a surprising number of people still believe them through a combination of ignorance and bad faith. And they have conveniently and deliberately ignored the essential truth, established beyond the shadow of a doubt: namely, that Luigi Calabresi was not in the room when Pinelli fell from the window and died. Five people were there, but not him. He was in another part of the building getting the chief of the political department to sign the police report. Although every scrap of evidence exonerated him, in the public delirium that surrounded the case no one seemed to care. What ensued was “a ferocious lynching in slow motion. A madness that has infected thousands of people”—that is how Pansa described it in La Repubblica.
In my heart, I am convinced that only a minority of Italians today still believe that my father could have killed Giuseppe Pinelli. My family understands this from the way people stop us on the street, the admissions that public figures from those years have had the courage to make, the letters and phone calls we receive. When faced by diehards who still insist on long-discredited theories, some people try to downplay them, explaining that there are always fringe elements who cultivate conspiracy theories, who believe that Elvis is alive or that the Twin Towers were destroyed by the United States government. Others have suggested that I should treat it as a joke.
In all frankness, I cannot laugh about it. Perpetuating false accusations is an insult to our intelligence and a disservice to democracy and civic coexistence. I am not talking about the youths that spray-paint graffiti: they don’t bother me. I am talking about the intellectuals and politicians of the far left who keep the tensions alive, fomenting hatred and rancor, by skirting the truth and refusing to go on the record with a clear and unequivocal condemnation of the violence of that era.
The bomb at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana caused sixteen deaths, and it left a trail of blood that includes Pinelli and also my father. But on December 12, 2006, the thirty-seventh anniversary of the massacre, the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Fausto Bertinotti, called Pinelli the “seventeenth victim of Piazza Fontana,” without addressing the causes of the railwayman’s death. While there were no moral equivalencies or insults in his statement, other people were not so discreet. His words were quickly appropriated to put forward the claim that Pinelli, too, had been murdered, recycling the aspersions that had been tossed around for over thirty-seven years. In its December 17, 2006, issue, the left-wing newspaper Liberazione proposed that a commemorative stamp be issued for Pinelli. The paper’s editor in chief had made this same proposal earlier, in January 2005, when a commemorative stamp was issued for my father, as if one stamp should offset the other. He observed, correctly, that the prosecutor had verified that Calabresi was not in the room when Pinelli died, but he then revived the most absurd hypothesis from the early 1970s: “Pinelli did not commit suicide. And tons of proof was found that first he had been knocked out, perhaps with a karate chop (or perhaps killed by the blow), and then thrown from the window, lifeless, to make it look like suicide.”
In January 2007, the provincial government of Milan issued a decision to place a commemorative plaque in memory of Luigi Calabresi on the thirty-fifth anniversary of his death, which fell on May 17 of that year. Shortly thereafter the mayor of the city of Milan, Letizia Moratti, announced that another plaque would be placed on Via Cherubini, the street where he had been shot. Together these initiatives sought to fill in a void in the collective memory of the city, but they immediately triggered a controversy in which Pinelli was once again brought into the fray.
The education commissioner, a member of the far left, abstained from the vote on the memorial. In his explanation, he touted the party line. “Not to deny the validity of a healing process, but out of respect for the history of the city of Milan and its citizens, we think that a more accurate historic context would be created by granting equal recognition and appreciation to the innocent victim Giuseppe Pinelli.” The commissioner from the Green Party voted in favor, invoking the need for a gesture of reconciliation that should, however, be “coupled with the decision to name a school after Pinelli, the innocent man killed after the Piazza Fontana massacre.” At that point the provincial leader, from the Democratic Party of the Left (a center-left formation), stated that the left-wing coalition had voted in favor, and that the far left had abstained rather than oppose the measure. He phoned my mother that same evening to convey the decision, and with great honesty he told her, “We succeeded in making an important gesture, thirty-five years after the death of your husband. Unfortunately we had to associate his name once again with that of Pinelli. I’m sorry about this imbroglio. I’m sorry that we always have to create pain. We should stop comparing the two things. For that matter, there is already a plaque for Pinelli. For Calabresi we don’t have anything.”
There are actually two tablets for Pinelli on the small plot of grass opposite the bank in Piazza Fontana. The first was set there almost thirty years ago by an anarchist group. It says that Pinelli, “an innocent, was murdered on the premises of the police headquarters.” The second, bearing the symbols of the city of Milan, was placed in March 2006 by the outgoing mayor, Gabriele Albertini. It states that Pinelli “died tragically.” For a few days the anarchists’ tablet, with its false allegation of homicide, was removed in favor of the city’s tablet. After a chorus of protests against the “revisionist” mayor for attempting to “rewrite history,” it was returned to its place, so that today, grotesquely, there are two plaques—leaving suspended, for now, the question of whether our history will be written on the basis of documents, expert testimony, and judicial sentences, or on the basis of Xerox copies of Lotta Continua pamphlets.
6.
the interview
If they want to issue a stamp commemorating the anarchist Pinelli, then why not give everyone the right to a commemoration, no matter how much time has passed? But they’re out of their minds if they’re using this measure to reintroduce the idea of first-degree murder. It would be like killing Inspector Calabresi for a second time. He wa
s not even in the room at police headquarters from which Pinelli fell.
So began a one-page interview in Corriere della Sera on December 18, 2006, with Senator Gerardo D’Ambrosio, one of the magistrates who investigated Piazza Fontana and the death of Pinelli. The lengthy inquest was not completed until after the death of my father, and it established that Pinelli had not been killed, nor had he committed suicide. He had quite simply fallen out of the window after suddenly taking ill. Although it did not appear in time to save my father’s life, D’Ambrosio’s investigation nevertheless uncovered all the mysteries of that awful night and established that my father had not been in the room when Pinelli fell from the window.
As I read his words, I am filled with emotion: someone has finally found the courage, the will, and the patience to dismantle the theories that had been recycled for decades. The interview was conducted by Dino Martirano, a courageous journalist who lives not far away from me in Rome. I decide to give him a call, and he immediately invites me over for lunch. At his house, he offers me a tape of the full interview. “I hear that you’re writing a book. This should definitely come in handy.”
I then phone Senator D’Ambrosio and ask if he can give me a minute of his time. We meet outside the Senate, have an espresso at Sant’Eustachio, and then walk toward the Pantheon. I ask his permission to use Martirano’s tape. “It wouldn’t look right if I, the son of Luigi Calabresi, asked you to give an interview exonerating my father. You might feel obliged to say nice things to me. But with Martirano you felt free to say what you think and if you don’t mind, I’d like to use your conversation with him as a document.”
Pushing Past the Night Page 5