by Tobias Jones
Italians, the hoped-for political change, the long-awaited coup d’état, has taken place. The political formula which has been used by governments for 25 years and has carried Italy to the brink of economic and moral ruin, has finally been abandoned … The armed forces, the forces of order, the most competent and representative men of the nation are with us and we can reassure you that the most dangerous adversaries – those who wanted to sell our homeland to the foreigner – have been rendered inoffensive … we raise the glorious tricolour, and invite you to shout with us our irrepressible hymn of love: Italia! Italia! Viva l’Italia!
Two hundred Forest Guards left their Cittaducale base in the northeast of Rome and made for the city centre in a convoy armed with sub-machine guns and handcuffs. Members and former members of a parachute regiment remained at their base, under the command of Sandro Saccucci (later to become a deputy for the MSI) awaiting orders. Across the country, other groups were ready for action. The Ministry of the Interior was occupied, and a stash of arms removed (counterfeit ones were later found in their place). Suddenly, however, just as the Guards were about to enter the state television studios, they were met by two unknown men, who ordered them to retreat. The operation was called off, with the bizarre explanation that it was raining too heavily.
The abortive coup was quickly dismissed as nothing more than the work of crackpot eccentrics, ‘a jolly get-together among old comrades’ according to General Vito Miceli, head of SID (the secret services) and another future MSI parliamentarian. The notion that there had been an attempted coup was ridiculed, indeed there was barely any evidence, bar those counterfeit weapons at the Ministry of the Interior, to suggest that it had even taken place. Gradually, however, the seriousness of the coup attempt became clear. General Miceli, it was revealed, had known about the coup well in advance, as had the army Chief of Staff, who was ready to provide weapons.
Indeed, within months another subversive organisation, Wind Rose, had been created by veterans of Borghese’s abortive coup. It was an alliance of senior army and intelligence officers hoping, again, to take over the reins of government. ‘The objective,’ proclaimed one of their early manifestos, ‘is to fight against the political, unionist and governmental braggarts, and against all those who cooperate and sustain the chameleons of this putrid democracy.’ Borghese died in exile, in Spain, in 1974, the same year in which Miceli was arrested for his part in that other, related organisation, Wind Rose. Those who had taken part in the Borghese coup were accused of ‘armed insurrection against the state,’ but by 1984 all had been acquitted on appeal. As ever, there was not one conviction following the crime. Indeed, since then the coup has been portrayed as nothing more than a left-wing hallucination.
In any other country, the coup, if that’s what it was, would be a sort of historical cul-de-sac, an example of a few politicians or militarists taking a wrong turning. But in Italy, because every intrigue is so secretive, the subject is never satisfactorily resolved. Confessions and revelations emerge from dubious pentiti, years and decades after the event, usually bringing confusion rather than clarity. Just as the Sofri case was reaching its conclusion, a pentito came forward claiming to have the missing link to explain one of the country’s many illustrious corpses: the disappearance and assumed murder of a journalist in the autumn of 1970. The journalist, claimed the pentito, had been murdered because he had discovered plans for the coup. No one, of course, knew whether the confessions of a mafioso over three decades after the event were reliable, but they were certainly, in the then political climate, poignant: the brother of the murdered journalist was, at the time of the new revelations, Minister for Education; at the same time, on the opposition benches, were two members of the National Alliance who had been intimate colleagues of Borghese, posing for photographs with him before the coup.
In 1971 the iconography of Pino Pinelli, the anarchist who died during questioning in the Milan police station, was becoming evermore like that of Che Guevara: his name endlessly invoked on thousands of banners and city walls. Meanwhile, the destinies of the two men held in popular opinion responsible for their deaths (the policeman Luigi Calabresi and a former colonel of the Bolivian police, Roberto Quintanilla, respectively) became bizarrely intertwined. The latter had been killed on 1 April 1971 in Hamburg, at the residence of the Bolivian consul. The gun used by the killer, a Colt Cobra 38, had been purchased by the publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan in 1968. Reports in the Italian press suggested that Feltrinelli had met the killer, a German called Monica Ertl, throughout the months preceding the murder. Others, of course, suggested it was another, sophisticated put-up job by the Italian police; more precisely, by that Office for Reserved Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior who were desperate to frame the rich revolutionary. In little over a year, both Calabresi and Feltrinelli would also be dead.
In May 1971, Pinelli’s body was exhumed as evidence in the libel case between Lotta Continua’s editor and Calabresi. On 4 October, an arrest warrant was issued for Calabresi (though he was, posthumously, declared innocent of all charges in 1975). The spring of 1972 is the twisted, intricate knot of all the threads at the beginning of the anni di piombo. On 3 March, the Red Brigades conducted their first, highly publicised kidnapping. On the 16th of the same month, Enrico Berlinguer was elected leader of the Communist party (the funeral of his predecessor, Palmiro Togliatti, had been attended by over a million people). The publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was killed as he allegedly attached explosives to a pylon outside Milan. In May, a young Anarchist, Franco Serantini, was killed in Pisa by police at an anti-Fascist rally. It was, crucially, at a meeting to commemorate the death of Serantini that Sofri allegedly ordered the killing of Calabresi (another policeman accused, of course, of killing another Anarchist).
The first warning of what had happened to Luigi Calabresi was a call received at the central line of the Milan police station at 9.15 on 17 May 1972: ‘There’s a man shot in via Cherubini … it’s commissioner Calabresi … he’s bleeding from his head …’ Calabresi was slumped on the pavement outside his house, next to his red cinquecento, with bullet-wounds to his head and left lung. One journalist who arrived at the scene recalled the ‘leaden atmosphere … the police and carabinieri considered themselves at war against groups on the left.’ Calabresi was transported to the San Carlo hospital, but pronounced dead within half an hour. He was thirty-five, and left a pregnant wife and two sons. Witnesses claimed to have seen a blue Fiat 125, number-plate Mi-16802, driven by a blonde woman. A man described as near six foot had fired the shots. The killing was, wrote Lotta Continua the next day, ‘a deed in which the exploited recognise their own yearning for justice’.
In 1988, Leonardo Marino, the crêpe-seller on the Tuscan coast, came forward with his version of events. Marino claimed that Sofri had ordered the killing of Calabresi after the rally to commemorate Serantini, the murdered Anarchist. Sofri and his two ‘accomplices’ were sensationally arrested in 1988, starting twelve years of trials, retrials, arrests and releases until that final verdict in October 2000. Partly because of the paucity of evidence against the former members of Lotta Continua, the imagery of the case became vital. Sofri was endlessly described as ‘too intelligent,’ as ‘arrogant’ and insufficiently contrite for the obscene rhetoric of the early 1970s. Just as the case was opening, Gemma Capri, the widow of Calabresi, published a book entitled Calabresi, My Husband. The timing was, to say the least, cynical. Elegant and blonde, she was present throughout each trial and retrial.
From the outset, Sofri has shown an almost aesthetic disdain for the legal pontificating. Writing of his first trial, he says: ‘The process has been diverted by gestures and tones closer to an autodafé rather than a civil trial. Suddenly tears and sweat, imprecations and furores … have overpowered and replaced the confrontation of the facts.’ Sofri accused the judicial circus of being in ‘bad taste’ (‘demagogic and windbag-ish’). Relying on their intuition, people had, said Sofri, been taken in by
the ‘fat and crying’ pentito, Leonardo Marino.2
Sofri was, however, apologetic about the tone of his and others’ writings from decades ago:
The articles which accompanied the Calabresi campaign were horrible … The articles in Lotta Continua are witness to a degenerative parabola which accompanied not only this case … The violence and the crudity and also the brutality of the things we were writing were precisely to do with the desire to obtain real justice … not to let what we thought had happened [to Pino Pinelli] in the Milan questura go unpunished … in the course of the campaign, that position became habitual, complacent: a sort of inert taste for insults, lynchings, for threats which took control of us, and not only us …3
As another witness at the trial explained it: ‘We were at war, it was the perverse logic of the era.’
As with the Piazza Fontana trial, there weren’t simply individuals on trial, but an entire diaspora of former colleagues and ‘extremists’. Lotta Continua was a sort of cradle for an intellectual caste in Italy which has now, years later, graduated into the media and parliament. Former Lotta Continua members are regulars on cultural chat-shows, they work as TV anchormen, as senators and academics. The Lotta Continua lobby (many of whom were also accused by Marino in 1988, before charges were dropped) have thus fought to clear not only Sofri’s name but also, by association, their own. And Sofri himself is second to none in terms of media manipulation and contribution: his by-line appears so regularly in newspapers and magazines that anyone who didn’t know otherwise would think he was the country’s most famous journalist, rather than its most famous ‘murderer’.
It would be too strong to say that Sofri has willed himself into this position, but in stubbornly and repeatedly requesting not liberty, but justice, he must have been conscious that he would become a secular martyr. Sofri finds himself in prison, wrote one journalist in October 2000, the day after the closure of his case, ‘for not having doffed his cap to the bureaucratic cast of the judiciary’. By now, in the autumn of 2000, Sofri is the only one of the four accused of the crime still in prison. The pentito Leonardo Marino was almost immediately released. Of the other accomplices, one (Giorgio Pietrostefani) escaped to exile in France after the Venice trial of 2000 (from where he has been interviewed by the press, but untroubled by extradition); and another (Ovidio Bompressi) also went into hiding, subsequently handed himself in, and was then confined to house arrest on medical grounds.
Sofri, on the other hand, has cast himself as the niggling point of clarity and honesty, refusing the fudge of exile or illness. The case is now only Sofri’s. It has become, in his words, a case not about ‘my future life, but rather about the past, more dear and vulnerable … this affair risks hijacking not only my material existence … but that of my own soul.’
Sofri has an almost boyish face: he’s very relaxed, very witty. He asks me to give him the ‘tu’, the informal address. He has a loud voice, and adds capisci?, ‘understand?,’ to the end of every sentence, projecting himself as the earnest professor he might, in other circumstances, have been. Deprived of any recording device, I have to transcribe his polysyllabic words at the speed of light.
‘There’s a very strong, virulent civil violence in Italy,’ he says. ‘It’s abnormal, monstrous, grotesque. Italians wallow in the fact that they are bravi ragazzi, good people, measured and antique … But there’s an endemic violence between neighbours which lurks like a kind of fever under the skin.’ The Italian words he uses to describe this atmosphere are una disponibilità alla riscossa, which means more or less ‘a disposition for revolt’. ‘In the 1970s,’ he says, ‘there was an atavistic, militant tension, a belief that there was a moral need for thought and action. Many felt that the Italy that emerged from the Second World War was divided into two parts, Catholics versus Communists, all that Don Camillo stuff. And many saw the history of anti-Fascism as a kind of incomplete emancipation, another example that everything in this country remains either half-done or betrayed.
‘But that notion of a “creeping civil war” is a beautification of the case. Both sides – the state and elements of the far right, and the blundering criminality of the left – just fed on themselves. They fatally believed their own rhetoric, so what culminated was an imagined civil war, a simulation of a civil war. The anni di piombo were just the usual Italian struggle, the usual fratricidal/patricidal goings-on within city-states, a sort of multiplication of opposing views from the peripheries, from the bell-towers. My case, for example, is a storm in a teacup. I’m not saying it’s not horrible, but it’s not part of some epic encounter between two sides. My case shows simple personal hatred, denuded, revealed in its full horror: it’s nothing more than the exultation of hate and grudge.’
Sofri is blunt and cynical. I ask him about the new trial for Piazza Fontana. ‘The danger is that the trial might confirm an idea which I don’t share, namely that there might be possible a degree of clarity about the Piazza Fontana bombing. This late recognition of what the “counter-information” of the left was saying at the time is strange. For the togas to talk about “a slaughter of the state”, using exactly the same words as we did back then, sounds a little false. Those were our slogans of extremism. And the fact that it is based upon very dubious pentiti takes something away from the case … pentitismo is, as we all know, a very slippery mechanism …’
Sofri throws out grandiose concepts in every sentence, sometimes following them up later in the conversation, sometimes leaving them hanging dislocated in the air. His range of reference is bewildering, peppered with the leitmotif of Italian cerebrality, the suggestive subjunctive. He swaps languages without pause.
Why is it, I wonder, that no historian or court or journalist ever seems able to unearth the truth, or even a convincing interpretation, about Italian history? ‘I think,’ he replies, ‘that things are actually much more simple than that. Dietrologia [conspiracy theorising] is an air that you breathe in Italy. It’s the result of paranoia and jealousy, and it simply exalts an intricate intelligence. It’s like Othello with Desdemona’s handkerchief: one innocent object can spark off endless suspicions. It’s a game which people play, almost to show off. I prefer not to see a conspiracy which exists than to see one where it doesn’t.
‘I don’t say that there aren’t many dark or dodgy things: people always say football matches are fixed because probably very often they are!’ He guffaws. ‘And there is a type of wretchedness about the Italian state, with its tricks and deceits and dirty businesses. But here a rationalist would cry. When one says things, with evidence and facts, you’re not believed. When something’s so obviously verosimile it can’t be the verità, it would be too simple: it would be too obvious, too easy, so it can’t be true …
‘Look at my case. I’ve never said that it’s inconceivable that the far left had something to do with the murder of Calabresi. I’ve simply asserted with frankness that I was never, never in any way responsible. It’s the stuff of madmen. When we spoke of the “general encounter” for the autumn of 1972, we meant the possibility of renegotiating a whole host of communal contracts, not that some killing would be the spark for armed revolution.’
He leaves no doubt as to his contempt for the judiciary: ‘full of ambition, symptomatic of the Italian delirium for omnipotence. Judges seem to think they are almost literary critics, re-evaluating novels. Or else they pretend to be the “good guardians”. It’s a monstrous deformity. We in Lotta Continua worked very much in the light of day, in fact sometimes with too much ostentation and pretension. Ours was an experimental adventure. Not an adventure in the sense of dangling yourself off a bridge with elastic tied to your ankle, not in that sense of extreme sports … ours was a communal interpretation of the world, a mixing of languages, an exciting crossbreeding of cultures. It all culminated in an extraordinary mimesis, a humane, though almost virtuoso, imitation of those around us. We were social, almost becoming others.’
He describes the typical trajectory of bourge
ois children feeling the gravitational pull of the workers. ‘We could use their language, learn their customs, appreciate and participate in their struggles. In the end, we realised it almost deprived us of our own identities. We realised we had to start taking things seriously. It all changed when women suddenly declared they were feminists … a few people did try to continue the mimesis, a kind of psychological transvesticism …’ He laughs again.
‘I now cull my political ideas from the same places as everyone else, from television and newspapers. That’s one of the strange things, that people outside live as if they were in prison, stuck in front of the television. Most of my articles I have to write from memory, because it’s not like there’s a massive library here. But I get fucked off [‘incazzato nero’] when people say I’m more free than them, because I can sit here with my thoughts. Prison is abominable – a torture, a physical torment, a sexual mutilation. We’re like scavengers on society’s rubbish …’
Leaving the prison, I go to a bar to read the day’s papers. In one, it being the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Franco, one of the Spanish dictator’s maxims is quoted: ‘one is the master of what one doesn’t say, and the slave of what one does.’ The phrase, despite its provenance, seems apposite for Sofri. He is a talker, a man who loves words, especially – say many – his own. In fact, Sofri is frequently accused of pompousness, of arrogance, of a yearning to be the protagonist; he’s an intellectual, according to a friend, who enjoyed the 1970s’ engagé game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’. And yet it’s very rare to meet anyone who doesn’t express ‘reasonable doubt’ about Sofri’s conviction. At most some say he’s guilty verbally, guilty of having been incautious with his words. He has been convicted simply for talking too much, for boasting and provoking. He is, I realise, a very literal prisoner of his own past, a slave of the words he had spoken.