Journalist Mario Calabresi (Milan, 1970) was just over 2 years old in 1972 and was shot that May morning when his father, police officer Luigi Calabresi, was about to open the door of a blue Cinquecento. In his head, as he wrote later, he managed to parcel out two memories, which he had kept intact for a long time, privately only to himself. He carefully took them out in the dark, before going to sleep, so as not to spoil them, he recounts in Coming Out of the Night, which made a fuss when it was published in Italy a few years ago. , but its translation into Spanish has yet to see the light of day. The first of these memories is the vague but beautiful feeling of a Sunday three days before the murder. Second, from the Wednesday morning he was killed, “clear, detailed and precise.” Curiosity to know what happened next conditioned the life of the journalist and writer, who was the former director of the newspapers La Stampa and La Repubblica.
On December 12, 1969, a bomb containing seven kilos of trilites exploded at the Banca Naziionalle dell’Agricoltura branch in Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing 17 and injuring 88. With this brutal attack attributed to the neofascists, directed by the secret services and which served as the basis for the subsequent establishment of the Red Brigades, Italy entered one of the darkest tunnels in its recent history, the so-called “liberation strategy” of almost two decades. The tension in which the vacuum resulting from the chaotic political-institutional situation attracts groups across the political spectrum who use street violence and terrorism as weapons to fight for demands”.
Commissioner Luigi Calabresi was appointed to the department of political crimes. He began engaging in subversive activities in 1968 and was part of the investigation into the bombings in Piazza Fontana, a year later the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli died after falling from the fourth floor while being questioned. A window from Calabresi’s office. It was never known under what circumstances it occurred, but the left-wing press and public immediately pointed to the commissioner as responsible for what appeared to be murder. Meanwhile, the official version is that Pinelli, an accommodating man who was on good terms with Calabresi, felt dizzy before he fell.
Several witnesses reassured that the commissioner was not in the office when the fall occurred. Arrested that same night on 12 December, Pinelli arrived there on a motorcycle and was locked in a room with other far-right and far-left activists and militants for three days with almost no food or sleep. Another tragic consequence of his death was “Calabresi, the murderer”. And ever since, in that stifling atmosphere of violence and confusion, all the commissioner had to do was wait for his time. He arrived when he was shot in the back on May 17, 1972 and finished off with a bullet in the back of his head.
After a long and dramatic period from 1988 to 2003, Italian judges found credible his version of the Calabresi murder of Leonardo Marino, a militant of the repentant ultra-left extra-parliamentary organization Lotta Continua. The lawsuits resulted in 22 years in prison for three of his former colleagues, Ovidio Bompresi, Giorgio Pietrostefani and Adriano Sofri. Bompresi, who had serious health problems, was pardoned in 2006. Pietrostefani fled from justice and hid in France. Sofri, whose health also deteriorated, was placed under house arrest and released in 2012. Among all the acts of terrorism of the 1970s this throws one mystery into the next, starting with the fact that it was carried out by people who came from nowhere and returned to it without a trace. The most staunch defenders of the innocent thesis argued that Marino was a liar and that the judges believed him because of his preconceived hostility to Calabresi. However, twenty thousand procedural pages document another story: an act born from the bowels of Lotta Continua, the relentless campaign against the commissioner, wrongly accused of being the scapegoat for the attack on Piazza Fontana.
When Mario Calabresi shared two childhood memories with his mother when he was a teenager, he found that they were worn out “like celluloids from movies that have been watched many times” from using them too much. He then decided to return them to the archive for better preservation. In any case, in this sad and beautiful book about the pain and scars on the victims, they were the candle that started to illuminate the night, just at a time when the executioners were not ashamed of them.