Growing Up During the Years of Lead

The historical conditions in Italy during my childhood probably go a long way to explain why I’m as weird as I am. Or, at the very least, they provide an excellent justification for my weirdness.

It was a time of tear gas, terrorist attacks, false flag operations, anarchists getting thrown out of the windows of police stations, bombs on trains, assassinations, street battles against neo-fascists, and the ever-present political violence. It was the time known as The Years of Lead.

The fact that little about that period is known in the English-speaking world has convinced me to reopen the wounds of those times and create a History on Fire episode to discuss it. It will take a while before it’s out, so in the meantime I want to share at least a little about those days.

Unlike what some people believe, fascism didn’t end with Mussolini’s corpse swinging in Piazzale Loreto in 1945. In the ensuing years, surviving fascists infiltrated many segments of Italy: from the army to the police, and especially to secret services. In what was known as ‘Strategia della Tensione’ (Strategy of Tension), neo-fascists supported by some folks in the secret services (and with some CIA help) began a campaign of terrorism that would bloody up Italy for well over a decade. Their goal was simple: to instill panic in the population, in the hope they’d clamor for the coming to power of a right-wing dictatorship promising law and order.

A perfect example of this was the massacre at the Bologna train station, on August 2, 1980, when fascists placed a bomb that killed 85 people and wounded over 200. At the time, my mother was going back and forth between Milan and Bologna on a regular basis, since she attended the DAMS program at the University of Bologna (btw, among her faculty was the uber famous writer and philosopher Umberto Eco). It was purely a matter of luck that she didn’t get killed in the attack.

Among those responsible was Licio Gelli, leader of a Masonic lodge known as P2 and one of the shadiest figures among the many shady figures in Italian history in the 20th century. His alliances ranged from the Mafia to politicians, from the CIA to the Vatican. Incidentally, just a few months after masterminding the Bologna massacre, Gelli was invited to attend Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration… Yeah… I’ll give you a second to ponder on that.

At the street level, this level of political violence meant you were in danger every time you went to a bank, or hopped on a train. As true terrorists, neo-fascists struck indiscriminately. Anyone could become a casualty at any moment. Before long, many to the left of the fascists armed themselves too.

To give you a taste of the times, here’s a passage from an article for La Repubblica by Guido Passalacqua (translated by yours truly):

“Every week the streets of Milan were the theater of demonstrations, and were lit up by the fires of Molotov cocktails. With the eyes inflamed by the tear gas shot by the police, Milan lived a tense, dark season, in which it was difficult to breathe comfortably. It was a nightmare in which the city had sunk since the bombing in Piazza Fontana, since the deaths in front of the Teatro Lirico of the young policeman Annarumma and of the anarchist Pino Pinelli thrown out of a window of the police headquarters. Then, the death of Feltrinelli, the murder of Commissario Calabresi, and the killing of agent Marino during a fascist demonstration. Violence, in all its forms, had found a home in the streets and in the squares. It was a distorted nightmare… Students, young workers, members of the underclasses: everyone had picked a side and was ready to fight. The city was divided in armed camps. The San Babila subway station was a fascist hangout. There, the son of a wealthy merchant would pay 20,000 lire for any leftist that neo-fascists would beat up. If you were a right winger, you definitely didn’t want to show your face near the Statale University. Much of the city was on the anti-fascist side and showed their choice in giant processions during the April 25 demonstrations celebrating liberation from fascism… Activists would wait for political opponents under their houses to beat them up. It was an underground war featuring informers, sentinels and hit squads.”

This was the Milan of my childhood.