Where the vita isn't dolce.
There are, in every culture, words that have a deeper, more profound meaning than the concept they define. Take balaclava, for instance; in British English it might be a garment but it's also the epitome of the ultimate sacrifice. In Italian the Bologna station, or Stazione di Bologna, is not only a stop on the busy high-speed line linking Milan with Rome; it also means bloodbath. A senseless, unjustifiable bloodbath. As all acts of terror are.
Upon exiting Bologna's station few travelers are likely to notice a clock hanging from the main building. Afterall, the station is busy, the piazza beside is usually clogged with people and vehicles. And, finally, that clock is stuck at the wrong time. It’s not broken, that clock; it’s stuck at 10.25 for a reason.
At precisely that time on August 2nd, 1980 a bomb detonated in the second class waiting room of Bologna's central station. Eighteen kilogrammes of nitroglycerin and five kilos of a blend of TNT and Compound B - military grade explosives - ripped apart the ceiling of the second class waiting room, shattered the first class lounge and sent thirty metres of a platform canopy, made out of concrete, flying into a train. Eighty-five people died, hundreds were wounded. The images - the shattered station, a city bus repurposed as a triage room full of dead and moribund - wedged themselves into Italy’s psyche.
The station bombing didn’t happen in a vacuum. Between 1969 and 1988 Italy experienced what some called a low-intensity civil war. Known to the public as gli anni di piombo, the years of lead, those 20 years were punctuated by more than 7,000 terror incidents and as many street riots. Four hundred people lost their lives, including a former prime minister, judges, cops, innocent bystanders. In this maelstrom of violence, August 2nd, 1980, became Italy’s 9/11 a good two decades before such a label meant something.
There’s just one difference. The perpetrators of 9/11, and those who sent them flying into skyscrapers, have been identified; for Bologna, that’s not the case. A band of neo-Fascists left that bag in the waiting room; but how kids - some as young as 17 - got their hands on them military-grade explosives has never been clarified. Over the years many hypotheses have been debated in courts and courtyards across the country: Carlos the Jackal, a Masonic lodge that ran a sort of parallel government called Propaganda 2, the Palestinian OLP, a derange phalanx of the secret services just to name a few.
To an outsider, it all sounds absurd. The plot of a Ian Fleming book, with the chief baddie wearing a red carnation in his lapel. But the history of Italy in those year is anything but simple, logic or straightforward. To pick up a book covering the second half of the XX century, in this country, is to read a story as convoluted as it is hard to believe. Police statistics from those years reported 24 “major” and 78 “minor” leftist terrorist groups, and that’s just one side of the political spectrum. The far right had as many, specialised in train bombings. Had the Italicus not been half an hour late, back in 1974, then Bologna station would’ve been bombed then too, for the train carried a device which detonated in a tunnel, killing twelve.
What's the point, today, of remembering these facts? Why do we still print those haunting images of bodies charred by molotovs thrown into "bourgeois" night clubs, or of protesters mimicking pistols with their hands, the infamous comrade P38? Why do people keep on laying flowers outside the Bologna station, or in Brescia's Piazza della Loggia, or Milan's Piazza Fontana?
Well, for starters with most of the violence of those years hasn't been explained in full. Who wanted former Prime Minister Aldo Moro dead? Who bombed, or shot down, Itavia's DC9 over Ustica? Who armed the youngsters who set off Bologna's bomb? And, secondly, because the past is not that far removed from the present day.
Marco Biagi was a consultant, working on a much-needed reform of Italy's sclerotic labour market. He lived in Bologna, where he also taught at the local University. His work had attracted some unsavoury attention: first came letters, then as a star, a particular 5-point stars, carved on a door next to his house. The star was the logo of the Red Brigades, and by them the letters were signed. Marco Biagi asked for protection, for an armed escort. The Italian Home Office, the same office who deemed enough to provide Prime Minister Berlusconi with a forty-men-strong security detachment, said no.
On March 19th 2002, long after the death of ideology, the introduction of the Russian tricolor and of the Apple iPod, Marco Biagi was gunned down as he peddled home. Old stuff? Think again.
