Forty three years ago, on 12 December, 1969, a bomb exploded in a crowded bank in Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing seventeen and wounding eighty eight. This bomb was the first in a series of terrorist massacres performed as part of the so-called “strategy of tension,” a political climate of terror orchestrated by a variety of right-wing organizations which aimed at promoting “a turn to an authoritarian type of government.” (see Anna Cento Bull’s study on Italian Neofascism) Other major bomb massacres followed: in 1974, during an anti-fascist demonstration in the Northern city of Brescia and on a train traveling from Florence to Bologna. Bologna was also the stage of another dramatic massacre, when a bomb exploded in the waiting room of the central railway station, on 2 August 1980: eighty-five people died (including a three-year old girl), two hundred were wounded.

Needless to say, the 1970s have a bad reputation, in Italy. Notwithstanding the fact that two neo-fascist terrorists were sentenced for the Bologna massacre, there are still too many unresolved issues and (state) secrets for Italians to make amends with this difficult past. In fact, the so-called “years of lead” are known mostly for the large number of terrorist attacks carried out by both left-wing and right-wing terrorists, as well as other forms of “subversive” violence. These have given shape to a “collective trauma” which the country has failed to come to terms with, in spite of official monuments and annual commemorative rituals that really only contribute to the silencing of memories.

The lack of a commonly shared, official memory of these events might explain why there are so many cultural products that take on the issue of 1970s political violence. A number of movies produced since 2000, for example, have tried to narrate the story of the 1970s, in different ways and with different purposes.

Recently, acclaimed filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana has attempted to visualize the traumatic memory of the Piazza Fontana massacre in Romanzo di una strage (“Piazza Fontana. The Italian Conspiracy,” 2012). The movie focuses not so much on the massacre itself but on the mysterious death of an anarchist who was arrested after the massacre and interrogated for three days, before he was thrown out of the window of the police headquarters. No legal truth has ever been reached on this incident, which was put off as a tragic accident. Giordana too fails to bring light on it, though he probably didn’t even intend to do so. Using the genres of the detective story and the Italian cop film, he presents a tale of mystery and secrets where the responsibility for the massacre is split between neo-fascists and anarchists, perhaps in an attempt to forge a symbolical reconciliation, which, instead in my judgment, only reopens the wound.

And so the phantom of the 1970s continues to haunt the country, as happened in May 2012, when the chief executive of a leading Italian manufacturer of thermoelectric power plants in Genoa was kneecapped by two men. Mainstream media instantly and dramatically called back memories of (left-wing) terrorism. In fact, the term “years of lead” primarily refers to left-wing terrorists, who used fire arms (“lead” being a metaphor for bullets) rather than bombs, and thus ignores right-wing terrorism which mostly had recourse to bombs, as in Piazza Fontana or Bologna. Of course it is not impossible, in times of crisis and social malaise, for some wannabe Che Guevara to decide to have a go at revolution again. But to talk about the return of the “subversive violence” of the 1970s is senseless. We are in a completely different social and historical context. More importantly, there has been a change of mentality which excludes any possibility of a new terrorist generation: Communism is no longer in, and most young people are more worried about how much money they have in their cell phones than about bringing down capitalism.

In fact, I think that we have been witnessing a sort of end of ideology in Italy: Mario Monti’s “technical” government responds primarily to the economic market, and the highly successful “5 star Movement,” led by comedian Beppe Grillo, explicitly has presented itself as an a-political party which promotes neither left-wing nor right-wing ideologies, but ideas. The traditional left, finally, has had its own demons to fight with: Florence’s mayor Matteo Renzi, a young and highly overestimated politician whose political views seem closer to the neoliberal right than to his own party. In a move not dissimilar to the one with which Silvio Berlusconi managed to win over the Italians in 1994, 37-year old Renzi had a go at the presidential primaries for the Democratic Party last month, promoting vague ideas about generational change and modernization. In doing so, he built strongly on the American model, with his Obama-like blouse with blue tie, tour bus and catchy slogans. Although such attempts to break with the hierarchical and rigid schemes of Italian politics is necessary, Renzi’s incapacity (or reluctance) to take discussions beyond the idea of generational change and engage in more serious political debates make him a highly inappropriate candidate. His success both among disappointed left-wing voters and right-wing voters in search of a new leader is another sign of Italy’s current struggle to define a political identity and outline a future direction, a struggle exemplified also by Berlusconi’s neoliberal right.

Over the past few months, Forza Italia has been desperately seeking a new political leader, up to the point that the party announced its own presidential primaries with some twenty candidates, an unthinkable situation when Berlusconi was still in charge, the party being constructed entirely around his figure. This has further fragmented the party, pushing right-wing voters in the direction of Renzi. However, this may also have been Berlusconi’s strategy – to create the impression that his party, and the country as a whole, cannot do without his leadership.

Berlusconi purports to be needed, motivating his umpteenth change of mind about going back into politics for the good of the country. Not very convincing, though: the day after Mario Monti’s announcement of resignation, the bond spreads rose instantly. The country risks losing the confidence of economic markets which Monti so painfully obtained. He brought the spreads down from nearly 600 in 2011, when Berlusconi resigned, to some 300 before Berlusconi announced his return, earlier this week.  Now, Berlusconi seems to be building his election campaign on a new enemy: the ‘scam’ of the bond spreads.

The world no longer seems to be run by politics or warfare, but predominantly by economic markets. People too are tired of politics and ideology, and ready for a new start. This increases the tendency to talk about difficult memories of political violence in terms of stereotypes and clichés. Interpreting acts of violence like the attack in Genoa in May 2012 as the reproduction or continuation of something that happened 40 years ago reveals a lack of critical analysis, an unwillingness to take responsibility for what’s happening today, and a turning away from problems which have their roots in the present. It’s the “easy way out,” and yet another sign of how the past continues to haunt the country and obstruct the way forward.

In the early 1990s, the political scandal “Bribesville” led to the emergence of a new political class in Italy, headed by Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing party Forza Italia (“Go Italy”). Bettino Craxi’s political protégée promised the Italians a “clean, reasonable and modern country.” Instead, the media magnate turned Italy into the “sick man of Europe”: “a country still struggling between modernity and backwardness, between the need/will to change and the fear of losing some local or specific privileges.” Twenty years on, a new corruption scandal has emerged, and the country seems to have returned to its point of departure, in spite of Berlusconi’s dismissal as Prime Minister.

This is not just Berlusconi’s fault, as I discussed in an earlier post . After all, he was voted in by many Italians, even if his control over the media (the Berlusconi family owns several TV channels, a publishing house and national daily) suggest a certain degree of political manipulation. The problem is that there is a mindset where getting away with (bad) things is a kind of national sport. It relates to the diffidence of Italian citizens towards the state, as historian John Foot explains in Italy’s Divided Memory:

“T]he Italian state has been in the throes of a semipermanent legitimation crisis ever since its inception. The basic ‘rules of the game’ have never been accepted by many Italians in terms of a ‘rational’ management of the state and the political system. They have, instead, been partly replaced by other, unwritten ‘rules’ that have institutionalized patronage, clientelism, and informal modes of behaviour and exchange.”

This legitimation crisis is evident, for example, in tax evasion but also – on the part of the state – in the use of excessive violence against citizens during social conflicts. The most exemplary case was the G8 summit in Genoa, in 2001, when police killed a student activist, savagely beat up activists and journalists during a police raid in the former Diaz school, and indulged in forms of torture at the Bolzaneto prison, where the nightmare continued for some 100 victims of the Diaz raid. Although the movie Diaz – Don’t clean up this blood (Daniele Vicari, 2012) gives an accurate account of what was defined as a “Mexican-style massacre,” it fails to take a real stance on the matter as responsibilities are split between the police (one of the police officers inside the Diaz school symbolically apologizes to one of the wounded activists, the view of a girl bleeding from her head clearly generating a sense of guilt) and the provocative and violent “black bloc” youth, the pretext for police to raid the Diaz school in the first place. In the movie, a couple of them find a hideout in a bar across the former school, on the night of the massacre: when – the following morning – they explore the abandoned building, traces of blood and debris unveil the horror that had taken place there. One of them penitently cries out that it was their fault.

The Genoa incidents are among a long list of traumatic memories, which remain controversial also because of a corrupt judicial system in Italy: earlier in 2012, ten Genoa activists accused of damaging property risked prison sentences of 10 to 15 years each, whereas the excessive physical violence used by the police in the Diaz school, on the other hand, was left unpunished. The trials for a series of dramatic bomb massacres that occurred between 1969 and 1980 had similar outcomes: 35 years after the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan, for example, the main suspects were identified as the culprits but received no prison sentences, for bureaucratic and legal reasons. On top of this, the families of the 17 victims were summoned to pay the trial expenses.

So Italians have some reason to not trust the state and its legal system. To be “bad,” in Italy, is a virtue, and this might explain the country’s infinite troubles with corruption. Throughout 2012, a series of scandals involving political parties from various ideological backgrounds followed each other up like a tragicomic sitcom. It started with the centre party La Margherita (“Daisy Party”), whose treasurer Luigi Lusi has been arrested for embezzling party funds. Next, it was the turn of the xenophobe Lega Nord (“Northern League”), which for years boasted of being corruption-free, and even built its very identity on the idea that Rome was full of thieves, as opposed to the clean North. Now it turns out that the Lega used party funds to buy leader Umberto Bossi’s son his university degrees, in Albania.

The most recent scandal, finally, involves the heir to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the People of Freedom party (PDL). Italians were plunged back into the ancient Rome of the Satyricon as news came out of PDL members from the Lazio regional council spending taxpayers’ money on luxury holidays, expensive cars and extravagant dress-up parties. Regional chief Franco Fiorito has been arrested for embezzlement of party funds of over $1,500,000, whereas a councilor spent nearly $40,000 on a toga party attended by 2,000 people – including Fiorito, nicknamed Batman – dressed up as Roman centurions or wearing pigs masks, while fondling women and feeding on oysters and champagne.

Ironically, Fiorito has tried to defend himself by claiming to have been among the angry crowd that had symbolically thrown pennies at Craxi, during the “Bribesville” investigations in 1993, one night when the Socialist leader left his residence in Rome. This historical moment came to represent the political demise of Craxi. Today, Fiorito has become the new face of political corruption in Italy.

This is the social context of the satirical TV show Blob, which I analyzed in an earlier post.  Blob brilliantly hit right on the spot when it opened its episode of 26 September 2012 with the “Mr Creosote” sketch from Monty Python’s satirical movie The Meaning of Life (1983 ). Mr Creosote is a surrealistically obese man who literally stuffs himself with food in a fancy restaurant. As he eats and – at the same time – coughs up his food, the man reaches his limit when the waiter (John Cleese) convinces him to have his final “wafer thin mint chocolate.” Mr Creosote accepts and literally explodes, but we don’t get to see that in Blob: just before the explosion, the scene switches to a shot of the equally obese Fiorito, and we cannot but imagine him on the various nights out, stuffing himself with oysters and champagne.

But it’s not just the fact that – in times of austerity – these people feed both on oysters and other people’s misery (in 2010 the Lazio region introduced prescription charges for disabled people). The real problem is that they don’t seem to be bothered with their lack of ethics and sense of propriety. Lazio governor Renata Polverini is exemplary here: according to Fiorito, Polverini was well aware of the misuse of funds within her council, and pictures showing her at the parties have been circulating in the media. Yet she denies that she knew anything of the embezzlements. Indeed, Polverini has been on a kind of media tour to exonerate herself from the accusations, pointing her finger at other parties and their scandals, as if to say that, in the end, everyone has been “bad.” She has also had posters put up all over Rome, where she looks straight into the camera, with pride and determination, as she firmly states that she will “send these people home.” This is, I think, the most outrageous outcome of the scandals: the lack of decency and responsibility among those who are in charge. For, even if Polverini really didn’t know anything, what is her ($15,000 monthly) job about then? For had this happened in Germany, Denmark or the Netherlands, Polverini would have stepped down instantly, quietly and ashamed for not having been more vigilant. Instead, she arrogantly claims to be a victim in the whole affair.

Indeed, the attitude of Italian politicians reflects a symptomatic problem in Italy: that of trying to get away with anything. As a number of Italian journalists have observed, the likes of Fiorito simply and sadly reflect Italian society at large.