On May 17, 1972, as he left his house, Commissioner Luigi Calabresi was killed with two shots, one in the back and the other in the neck. Thus ended three years of insults, threats and intimidation that extreme left intellectuals and terrorists had poured against Calabresi, whom they considered guilty of the death of the anarchist Joseph Pinelli. He, arrested for the famous attack on Fountain square -17 dead and 88 injured- that inaugurated the bloody Years of Lead, plunged into the void from the fourth floor of the Milanese police headquarters, becoming the protagonist of Accidental death of an anarchistthe famous buffa comedy by Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo.
Fo would be one of the almost 800 intellectuals –Fellini, Primo Levi, Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Einaudi, Umberto Eco, Pasolini…- that they would sign in 1971 in the newspaper The Espresso a very harsh accusatory manifesto against Calabresi, on which the left-wing press poured out a fierce campaign. The writer erri de lucathen a militant of the terrorist group Fight continuesHe would say years later: “Any of us could have killed Calabresi”who was nicknamed “Commissioner Ventana”.
“For almost 30 years I was collecting fragments of memories, news, all kinds of information… I wrote this book throughout my entire life, but I needed to create a bubble of silence and distance around me. to take out everything he had accumulated over the years. It was difficult, painful, but also therapeutic. I would never have imagined that this tour could also be beneficial for other people and for society,” his son tells EL MUNDO Mario Calabresi (Milan1970), journalist and former editor of newspapers The print y The Republic, who was then only two years old.
In 2007, at a time when in Italy “there was a fierce public debate about whether the time had come to turn the page on that dark decadeto reintegrate the ex-terrorists and appease society,” wrote get out of the night (Books of the Asteroid), the chilling story of the wrong revenge against his father that recreates the climate of terror that prevailed in Italy in the 70s, prey to a bloody battle between terrorism from both ends that by 1989 had left a balance in the transalpine country of more than 1,000 attacks, murders and attacks more or less selective. The most paradigmatic, that of the politician Aldo Mororecreated again in the recent series of Mark Bellocchiooutside night.
In the book, Calabresi not only recreates the sad end of his father and how it affected his family and his childhood, but also relives how for years he has faced terrible situations about his father’s memory. On one occasion in 1984, at a student demonstration in memory of the Piazza Fontana massacre, he had to hear the crowd chanting: “Ca-la-bre-si a-se-si-no”. Another day, in 2004, the author came across some leaflets on the street: “Enough of the lies! Luigi Calabresi was a torturer.” And soon after, walking along Via Calabresi, he saw that on the plaque, under his father’s name, they had once again written “Murderer”.