ROME, 21 September 2003 — No event of the second half of the 20th century in Italy has a stronger grip on the public imagination than the kidnapping and killing by the Red Brigades of Aldo Moro, the leader of the once-dominant Christian Democratic Party.
His death in 1978 inspired scores of books, hundreds if not thousands of essays and articles, and enough conspiracy theories to overwhelm Oliver Stone. Moro’s murder is Italy’s equivalent of the Kennedy assassination.
This year, two feature films about Moro opened in Italian theaters. One was a rehash of a theory that the United States and other sinister forces had arranged his death. But the second, a psychological portrait of one of the terrorists, created a stir. “Buongiorno, Notte” (“Good Morning, Night”) ends with a dream of Moro walking free from captivity, instead of the true climax, his body found crumpled and full of bullets in a stolen car parked on a side street in downtown Rome.
Suddenly, all sorts of Italians are fantasizing that Moro came home alive — his captors, aging politicians who announced they would not negotiate for his release, pundits and historians.
It was as if Italy had moved from historical revisionism to psychological revisionism. In the days leading up to Moro’s death, his survival seemed low among many Italians’ priorities. Twenty-five years later, it seems to be everyone’s most ardent desire.
“A worker came up to me who saw the movie,” said Marco Bellocchio, the director. “He said that he was 20 when Moro was kidnapped, and he applauded. Now, he said, he cried.”
Even former members of the Red Brigades got into the act. After viewing the movie, Anna Laura Braghetti, who was one of Moro’s captors and the person on whom the main character is based, said she was against killing Moro. “I was horrified. I imagined letting Moro go, but I didn’t do it. I stayed in the Red Brigades,” she told the newspaper Corriere della Sera, in her only interview after the movie’s showing.
Her memoir of the killing, called “The Prisoner,” was one of the sources for the film. But she did not actually dream Bellocchio’s dream. After finishing with Moro, she was involved in the coldblooded killing of a university professor.
Eventually, Red Brigades members were hunted down and put on trial. The Moro killing was the beginning of the end of what they called “armed struggle.”
With 21st-century Italy internally at peace and issues like the fate of an overburdened pension system its biggest political challenge, it is hard to appreciate the country’s turmoil in the 1970s. Italy was a front-line Western state in the Cold War, and the possibility of Communists taking power was real.
The economic miracle that quickly brought prosperity to an impoverished land had not erased class hatred. Radical Italian leftists with links across Europe killed, kneecapped and kidnapped businessmen, academics and politicians. The ‘70s became known as the decade of lead.
Moro, a former prime minister who in 1978 was the Christian Democratic Party president, tried to stabilize Italian politics with a project known as the “historic compromise”: He wanted to include the Italian Communist Party as a voting member of the Christian Democrats’ majority in Parliament, though without Cabinet seats. For the Communists, this would have been a step toward political legitimacy.
The Red Brigades, one of many far-left splinter groups that brooked no compromise with the “bourgeois” government, opposed the Communist move.
Terms of the debate changed on March 16, 1978, when members of the group staged a carefully planned ambush of Moro’s car as it headed down a Rome street toward Parliament. All five of his bodyguards were killed; Moro, unhurt, was bundled off by the attackers.
The ensuing crisis transfixed Italy. The Brigades repeatedly demanded the release of fellow members standing trial; both the Communists and the Christian Democratic government, then headed by Giulio Andreotti, rejected negotiations with the Red Brigades. The kidnappers held Moro in a cell in a suburban apartment for 55 days, put him on trial, sentenced him to death and shot him.
A quarter-century later, many people who were involved say they labored for a happier ending.