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 Imagining Terrorism
The Rhetoric and Representation of
Political Violence in Italy 1969-2009
 legenda
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7. Playing with Gender: The Comedies of Goldoni, by Maggie günsberg
8. Comedy and Culture: Cecco Angiolieri’s Poetry and Late Medieval Society, by Fabian alfie
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10. Contesting the Monument: The Anti-Illusionist Italian Historical Novel, by Ruth glynn
11. Camorristi, Politicians and Businessmen, by Felia allum
12. Speaking Out and Silencing, ed. by anna Cento Bull and adalgisa giorgio
13. From Florence to the Heavenly City: The Poetry of Citizenship in Dante, by Claire e. Honess
14. Orality and Literacy in Modern Italian Culture, ed. by Michael Caesar and Marina Spunta
15. Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy: The Making of a New Genre, by lisa Sampson
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Managing Editor
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www.legenda.mhra.org.uk
 Imagining Terrorism
The Rhetoric and Representation of
Political Violence in Italy 1969–2009

Edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

Italian Perspectives 18
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2009
 First published 2009

Published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

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© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2009

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 Contents
❖

Acknowledgements ix
List of Contributors x
Introduction  1
pierpaolo antonello and alan o’leary
Pa rt I: Na rr ative Models of Politica l Violence
1 Killing the Father: Politics and Intellectuals, Utopia and Disillusion 16
antonio tricomi
2 Narratives of Sacrifice: Pasolini and Moro 30
pierpaolo antonello
3 Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema 48
alan o’leary
4 Through the Lens of Trauma: The Figure of the Female Terrorist in
Il prigioniero and Buongiorno, notte 63
ruth glynn
Pa rt II: Genr es of Terror
5 Television and Terrorism in Italy: Sergio Zavoli’s La notte della repubblica 77
isabella pezzini
6 Screening Terror: Political Terrorism in Italian Cinema 88
giancarlo lombardi
7 Lo stupro by Franca Rame: Political Violence and Political Theatre 101
luciana d’arcangeli
Pa rt III: The Rhetoric of Violence
8 The Rule of Which Law? The Use of Legal Language in the Rhetoric
of the anni di piombo 116
eleanor spaventa
9 A (Conceptual) History of Violence: The Case of the Italian Extreme Left
in the 1970s 128
lisa gerusa
10 Narrative Models of Political Violence: Vicarious Experience and
‘Violenti­zation’ in 1970s Italy 139
francesco caviglia and leonardo cecchini
Pa rt IV: The M emory of Events
11 Contested Memories: Milan and Piazza Fontana 153
john foot
viii Contents

12 Memorialization without Memory: The Case of Aldo Moro 168

david moss
13 Political Violence, stragismo and ‘Civil War’: An Analysis of the
Self-Narratives of Three Neofascist Protagonists 183
Anna Cento Bull
14 Self-Narratives of the anni di piombo: Testimonies of the Political Exiles 200
in France
Rachele Tardi
Index 221
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v

This book originated in the conference ‘La violenza illustrata: The Rhetoric and
Representation of Political Violence in Italy, from 1968 to the Present Day’, held at
the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge,
in November 2004, and several of the chapters are elaborations of papers presented
on that occasion. We would like to thank all of the conference speakers and the
co-organizer Ed Emery; our special thanks to Ludmilla Jordanova and the staff
of CRASSH for their financial, logistical and moral support with the event. We
gratefully acknowledge the support of our main sponsor, the British Academy; the
conference was also generously supported by Trinity College, and the Department of
Italian at Cambridge University. We would like to thank the translators of Chapters
1, 5, 9 and 10, essays which were all originally composed in Italian. We are grateful
to Zyg Barański and Laura Lepschy, who read the manuscript with great care, and
to Annalia Cancelliere who prepared the index to the volume. The cover images
for this volume were very kindly provided by Cattleya S.p.A., 01Distribution and
Studio PUNTOeVIRGOLA, and our thanks are due to Giancarlo de Cataldo for his
help in acquiring the images and permissions. Finally, the publication of this book
was made possible by grants from the School of Modern Languages and Cultures,
University of Leeds, and the Department of Italian, University of Cambridge.
 LIst oF ContRIBUtoRs
❖

Pierpaolo antonello is Senior lecturer in Italian at the University of Cambridge

and Fellow of St John’s College. His publications include: Il ménage a quattro: Scienza,
filosofia e tecnica nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence: le Monnier, 2005);
Science and Literature in Italian Culture: From Dante to Calvino (Oxford: legenda,
2004), co-edited with Simon gilson, and with René girard and João Cezar de
Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (london:
Continumm, 2008), translated into six languages.
anna Cento Bull is Professor of Italian History and Politics at the University of
Bath. Her publications include The Lega Nord and The Northern Question in Italian
Politics, Palgrave, 2001 (jointly with Mark gilbert); Speaking Out and Silencing:
Culture, Society and Politics in Italy in the 1970s, Maney Publishing, 2006 (edited jointly
with a. giorgio); Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Non-
Reconciliation, Berghahn, 2007.
Francesco Caviglia is a secondary school teacher and works with the Italian
national Research Council on literacy and learning in the Humanities. Recent
publications include: ‘Understanding Public discourse about Violence and Crime:
a Challenge for Critical discourse analysis at School, in Mediating Ideology in
Text and Image: Ten Critical Studies, ed. by I. lassen, J. Strunck and T. Vestergaard
(amsterdam, 2006); and, with leonardo Cecchini, ‘a Quest for dialogism:
look ing Back at Italian Political Violence in the ’70s’, in Constructing History, Society
and Politics: Multimodal Approaches, ed. by T. Vestergaard, I. lassen & J. Strunck
(aalborg, 2009).
leonardo Cecchini is associate Professor and Head of the department of Italian
at the Institute of languages, literature and Culture, University of aarhus. His
research fields are dante and the Italian middle ages, and modern and contemporary
Italian culture and literature. His publications include: ‘ “allegory of theologians”
or “allegory of poets”: allegory in dante’s Commedia’, in Orbis Litterarium, 55: 5
(2000), 340-78; ‘Rappresentazioni degli anni di piombo’, in Atti del VII congresso degli
italianisti scandinavi (Helsinki, 2005).
luciana d’arcangeli is Cassamarca lecturer in Italian at Flinders University,
adelaide. She specializes in the study of contemporary Italian theatre and cinema,
and in translation and interpreting. She is the author of various articles on the
Theatre of dario Fo and Franca Rame and her book I personaggi femminili nel teatro
di Dario Fo e Franca Rame is forthcoming with Franco Cesati (Florence).
John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History in the department of Italian,
University College london. His publications include Milan since the Miracle: City,
 List of Contributors xi

Culture and Identity (Berg, 2001) — in Italian as Milano dopo il Miracolo: biografia di
una città (Feltrinelli, 2008), now in its 3rd edition; Modern Italy (Palgrave, 2003); and
Calcio: A History of Italian Football (Harperperennial, 2007), also in its 3rd edition
— in Italian as Calcio: 1898-2007. Storia dello sport che ha fatto l’Italia (Rizzoli, 2007).
Guerre civili: un viaggio nella memoria divisa italiana will be published by Rizzoli in
2009 and by Palgrave in 2010 as Divided country: History and Memory in Twentieth
Century Italy.
Lisa Gerusa holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of
Bologna (2006). She has worked on Franz Kaf ka and Walter Benjamin, in particular
Benjamin’s Passagenwerk. She is now completing a degree in Political Science at the
University of Pavia.
Ruth Glynn is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Bristol. Her research
interests lie in late twentieth-century and her current project explores how women’s
participation in political violence and terrorism in the anni di piombo is articulated
as collective and cultural trauma. She is the author of Contesting the Monument:
The Anti-Illusionist Historical Novel (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2005), and
co-editor, with Alan O’Leary and Giancarlo Lombardi, of Terrorism, Italian Style:
The Representation of Terrorism and Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema
(London: IGRS Books, forthcoming 2009).
Giancarlo Lombardi is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature
at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2002, he
published the monograph Rooms with a View: Feminist Diary Fiction, 1954-1999
(Fairleigh-Dickinson). He has also published a number of articles on contemporary
women writers, television studies, Italian cinema and cultural studies. He is
currently working on a volume on the cinematic representations of Italian political
terrorism.
David Moss is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Milan. His
research on Italian politics and society include studies of pastoralism and banditry in
Sardinia, patronage, and responses to HIV/AIDS. He has also published a study of
the politics of leftwing violence between 1969 and 1985, an analysis of the evolution
of pentitismo, and a comparison of the events and interpretations of the deaths of
Aldo Moro and Captain James Cook. He is currently writing an introduction to
anthropology.
Alan O’Leary is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Leeds. His monograph
Tragedia all’italiana: cinema e terrorismo tra Moro e Memoria (Tissi: Angelica) was
published in 2007; a revised English edition is forthcoming from Peter Lang. He
is the editor with Ruth Glynn and Giancarlo Lombardi of Terrorism Italian Style:
The Representation of Terrorism and Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema
(London: IGRS Books, forthcoming), and with Millicent Marcus of the annual
film issue of the journal The Italianist.
Isabella Pezzini is Professor of Semiotics at the Department of Sociology and
Com­muni­cation, at the University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’. Her research interests
lie in semiotic theory, text semiotics, and semiotics of culture. Her publications
xii List of Contributors

include: Le passioni del lettore: saggi di semiotica del testo (Milan: Bompiani, 1998);
Semiotic Efficacity and the Effectiveness of the Text (Turhout: Brepols, 2002); Trailer, spot,
siti, banner: le forme brevi della comunicazione audiovisiva (Rome: Meltemi, 2002) (ed.
with Pierluigi Cervelli); Il testo galeotto: la lettura come pratica efficace (Rome: Meltemi,
2007); Immagini quotidiane: sociosemiotica visuale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2008).
Eleonor Spaventa is Reader in Law and Director of the Durham European Law
Institute. Her research interests lie in European law and in particular in the fields of
European constitutional law, free movement, fundamental rights, co-operation in
criminal matters in the EU, and EU counter-terrorism measures. She is the author
of Free Movement of Persons in the EU: Barriers to Movement and their Constitutional
Context (Kluwer Law International, forthcoming), the co-author (with Wyatt
and Dashwood) of Law of the European Union (Sweet and Maxwell, 2006), and the
co-editor of Social Welfare and EU Law (Hart Publishing, 2005).
Rachele Tardi received a PhD in Italian Studies at UCL in 2005 with a dissertation
entitled Representations of Italian Left Political Violence in Film, Literature and Theatre
(1973-2005). She has been a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds and is now
working for the British Red Cross.
Antonio Tricomi is a Lecturer in Film History and Criticism at the University of
Macerata, and has a doctorate in Literary Criticism. He has published extensively on
Pasolini, including the monographs Sull’opera mancata di Pasolini: un autore irrisolto e il
suo laboratorio (Rome: Carocci, 2005), and Pasolini: gesto e maniera (Soveria Mannelli:
Rubbettino, 2005). His most recent book is Il brogliaccio lasco dell’umanista: cinema,
cronaca, letteratura (Ancona: Affinità Elettive, 2007).
 INTRODUCTION
v
Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

The so-called anni di piombo (‘years of lead’), from roughly 1969 to 1983, can be
described as the crucible of many political, ideological, social contradictions and
tensions accumulated in Italy since the end of the Second World War.1 The period
was marked by a streak of politically motivated violence unparalleled in contem­
porary European history. Although some have claimed that there has been an
overemphasis on the role and presence of political violence in those years,2 it is a
statistical fact that between 1969 and 1980 there were more than 12,000 incidents
of politically motivated violence (an average of 100 incidents per month, three per
day): 362 people were killed, 4,500 were injured, 597 terrorist groups, of both left
and right, were counted.3 The resurgence of terrorist activity in Italy at the turn of
the century (the assassination of Massimo D’Antona in 1999, and of Marco Biagi in
2002 by the ‘new’ Brigate Rosse), as well as the centrality of the theme in the global
security agenda, have also raised again a cultural and political concern with the
violence that appeared to have culminated and ended in the first half of the 1980s.4
It was inevitable then that a collective experience that has been referred to as a ‘civil
war’ or as a ‘guerra civile a bassa intensità,’5 and can be justly described in terms of
national trauma, should impact upon so many aspects of Italian cultural life, tinting
everyday language, media communication, categories of historical understanding,
and artistic representations of all kinds.
It is not then surprising that the study of representations of political violence in
Italy has grown rapidly as a field of research in recent years. Scholars from different
fields have begun to investigate a range of representations in the Italian context
— cinema, fiction and biography, the mass media and popular culture, political
and juridical discourse, historiography.6 This book is aligned with this collective
critical and exegetical task, although it aims to broaden the perspective in order
to understand how political violence was expressed, symbolized and analysed at
different rhetorical, philosophical and linguistic levels even before (or as) it became
a subject of artistic representation. It also seeks to describe how these different forms
of textuality and representation — in their constant, mutual, inter-mediatic and
inter-genre dialogue and cross-contamination — have become privileged sites for
the elaboration of national and historical trauma.

Language, rhetoric, myth

The first problem one has to face in a volume such as this is terminological.
‘Terrorism’ is an elusive and contentious term, with no satisfactory definition
— none that is both precise and widely accepted, and we do not aim, here, to
2 Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

disentangle the terminological and theoretical knot.7 The description ‘terrorist’

always implies a negative judgement of the means, and by extension the ends, of
the individuals or groups so described, and the word inevitably carries a rhetorical
ballast of moral outrage. But terrorism is not an ideology; it is brutal means of
communication, a tactic or strategy in the service of an ideology or of political,
economic and military objectives, though few if any ‘terrorist’ groups would adopt
the term as a self-description, or accept it as a tag for their methods. Nonetheless,
it is a truism to say that political violence is always symbolically charged. Thus the
Brigate Rosse (BR) motto, ‘colpirne uno per educarne cento’, is a statement of
method as well as intention. It becomes then important to analyse how language was
used and deployed in connection with political violence, to elucidate the linguistic
and rhetorical strategies which legitimated, encapsulated, and prompted strategic
violent actions. That process is made evident by Gerusa (Chapter 9) in relation to
the philosophical and theoretical discourse which grounded the legitimacy of the
praxis of groups such as Avanguardia operaia and the BR, and by Spaventa (Chapter
8) in relation to the employment of legalistic language and rhetoric by the BR
during the negotiations that followed the kidnapping of judge Mario Sossi.
The analysis of rhetoric and language becomes an important point of entry to
examine and disentangle the ideological tensions characteristic of a certain period
and set of problems. In terms of linguistic analysis, L’affaire Moro (1978), Leonardo
Sciascia provided a remarkable example (almost an exegetic template) of how to
peel away the palimpsestic semantic layers of the language used in criminal and
political events like the Aldo Moro kidnap, in order to tease out inconsistencies as
well as clues about deep-seated motivations and meaning. In particular, Sciascia’s
famous observation that ‘l’italiano delle Brigate Rosse è semplicemente, lapalissia­
namente, il linguaggio delle Brigate Rosse’ is not a vacuous tautology, but the
recognition that it was a language which at that point was speaking only to itself.8
The terrorism of the left was extremely loquacious, involving the production of
a vast quantity of documents and declarations, but it gradually gave itself over
to a sort of communicative autism. Paradoxically, the terrorist left failed in the
very domain in which the general leftist contestation and movimentismo was most
effective: in shaping a new language, in providing a new creative vocabulary.9
Enrico Fenzi, university professor in Genova, and one of the ideological brains
behind the BR, in an interview with the TV journalist Sergio Zavoli, stressed the
fact that besides the political and military defeats, leftist terrorism experienced a
‘sconfitta della parola, della comunicazione, sul piano culturale’.10 The increasing
isolation and self-referentiality of leftist terrorism can be measured by the increasing
separation of its jargon from everyday language. On the other hand, if the radical
left was hyper-logorrheic, one could argue that the laconic character of right-wing
terrorism was more successful in its communicative goals. There was no need for
rhetorical self-justification on its part, because its action was representative of an
ideology that sees society as enmeshed in chaotic violence; thus, far-right terrorism
was paradoxically more ‘eloquent’ in its pursuits. Secrecy, silence, esoteric mystical
knowledge attached to the power of action, became the effective trademark of
extreme right-wing rhetoric and propaganda.11
 Introduction 3

Mario Moretti, leader of the BR for several years, has admitted that the BRs
analysis was often pursued and propagated ‘per simboli, per rappresentazioni’.12
As is pointed out by Caviglia and Cecchini (Chapter 10) and by Gerusa, in this
mode of discourse shared myths become the shibboleths of coercion that validate
the route to violence and assert it as irresistible. Thus, the myth of the betrayed
Resistence; the myth of ‘imminent revolution’ growing from the events of the long
’68; the myths of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; of the Cuban revolution and
Che Guevara; and thus the myth of the so-called SIM, the Imperialist State of the
Multinationals — understood at the time as a genuine and concrete agent, a ‘single
brain’ that controlled and directed everything, and which now appears rather as the
hypostatization of an absolute enemy. These may, at one level, have had a strategic
and rhetorical value, but at another level they represented a hermeneutical trap, a
failure of interpretation.
Arguably, because of this mythologizing/ideological/utopian charge, the exper­
ience of the anni di piombo in Italy has become a history of interpretative failures,
both on the part of the protagonists, unable to analyse the evolution of political
events and socio-historical contexts at crucial stages of their development, and
on the part of those who tried to scrutinize these very phenomena from judicial,
historical, and sociological standpoints. Myths encapsulated and facilitated an
ideologically charged perspective which of necessity generated such hermeneutical
hiccups, but also provided for representational elements through which to frame
and account for historical events, presenting an interesting case of the interaction
between ‘fictionality’ and socio-political reality. As Tricomi (Chapter 1) points out,
the vocabulary of insurgency of the brigatista Valerio Morucci is strongly determined
‘by his watching of films, so much so that he cannot resist modelling both the
execution and the recounting of his militant activity upon those of the sheriffs and
hitmen of the many westerns and films noirs he has seen at the cinema’. Motivations
and memory are wrapped in a self-mythologizing aura that renders crucial the study
of the representation of terrorism and political violence in order to fully understand
the ideological climate of those years and its cultural refraction.

Social texts and social dramas

The evident interrelation between collective imagination, fictional representation,
social movements and political action signals the need to broaden the understanding
of these different kind of texts (self-narratives, novels, films, historiography,
TV programmes, etc). In the case of the representation of terrorism, we are not
simply dealing with films, novels, essays, which have to be critically approached
from a stylistic perspective or in a thematic fashion in order to chart a series of
literary topoi. When speaking of the representation of terrorism we have in mind
the production of texts that are located within the interpretative socio-historical
discourses of those years, that engage with specific constituencies, taking sides with
regard to the coeval political debate, adding further hermeneutical insights to the
historical analysis of the events, and eventually becoming instruments of a spurious
form of ‘supplementary’ justice. As Moss (Chapter 12) writes, the ‘failure to shape
4 Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

the events and experiences surrounding the [Moro] kidnapping into a form of
public memory has [...] acquired a history of its own’, the history of the different
interpretative outputs. In this respect we would adopt the notion of the ‘social text’,
employed for instance by Beverly Allen in reference to the novel during the anni di
piombo,13 or by Jerome McGann, who points out the fact that any text (be it novel,
poem or a film) is better thought of, not as the offspring of individual creativity or
genius according to the Romantic or auteurist model, but as the output of a nexus
of social relations and productive functions. Seen thus, the text can in no way be
treated as a hermetic artefact available to formal exegesis alone; instead, McGann
argues ‘that to pursue the meaning of a text entails the pursuit of the text’s entire
socio-historical field, that the range of such a field will stretch across large reaches
of time and space, and the field cannot be properly approached — cannot even
be seen — if one’s vision is hemmed in within the linguistic confines that have
so dominated twentieth-century hermeneutics’.14 It is in such terms that we can
discuss, for instance, La meglio gioventù (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003), a six-hour
mini-series made for Italian state television and subsequently given an international
cinema release. A text like this cannot be accounted for in purely formal terms, and
eludes evaluative perspectives that consider only its compliance with a preferred
aesthetic model; any account which fails to consider the film’s ecstatic reception by
the left-wing public and press is missing an essential aspect, the rhetorical appeal to
a constituency and its shared memory, inscribed in the text itself. As the example
of La meglio gioventù demonstrates, literary or cinematic works ‘are fundamentally
social rather than personal or psychological products’, and they ‘do not even
acquire an artistic form of being until their engagement with an audience has been
determined’.15 At another level, La meglio gioventù asserts the permeability or mutual
osmosis between events and representations, and can be described itself as ‘social
text’. Events — the student and worker protests of the late 1960s, terrorist activities,
Tangentopoli, the murder of Falcone — have a discursive as well as a phenomenal
status, and enter into a field we may describe as representational. No event exists
as a ‘fact’ outside a system of textual models; that is, no event can be independent
of the context of its interpretation. Cultural artefacts exist along a continuum with
events that allows them no autonomy and allows events no independence from their
representation. The relationship, though at times opaque, is one of symbiosis: events
determine the form an artefact will take, just as interpretation is present at the very
moment of the event. So it is that a film like La seconda volta (Mimmo Calopresti,
1995), as explained by Lombardi (Chapter 6), embodies in its unresolved structure
and truncated narrative the political and ethical impasse of the indulto debate —
the debate in the wider society about the fate of those imprisoned for ‘terrorist’
offences. Thus, rhetoric and representation refract, and in their turn impress upon,
the social and political world and the interpretation of events.
The notion of ‘social text’ also accounts for the evident and intrinsic inter-mediatic
modality of these representations. In the case of terrorism, it makes little sense to
consider genres and media in isolation, as they all respond to the same need and all
feed on the plethora of interpretations of events, borrowing images, motifs, narrative
structures from each other: historiography, autobiographical narratives, journalism,
 Introduction 5

auteurist cinema, docu-dramas, television formats, comics, novels, political theatre,

popular songs, B-movies, are all inscribed in a sort of hermeneutical continuum. A
glaring example is Sergio Zavoli’s La notte della repubblica (1989), as reconstructed by
Pezzini (Chapter 5), a journalistic account of the events which was shaped through
careful narrative modalities, and borrowed images and sequences from movies like
Giuseppe Ferrara’s Il caso Moro (1986), only to in turn provide a cinematic template
for subsequent films like La mia generazione (Wilma Labate, 1996) in the powerful
close-ups employed by Zavoli in the interviews with terrorists.
A further layer in this understanding of the social composition and implication of
representational texts is given by what Robin Erica Wagner-Pacifici, in reference to
the Moro case, defined as ‘social drama’.16 Events are intrinsically representational,
as they are interpreted through narrative modalities: ‘social and political events
are experienced and retrospectively interpreted according to theatrical criteria’.17
According to Wagner-Pacifici, who borrows the concept from the anthropologist
Victor Turner, the concept of ‘social drama’ does not simply assert and employ a
retrospective narrative analysis of events:
it regards the social actors themselves as proceeding through and attempting to
direct certain events with, among other kinds of consciousness and motives (e.g.,
political, moral, economic), a theatrical self-consciousness. The protagonists of
a social drama respond to and clothe themselves in their culture’s stock of
sedimented symbols, archetypal characters, and rhetorical appeals.18
This is reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s comments on the theatricality and
exhibitionist quality of terrorist activity, as well as the performative style of
politicians and establishment figures during the Moro case, or to what the historian
Martin Clark referred to as ‘a national melodrama’.19
As mystery tales, dramas, tragedies, Oedipal narratives, tales of sacrifice, and
conspiracy theories are all forms of the textualization of events which perform both
an interpretative and representational function, in the first section of this volume
we isolate three of the key narrative modalities that were used to account for the
social dramas of the anni di piombo. Antonio Tricomi interrogates the Oedipal
interpretative structure, as implicitly or explicitly thematized by authors such as
Pasolini or Bellocchio. For instance, proximity to the escalating seriousness of events
between 1979 and 1982 seems to have encouraged psychoanalytical interpretation in
the films made in the period, all of which represent the anni di piombo in terms of
Oedipal conf lict. Renzo De Felice, writing about historiography and the ventennio
fascista, has argued that closeness in time leads precisely to acts of ‘interpretation–
characterization’ cast in terms that privilege the psychological rather than the effort
of historical reconstruction of causes.20 Another reason for the prevalence of the
Oedipal structure might be sought in the appeal of the mythological rather than
the Freudian dimension of the story. The use of the Oedipal configuration in a
film about terrorism might have been a way to generalize the conf licts depicted;
an attempt to identify an archetype behind a violence that otherwise seemed so
historically rooted. The recourse to myth might even be argued to be a kind of
evasion, and to be symptomatic of an inability to properly account for the traumatic
events.
6 Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

Another widespread ur-narrative employed to deal with the anni di piombo has been
the conspiracy mode, as discussed by O’Leary (Chapter 3) in relation to the Moro
kidnapping and to right-wing terrorism and stragismo (large-scale indiscriminate
bombings). Dietrologia (the production of conspiracy theory) became a favourite
hermeneutical modality during the anni di piombo and has survived them. As Gundle
and Rinaldi argue, ‘the cumulative effects of a long series of mysteries turned this
approach into a standard response to many murders’, affecting interpretation of
events well beyond those connected with terrorism.21 Commentators like Mario
Pirani have argued that conspiracy accounts of the Moro kidnap were (and are)
especially ‘cara a una parte non secondaria della sinistra’;22 as Rossana Rossanda
argues:
La tesi d’un complotto dei servizi, che avrebbero diretto o inquinato o
surdeterminato le azioni delle Brigate Rosse, agisce soprattutto sulla memoria
della sinistra, che senza di essa dovrebbe misurarsi con il problema di una
eversione di radice operaia nata al suo fianco, la incapacità di prevenirla e di
batterla.23
On the other hand, conspiracy theory tends to confirm the extreme right’s
conception of society as ruled by violence, and implicitly validates the view that the
effective exertion of authority and power is the only real question of importance.
The conspiracy text — for example, the film Piazza delle Cinque Lune (Renzo
Marti­nelli, 2003) — might attempt to introduce questions of ethics, but these
will inevitably seem ‘unrealistic’, in the sense that they are irrelevant to the ‘real’
questions of political survival and national strength (‘realism’ is intended here in the
narrow sense of the theory of the preservation of power).
Also in section I, Antonello reconstructs two of the key events of the 1970s, the
murders of Pasolini and Moro, through a ‘sacrificial model’. He discusses the extent
to which the two murders have been considered in terms of the collective expulsion
of two innocent victims for ‘cathartic’ purposes: for the recomposition of social
ties and structures strained by the ongoing political crisis which jeopardized social
stability and integrity. This model resonates with the ‘dramatic’ structure explored
by Wagner-Pacifici, although turning the emphasis on the anthropological reality
embedded in the ‘fictional’ texts representing these events, rather than on the
‘theatricality’ of the events themselves.

The topography of trauma

Key locations for cultural criticism and theoretical discussion in recent years have
been those of cultural memory and collective memory, in reference to the under­
standing of how groups of people, with a shared history and cultural identity, create
ways of perceiving themselves, gathering narratives, values, leaders or heroes into an
account that helps them in self-understanding.24 However, David Moss points out
the ‘list of cases of “divided memory” that have occupied Italian historians and social
scientists in recent years’, and how difficult it is to reconstruct a shared, unifying
and collective memory in the case of traumatic events of terrorism. Just as terrorism
in the 1970s, and the return of left-wing terrorism in 1999, could be interpreted as
 Introduction 7

the ‘return of the repressed’ for a country that has never fully addressed the causes of
social unrest, the simultaneous reappearance of books and films on the Aldo Moro
kidnap in recent years identifies this episode as the locus of a trauma that elicits
repetition compulsion but which simultaneously conceals the extent and character
of that trauma.25 On this score, the historian Guido Panvini has argued that the
focus on ascertaining the truth of particularly salient events has taken precedence
over the historical analysis of social movements and processes in the anni di piombo.
We still lack a wide-ranging work of historiography on the causes and contexts of
the violence of the period, ‘che riordini il materiale a disposizione e lo ricolleghi ai
diversi contesti politici e culturali, problematizzandolo e relativizzandolo’.26 In the
absence of such a work, says Panvini, a fixation with spectacular events prevails,
and the listing of particularly salient events becomes indeed a tempting mode of
ur-narration of the period — a trajectory of atrocity and trauma with calling points
named Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, Via Fani, Bologna Centrale...
Section IV of the volume tries to define this ‘traumatic topography’ by singling
out key places and events, among which is the Moro kidnap, as recounted by David
Moss. John Foot’s discussion of the Piazza Fontana bombing (Chapter 11) offers a
fascinating case of the persistence of a ‘divided memory’ related to a tale of ‘two’
cities: that is, a divided Milan, with its still visible scars of the anni di piombo. In
collective perception, Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, via Fani, the Bologna
railway station are traumatic labels that live side by side with other historical and
foundational events, like the slaughters of Marzabotto or the Fosse Ardeatine.
These are public spaces stripped of their anonymity to act as memorial toponyms of
a crucial and contested period of Italian history and as reminders of the shortage of
democratic justice experienced by Italy since the inception of the Republic.
This topography preserves the collective scars inf licted by right-wing terrorism
on civil society, which has nonetheless proven more elusive for memory because of
the obscure nature of stragismo. Perhaps its most striking icon is the clock stopped
at 10.25 in Bologna station, indicating the time of the bombing on 2 August 1980.
It is significant, however, that the stalled clock-face is the mysterious index of an
event, retained by the city of Bologna itself, rather than the chosen symbol of a
terrorist organization. In contrast to the modus operandi of left-wing terrorism,
the perpetrators of the Bologna explosion elected to remain anonymous. This
anonymity, and the apparently ‘senseless’ character of the massacre led, it could be
argued, to the bombing being classed ‘in the category of the “wrath of nature”,
much like an act of God or a freak of nature — here today, gone tomorrow —
lacking any rhyme or reason’;27 as such, it could only find an ambiguous place in
the national memory.28 Though a massive and monstrous event, the bombing was
destined to disappear from newspapers, and certainly from the front pages and
telegiornali headlines, after just a few days. On the other hand, the very duration of
the Aldo Moro kidnapping (fifty-four days) ensured that it remained on the front
pages of the national papers, and gained maximum attention for the kidnappers.
An extended and morbidly photogenic series of events, like the Moro kidnapping,
is ultimately more memorable than the apparently inexplicable and arbitrary
acts characteristic of right-wing terrorism. The iconic image of Moro in his Via
8 Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

Montalcini prison remains the symbolic ‘seal’ of the anni di piombo, regarding us
from the covers of the myriad books on the subject.29 The kidnapping comes to
stand as a screen memory for the period: it is the event through which the period is
recalled, but also that which masks the other events, the deeper processes and social
movements of the time.

Disavowal, testimony, narcissism

There is an intrinsic difficulty in dealing with political violence at a representational
level, related to the shame of having been the perpetrator but also the victim of
violence. Both in rhetorical and representational terms a tension between revelation
and concealment is made evident when dealing with acts of violence. Violence is
actually and symbolically made explicit, used as a political means, but it is also
rheto­r ically disavowed. In this regard, it is revealing to read Raimondo Catanzaro’s
socio­logical study of the Brigate Rosse. In his interviews with the protagonists of
those years, he discovers that they find it difficult to speak about their violent acts
in the past:
The lack of detailed references to episodes of violence is an indication of the
difficulty encountered by the protagonist in reconstructing a coherent identity
of his or her own past. [...] The first instrument used to [...] avoid having to
deal with the contradictions implicit in the subject’s life, thus enabling him to
conserve a coherent rather than a despicable image of himself, is the glossing
over of the particular episodes of violence in which the subject has been
involved.30
Such reticence could be understood as ‘cattiva coscienza’ or as a ‘rimozione del
trauma’. There was also a comparable form of ‘restraint’ and reticence on the part
of many writers and intellectuals in elaborating on the issue of violence per se, as
discussed by Jennifer Burns and Agostino Giovagnoli, specifically in reference to
the Moro case.31 As Antonio Tricomi explains, in his contribution to this volume:
‘the intellectuals were silent because the death of Moro marked their own death
as well; because they realized that, using their habitual analytical tools, they could
comprehend neither contemporary reality, nor that which was to come; because
they sensed that the new country taking shape would not have a role for them’.
As mentioned above, particular narrative modalities were used to refract the
experience of terrorism transcending the ideologies: besides the Oedipal model
of conf lict discussed by Tricomi, the gendering of protagonists, as Glynn argues
(Chapter 4) is not to be treated as casual: the eruption of the violent woman
in representational discourse should be seen as symptomatic of a threat to the
social body or a trauma therein. Cento Bull (Chapter 13) describes the alternative
modalities of memory employed by the protagonists of right-wing terrorism, which
has tended to elude memory and resist historiography. Nevertheless, if the texts she
analyses can be described as life-writing, it is likely that the justificatory tropes such
texts employ are also shared by the self-narratives of former left-wing militants, as
in Catanzaro’s example, above, and in the texts analysed by Tardi (Chapter 14).
Problems with the representation of violence are complicated still further when
 Introduction 9

the point of view is shifted from the perpetrators to the victims: in this context
the testimonial role becomes fundamental, as the atrocity of violence is given
increased visibility. It preferably utters the language of the body: the victims use
the body as the ultimate site of testimonial evidence, as the wound that speaks in
an almost Christological sense. According to Antonello, this becomes especially
evident in the representation of the murders of Pasolini and Moro, where the body
is employed as epistemological and political instrument, through the evidential
power of ‘martyrdom’; but it is also evident in the theatrical performance of Franca
Rame’s Lo strupro, as argued by D’Arcangeli (Chapter 7), in which Rame’s powerful
description of her torture and rape becomes emblematic of how violent personal
trauma is elaborated through an act of revelation.
This issue of imagining violence is also connected to the problem of the repre­
sentation of otherness. There is a radical asymmetry in the representation of the
‘other’ when political dialectics turns into violent altercation, when violence is
the exchanged token of communication. It is always felt to be the ‘other’ who
brings illegitimate or irrational violence to the system, and this otherness must be
constructed in representational and rhetorical terms. In the media and in some areas
of public opinion, terrorists tended to be denied human traits and were represented
as barbarous murderers or psychopaths who did not belong to society. As Beverly
Allen has pointed out, literature itself up to the mid-1980s symbolically excluded
the terrorists from the representation of the Italian ‘family’.32 In turn, politicians,
journalists and above all the relatives of the victims were critical of Sergio Zavoli
and his TV series La notte della repubblica, because in a long series of interviews he
showed the ‘normality’, even the banality of the faces, of the accents, of the postures,
of the idioms of those who were imagined as radical evil, as the non-human (on this
score, see Pezzini’s contribution to this volume). The same humanity that, on the
opposite side of the spectrum, was negated to the victims of terrorist violence, seen
merely as symbolic targets, as enemies, and never as human beings.
Conversely, there tends to be an increasing level of identity in violence: when
vio­lence is openly exchanged, when it becomes reciprocal violence, enemies tend
to resemble each other more and more closely. As Anton Blok has shown, vio­
lence is always based on an increasing level of reciprocity and similarity between
the contenders.33 Freud referred to this phenomenon as ‘the narcissism of minor
differences’, an idea taken up in cultural anthropology to describe how the motiv­
ations for conf lict tend to derive from antagonists’ similarities and not their
disparities. Carla Mosca and Rossana Rossanda point out to Mario Moretti a
paradoxical fact in the BR’s treatment of Moro: ‘Nel sequestro ti opponi allo stato
con i suoi mezzi, quelli che denunci. Gli somigli, l’ostaggio ridotto a niente, la
“prigione” del popolo, gli interrogatori’.34 Catanzaro’s accounts of militants’ decision
to embrace armed struggle in the post-1975 generation of the BR highlights the
immediacy and, in a sense, ideological neutrality of this decision, a perceived need
for action that was also typical of the extreme right.35 Certainly, we can refer to
the mutual antagonism of left and right in the anni di piombo (and beyond) in terms
of the narcissism of minor differences, and see this syndrome as still determining
the ideologically constrained histories written of the period. Thus, Marco Baliani,
10 Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

in his theatrical monologue on the Moro kidnap, Corpo di stato, rhetorically asks
himself a similar question:
Com’era successo che, amici, compagni di gruppo, di corteo, improvvisamente
s’erano messi a parlare di armi? Da un giorno all’altro avevano cominciato a
usare termini tecnici, da riviste specializzate, come se ne fossero infatuati. Ma
non erano sempre stati i fascisti gli innamorati delle pistole?36

Histories, fictions, memory

Baliani’s monologue, a formalized work (or act) of oral history, raises the persistent
question, implicit in this volume, of the relationship between narrative and history.
It is a question that dates in the Italian tradition to Verri or Manzoni, and which
finds an exemplary modern instance in Sciascia’s work, as well as being interrogated
in theoretical terms in the writings of Carlo Ginzburg, with his strong interest
in the relationship between history and representation, between the rhetorical
construction of historical accounts and their reference to a given, ‘objective’ reality.
Ginzburg writes in Il giudice e lo storico that ‘uno storico ha il diritto di scorgere un
problema là dove un giudice deciderebbe un “non luogo a procedere” ’.37 Likewise,
however, a writer or a film director can proceed even where the historian feels
s/he is on hazardous terrain. It is clear that the contesting versions of history and
(contemporary) events in everything from judicial discourse to television drama
challenge the traditional idea of a document-based history as the only form of
authoritative historiography. The conservative wave of the 1990s, the political
homogenization of the press, the accommodation of the ‘official’ historical narrative
of the anni di piombo to the unsatisfactory judicial sentences of the past twenty years
— all have left an explanatory void and a perceived need for supplementary justice
that has been only partially filled by historiography. Panvini has commented on the
current absence of a general historical account of the anni di piombo, because of the
‘procedimenti penali ancora aperti’ and of the forty-year exclusion law that prevents
official acts from being deposited in the Archivio di Stato, but also because of ‘il
mancato utilizzo da parte degli storici di tutti quei documenti’ which are in fact
‘disponibili e oggi raccolti e sistematizzati in appositi archivi’.38 The emergence of an
array of discourses, narrative hypotheses and interpretations, in film and literature,
has created the sense that history, above all in the Italian case, could and should also
be written and interpreted outside the courtrooms or historical archives.
The work of Marco Tullio Giordana, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Marco Paolini,
Carlo Lucarelli, and others are all cases in point. Such work attempts to provide
a fictionalized account of events even where clues and evidence are sporadic, or
in those cases where evidence has apparently been misinterpreted or politically
manipulated. In a process which may appear paradoxical, fiction has become
the pre-eminent means to account for these missing pieces of our recent history
and to keep the memory of certain events alive among non-experts. Fiction, and
artistic representation more broadly, persistently supplement history, and function
as an instrument that in the tradition of Manzoni or Sciascia may contribute to
challenging the verosimile of official history, to uncovering the vero of reality, to
constructing a collective experience of justice.
 Introduction 11

To end this introduction on a polemical note, we might invoke Caviglia and

Cecchini’s idea that fictional and memorial texts may offer a form of supplementary
justice through the provision of instances of reciprocal discourse (between victim/
community and terrorist/prisoner) that may in turn serve as a model for how the
trauma and violence of the anni di piombo might finally be overcome.39 They use
the metaphor of a commission for truth and reconciliation, such as that seen in
recent years in South Africa, Argentina and Chile, to characterize the aspirations
if not the achievement of such texts, which present a ‘dialogic’ model against the
‘the condition of split memory and monologism that aff licts public discourse’.40 The
metaphor bears enquiry, not least because the Italian political system itself (or at least
some of its significant actors) has recognized the potential of such a commission,
even if a forum of this nature has never been established in Italy.41 The goal of a
truth and reconciliation commission is to establish a sharable and national memory
of a period of violence and the gross infringement of human rights, in order to
limit the damage caused to society and nation in the present and future. A further
goal is to establish the space for a renewed national identity by recognizing the
suffering of victims, and by recording misdeeds or atrocities without indulging in
revenge upon their perpetrators, who can be allowed amnesty from prosecution in
return for their ‘truth-telling’. In the absence of a truth commission dealing with
the period of the anni di piombo, have the representational media been performing an
analogous function? And the many films and novels on the period, the abundance
of autobiographies, memoirs and interviews by former terrorists, or the fewer
volumes written by victims: have these brought Italian society any closer to a sense
of justice achieved and to the sense of having established a sharable national memory
of a traumatic period?

Notes to the Introduction

1. The phrase anni di piombo derives from the Italian title given to a German film, Margarethe
von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit — literally ‘the leaden time’ — which received the top prize
at the Venice film festival in 1981. The phrase is problematic in that the transition from the
German adjective ‘bleierne’, intended to connote the ‘leaden’ weight of history, to the Italian
noun ‘piombo’, with its clear metaphorical allusion to bullets, implicitly excludes the bombings
characteristic of right-wing terrorism. This effect has been further exaggerated when the
phrase is rendered in English. In Paul Ginsborg’s History of Contemporary Italy, it becomes, in a
chapter sub-heading, not ‘years of lead’, but, precisely, the ‘years of the bullet’, and all potential
ambiguity about the figurative character of the ‘lead’ is lost. P. Ginsborg, History of Contemporary
Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 1993), p. 379.
2. A. Cento Bull and A. Giorgio, ‘Introduction’, Speaking Out and Silencing: Society and Politics in
Italy in 1970s, ed. by A. Cento Bull and A. Giorgio (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), p. ix.
3. C. Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
pp. 67–68.
4. After a quarter of a century, there are still those who employ the interpretative categories and
rhetoric typical of the anni di piombo. Representatives of the extreme left have used expressions
such as ‘resistance’ or ‘strategia della tensione’ to define events and features of the Iraqi war,
something which, in geo-political and historical terms, is very remote (to say the least) from
the Italian case. A similarly problematic magpie rhetoric was recently used by a former socialist
member of the Italian parliament and minister, Claudio Martelli, in a TV programme on
the assassination of journalist Walter Tobagi, when Martelli spoke of left-wing terrorism as a
‘communist jihad’.
12 Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

5. See Anna Cento Bull’s chapter in this volume. For a critique of the use of the term ‘civil
war’ to describe Italian terrorism and the conf lict with the state, see Guido Panvini ‘Il “senso
perduto”: Il cinema come fonte storica per lo studio del terrorismo italiano’, in Schermi di piombo:
il terrorismo nel cinema italiano, ed. by C. Uva (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2007), pp. 98–113
(pp. 103–04).
6. See, for example, Cento Bull and Giorgio, eds, Speaking Out and Silencing; Assassinations and
Murder in Modern Italy, ed. by S. Gundle and L. Rinaldi (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007); Uva, ed., Schermi di piombo; A. O’Leary, Tragedia all’italiana: cinema e terrorismo tra Moro e
Memoria (Tissi: Angelica, 2007); Terrorism Italian Style: The Representation of Terrorism and Political
Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema, ed. by R. Glynn, G. Lombardi and A. O’Leary (London:
IGRS Books, forthcoming).
7. For an inf luential discussion of the problems of defining terrorism, see A. P. Schmid and A. J.
Jungman, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories and
Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988). Terrorism, however we define it,
has a proud history in Italy: it has been employed in the service of the state as well as against
it, and has been the expression of a variety of aspirations, moderate as well as extremist. It is
not controversial to describe as state terrorism the repressive tactics, extending to political
assassination, practised by the fascist regime. Less commonly referred to as such are the coercive
and repressive methods employed by the liberal state that preceded fascism, which established
an authoritarian attitude in Italian political culture that has among its heirs the would-be
practitioners of coups d’état and the state facilitators of the right-wing terrorism of the 1960s and
1970s. Likewise, unified Italy has always had its internal opponents, and many have had recourse
to methods we could describe as terrorist: pro-Bourbon brigandry in the South; anarchist
bombings, assassinations (including that of King Umberto I in 1900) and several attempted
insurrections from the 1870s until well into the twentieth century. The strategy of provoking
vicious backlash, in the hope of fomenting popular insurrection, employed by urban anti-fascist
resistance groups in World War II, can also be described as essentially terroristic: it anticipates
the approach of the BR three decades later, the aim of which was to reveal the ‘hidden fascism’
of Christian Democracy by inducing it to reveal its brutally repressive face. Terrorism in Italy
has also had a nationalist or regionalist character: post-war Italy saw independence movements
in Sicily and Sardinia, and from the latter half of the 1950s, groups in the South Tyrol carried
out attacks in the attempt to secure a regional autonomy ultimately granted in 1969. Finally, we
should bear in mind that some of the actions of the Mafia and other organized criminal groups
can be defined as terrorist.
8. L. Sciascia, L’affaire Moro, in Opere 1971–1983, ed. by C. Ambroise (Milan: Bompiani, 2001), pp.
463–599 (p. 595).
9. See L’orda d’oro, 1968–1977, ed. by N. Balestrini and P. Moroni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997); The Art
of Persuasion: Political Communication in Italy from 1945 to the 1990s, ed. by L. Cheles and L. Sponza
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
10. S. Zavoli, La notte della Repubblica (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), p. 218.
11. Umberto Eco, quoting Georg Simmel, claimed that ‘il segreto conferisce a chi lo possiede una
posizione d’eccezione e opera come una forma d’attrazione determinata da pure ragioni sociali’
(I limiti dell’interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), p. 50). On the rise and ideology of right-
wing terrorism, see N. Rao, La fiamma e la celtica (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2006).
12. M. Moretti, C. Mosca and R. Rossanda, Brigate Rosse: una storia italiana (Milan: Baldini and
Castoldi, 2000), p. 46.
13. B. Allen, ‘They’re Not Children Anymore: The Novelization of “Italians” and “Terrorism” ’, in
Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, ed. by B. Allen & M. Russo (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 52–80 (p. 54).
14. J. McGann, ‘Theory of Texts’, New York Review of Books, 18 February 1988, pp. 20–21 (p. 21).
15. Jerome McGann quoted in Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism, ed. by C. Murray, 2 vols
(London: Salem Press, 1999), ii, 741.
16. R. Erica Wagner-Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1986); V. Turner, ‘Social Dramas and Stories about Them’, Critical Inquiry, 7
(1980), 141–68 (p. 145).
 Introduction 13

17. Wagner-Pacifici, Moro Morality Play, p. 10. Wagner-Pacifici understands social dramas as
follows: ‘as revelatory of the ongoing but normally indistinct social structures and relations’; ‘as
functional (attempted) remedies for societies in crisis’; ‘as self-ref lective moments for societies in
crisis’; ‘as potentially “liminal” moments of social transformation’ (p. 9).
18. Ibid., p. 7.
19. J. Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, ed. by K. Fleming (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), p. 45; M.
Clark, Modern Italy, 1871–1995, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1996), p. 387.
20. R. De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism, trans. by Brenda Huff Everett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1977), p. 160.
21. Gundle and Rinaldi, eds, Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy, p. 3.
22. M. Pirani, ‘Il film su Moro e la retorica della trattativa’, La Repubblica, 12 September 2003, p. 1.
23. R. Rossanda, ‘Sequestro e uccisione di Aldo Moro’, in I luoghi della memoria. Vol. i: Strutture ed
eventi dell’Italia Unita, ed. by Mario Isnenghi (Bari: Laterza, 1997), pp. 493–513 (p. 508).
24. See P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
25. The literature on the Moro case is vast and still growing; to name but a few recent texts: G.
Bianconi, Eseguendo la sentenza. Roma, 1978: dietro le quinte del sequestro Moro (Turin: Einaudi,
2007); A. Colombo, Un affare di stato: il delitto Moro e la fine della Prima Repubblica (Milan: Cairo,
2008); G. De Lutis, Il golpe di via Fani: protezioni occulte e connivenze internazionali dietro il delitto
Moro (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2007); C. Belci and G. Bodrato, 1978: Moro, la DC, il terrorismo
(Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006); G. Fasanella and G. Rocca, Il misterioso intermediario: Igor Markevic
e il caso Moro (Turin: Einaudi, 2003); A. Giovagnoli, Il caso Moro (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005); F.
Imposimato and S. Provvisionato, Doveva morire (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2007); Agnese Moro,
Un uomo così (Milan: Rizzoli, 2003); V. Satta, Il caso Moro e i falsi misteri (Soveria Mannelli:
Rubettino, 2006); M. Clementi, La pazzia di Moro (Milan: Rizzoli, 2008). In terms of cultural
representation, one might mention the films Il caso Moro (G. Ferrara, 1986), Piazza delle cinque
lune (R. Martinelli, 2003), Buongiorno, notte (M. Bellocchio, 2003); pieces for the theatre by M.
Baliani (Corpo di stato vive, 1998), M. F. Moro and A. M. Di Fresco (L’ira del sole: un 9 di maggio
(1998)), C. Augias and V. Polchi (Aldo Moro: una tragedia italiana (2007)); the novel by E. Spinato,
Amici e nemici (Rome: Fazi, 2004); the graphic novel by P. Parisi, Il sequestro Moro: storie dagli anni
di piombo (Levada di Ponte di Piave: BeccoGiallo, 2006).
26. Panvini, ‘Il senso perduto’, pp. 104–06.
27. R. F. Farnen, ‘Terrorism and the Mass Media: A Systemic Analysis of a Symbiotic Process’,
Terrorism, 13: 2 (1990), 99–143 (p. 123).
28. For more on the uncertain place that Bologna holds in the national memory, see A. L. Tota, ‘A
Persistent Past: The Bologna Massacre, 1980–2000’, in Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860, ed. by
J. Dickie, J. Foot, and F. M. Snowden (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 281–300; La
città ferita: memoria e comunicazione pubblica della strage di Bologna, 2 agosto 1980 (Bologna: Il Mulino,
2003).
29. See M. Belpoliti, La foto di Moro (Rome: Nottetempo, 2008).
30. R. Catanzaro, ‘Subjective Experience and Objective Reality: An Account in the Words of its
Protagonists’, in The Brigate Rosse and Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy, ed. by R. Catanzaro (London:
Pinter, 1991), pp. 174–203 (p. 175).
31. J. Burns, ‘A Leaden Silence? Writer’s Responses to the anni di piombo’, in Cento Bull and
Giorgio, eds, Speaking Out and Silencing, pp. 81–94; Giovagnoli, Il caso Moro, pp. 103–10.
32. ‘By processes of gradual demonization and delegitimation [...] the novel during the “years of
lead” comes to represent [the terrorists] as abnormal, deviant, a disease invading the body politic
rather than members of it. By insistent implication, in fact, the novel genre [...] eventually
hints that the perpetrators are not even Italian’ (Allen, ‘They’re Not Children Anymore’, p.
64). Conversely, as Robert Lumley suggests, it is ‘interesting to note that in Italy in the late
1970s and early eighties many analyses of the development of red terrorism have looked at the
individuals involved without automatically pathologizing them. The terrorists are shown to
be not ‘monsters’ but, for the most part, rational human beings who made a political choice;
a choice, moreover, which made sense (that is, was comprehensible) to peers in the social
movements’ (States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso,
1990), p. 291). There is an important contrastive study to be done on the differences between
14 Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary

the version of terrorism and terrorists given in the novels discussed by Allen, representations in
the contemporary mass media, and in studies like those referred to by Lumley, for example G.
Bocca, Noi terroristi: dodici anni di lotta armata ricostruiti e discussi con i protagonisti (Milan: Garzanti,
1985).
33. ‘The ethnographic literature on warfare in tribal societies suggests that violent confrontations
usually take place in close circles: that is, within the limits of the tribe, between neighbours,
friends or relatives — in short, between people who share many social and cultural features’ (A.
Blok, ‘Collective Violence and the Narcissism of Minor Differences’, in Politiek geweld: etnisch
conflict, oorlog en genocide in de twintigste eeuw, ed. by T. Zwaan and M. de Keizer (Zutphen:
Walburg Pers, 2005)).
34. Moretti, Mosca and Rossanda, Brigate Rosse, p. 67.
35. Catanzaro, ‘Subjective Experience and Objective Reality’, pp. 180–83.
36. M. Baliani, Corpo di stato: il delitto Moro (Milan: Rizzoli, 2003), p. 28.
37. C. Ginzburg, Il giudice e lo storico: considerazioni in margine al processo Sofri (Turin: Einaudi, 1991),
p. 13.
38. Panvini, ‘Il senso perduto’, p. 105.
39. F. Caviglia and L. Cecchini, ‘A Quest for Dialogism: Looking Back at Italian Political Violence
in the ‘70s’, in Constructing History, Society and Politics in Discourse: Multimodal Approaches, ed. by
T. Vestergaard (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2009), pp. 127–49; L. Cecchini, ‘Rappre­
sentazioni degli anni di piombo’, in Atti del VII Congresso degli Italianisti Scandinavi, Mémoires
de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki. Vol. lxviii, ed. by E. Garavelli and E. Suomela-Härmä
(Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 2005), pp. 299–310. The texts they consider are (in ‘A
Quest for Dialogism’) La seconda volta (Mimmo Calopresti, 1996) and the transcripts of Sergio
Zavoli’s interview with Silveria Russo in La notte della repubblica, in Zavoli, pp. 373–85; and
(in ‘Rappresentazioni degli anni di piombo’) La seconda volta, La meglio gioventù (Marco Tullio
Giordana, 2003) and Buongiorno notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2003).
40. Caviglia and Cecchini, ‘A Quest for Dialogism’.
41. The ‘Commissione Parlamentare d’inchiesta sul terrorismo in Italia e sulle cause della mancata
individuazione dei responsabili delle stragi’ (or Commissione stragi) cannot be described as a
truth commission for various reasons. Indeed, the document submitted to the final sitting of the
commission by one of its members, Alfredo Mantica, an Alleanza Nazionale senator, with the
support of the commission’s president, senator Giovanni Pellegrino, suggests a candid awareness
that the Commissione stragi had not performed a unifying function; the document was entitled:
‘Il problema di definire una memoria storica condivisa della lunga marcia verso la democrazia
nell’Italia post-bellica: Un contributo dall’esperienza della Commissione per la verità e la
riconciliazione in Sudafrica’. The Commissione stragi was initially set up in 1988 and intended
to complete its investigations within eighteen months. It was reconstituted several times, given
a major overhaul of personnel in 1996, and eventually worked until March 2001 (see <http://
www.parlamento.it/bicam/terror/n.i/nota.htm> [accessed 5 June 2007]). Though a cross-party
forum, the number of subgroup publications and internecine polemics demonstrate that it served
partisan purposes. For an anecdotal account, see T. Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy: Travels Through
Time and Space Across Italy (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), pp. 29–32. Even had this not been
the case, the fact that action could not be taken on the basis of its conclusions distinguish it
from genuine truth commissions and the authoritative status they hold. The official website of
the commission is at <http://www.parlamento.it/bicam/terror/home.htm> [accessed 5 June
2007]. Giovanni Pellegrino has written more recently of the impossibility of reconciliation in
Italy following what he describes as the ‘guerra civile a bassa intensità’: ‘Una riconciliazione,
cui pure avevo pensato, non è purtroppo possibile, perché l’Italia continua ad essere un Paese
diviso nel bipolarismo manicheo, che caratterizza la cosidetta seconda Repubblica’; in M.
Caparra and G. Semprini, Destra estrema e criminale (Rome: Newton Compton, 2007), p. 7. See
also G. Fasanella, G. Pellegrino and C. Sestieri, Segreto di Stato: verità e riconciliazione sugli anni di
piombo (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2008), and A. Cento Bull, Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of
Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation (New York: Berghahn, 2008). On the question of the
desirability of a commission for truth and reconciliation, note the dissenting view of the highly
respected investigative magistrate Armando Spataro: ‘l’ipotesi di una commisione di variegata
 Introduction 15

estrazione che indaghi sul passato offrendo in cambio impunità non ha senso. L’Italia, grazie
alla reazione compatta delle istituzioni, delle forze politiche, dei cittadini e grazie alle possibilità
già offerte a chi intendeva dissociarsi [Spataro has in mind the reduced sentences for those who
turned state’s witness], ha di fatto chiuso quella pagina. Offrire altre platee a coloro che uccisero
alimenterebbe solo il fenomeno ormai insopportabile degli ex terroristi assurti al ruolo di
maître à penser’ (‘Niente commissioni: non ci sono misteri irrisolti’, Corriere della sera, 10 May
2008, p. 5).
 CHAPTER 1
v

Killing the Father:

Politics and Intellectuals,
Utopia and Disillusion
Antonio Tricomi

In Italy, the film Buongiorno, notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2003) was much criticized
because its depiction of Aldo Moro as a benevolent father figure was felt to be
ridiculous. Yet, as Marco Bellocchio himself has pointed out, Moro is described
as a ‘great patriarch’ in the book from which the film is taken, Il prigioniero (2003),
Anna Laura Braghetti’s memoir of her time as the ex-Prime Minister’s jailer.1
Indeed, if one examines other books by former members of the Brigate Rosse (BR),
it becomes apparent that almost every author lingers over the description of their
relationship with this paternal figure, often set up as a symbol of the nation and
the bourgeois authority which they rejected. To put it another way, it is apparent
that these former militants perceived, if only implicitly, their period of political
militancy as resulting from an Oedipal conf lict, a revolt against the society they
had inherited from their fathers.2
From one point of view, then, Bellocchio is merely using Buongiorno, notte
to stake his claim to a possible interpretation of Moro’s death and of the whole
armed struggle, one which had been suggested to him by the perpetrators of that
struggle. However taking another, perhaps more nuanced, point of view, which
departs from the idea that the history of the BR should be seen as part of the wider
history of the Italian left, one could suggest that Bellocchio was aiming to do
somewhat more than that. The experiences of the BR are part of the wider story
of the generations of utopian thinkers and militants who, in the 1960s and 1970s,
attacked the established left, represented by the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI)
and the trade unions, from the left. It is this story which can be read in terms of the
desire to commit parricide. The death of the statesman of the Democrazia Cristiana
(DC) would then become the moment at which the dream of social renewal was
shattered. With hindsight, such a dream may well seem to have been more than just
of setting up a communist society, though it was certainly that; however, the attacks
were probably rooted more in the rejection of any established idea of authority —
moral, political or social — and indeed of the very concept of authority, which was
felt to be a crutch for the bourgeois order. The BR clearly had no well thought-out
political strategy, but saw society as riven by profound economic and social ills; they
 Politics and Intellectuals 17

therefore tried to force matters to a head, hoping for a result the details of which
they themselves were unclear of. Equally, the ‘unarmed Left’, despite appearing in
1968 to have coherent proposals for communist reforms, had over time lost sight
of the possibility of holding a political line. As the events of 1977 demonstrated,
the protests of the movimento eventually took the form of the exaltation of a variety
of liberties of expression and behaviour; however, the attainment of these was not
yoked to a defined or coherently articulated vision of society.3

Fathers and sons

The PCI was thus the first ‘father’ that the utopians and militants wished to
dispatch, accusing the party of failing to transform the Resistance movement into
a revolution. Indeed, the myths of the Resistance, and of its betrayal, had become
clichés of Italian political discourse of the 1950s and 1960s.4 On the one hand, the
PCI continued to claim a central role in the partisan struggle, often depicted as an
essentially ‘red’ struggle; the party also claimed credit for having insisted that the
post-war Italian constitution make explicit reference to the values of the Resistance
and that these be made the cornerstone of the new Republic. The PCI therefore
rejected any charge of having betrayed the Resistance, whose spirit, it argued, was
well safeguarded by the existence of a democratic state. On the other hand, many
of those born between the two World Wars maintained a less straightforward
stance than that of the PCI. They might have participated in the Resistance or,
even if they been too young at the time, they might have borne witness to it; they
were, therefore, perfectly conscious that the period was responsible for the birth
of a new Italy, one which they now had a responsibility to cultivate. Instead of an
uncomplicated pride, however, this awareness led to an ambivalent perception of
the Resistance past and of the democratic present.
This stance is exemplified in several books by authors who highlight the need
to record the Resistance precisely because they judge it to have been the moment
in which they, as young people, chose to rebel, alongside many millions of their
contemporaries: fighting against the fascist Italy they had inherited from their
parents, and fighting for a better society that many hoped would take a communist
form. It is the particular political and emotional schooling received during the
partisan struggle which is evoked by writers such as Italo Calvino and Luigi
Meneghello, the former in his novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947), and also in
certain of the stories published in Ultimo viene il corvo (1948), and the latter in Piccoli
maestri (1964). Another author, Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was not himself a partisan,
directs an explicit and sometimes violent polemic against the Italian state and the
PCI, whom he accuses of having squandered the political and moral legacy of
the Resistance. As early as the 1940s, Pasolini and a group of friends made plans
(never realized) for a magazine to be entitled Eredi. The title was chosen because
those involved in the project felt that their generation had a responsibility to keep
renewing the traditions of humanism and to rebuild Italy on new foundations after
fascism had brought the country to ruin.5 However, if one looks at Pasolini’s poetry
— at the collection Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957), for example, especially a poem such
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
the lough, and that the old priviledges in the former charters before
164-1 be obi:i;uetl ; that is, the election of warden and the mayor to
be vice-admiral within the precincts of the port, and he and the
recorder to be justices tliroughout the province. " This mayor (the
only Catholic that filicd the office scizetl, of the castles of Castle-
Hackctt and Cahircsincc 1C54) was the firit proprietor m his name, of
the Morris; but that Mc. Haikelt, the chief of his name, ancient e»!
'.to of Castle-Hackett, «Iiich ori'^ir.allylicloiijjcd and others of th^j
sefjt of the Hacketts, claun the aforeto th'.' iiHckett fmriily. — Vide
page 16, ii
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220 HISTORY OF GALWAY. Mayors. 1688. Dominick

Browne. 1689. The same. 1C90. Arthur French." Sheriffs. Francis
Blake Fitz-Andrew. Domk. Bodkin Fitz- Patrick. Same. "WiHiam Clear.
Oliver French. By-laws. 1688.* On the petition of Joseph Fl in,
master of the joyners, masons, shipp-wrights, plasterers, turners,
slaters, sawyers, upholsterers, miliars and millwn'njhts, a new
charter was frranted to those different Ejuilds, and a similar one
soon after to the company of tallow-chandlers, soapboilei-s and
smiths. It was afterwards ordered, that all the natives, and others,
who were entitled to their freedom, might, at any time, attend
before the mayor, and be sworn without fees. 1690. The clerk of the
privy council having, by letter of the 15th April, signified that his
majesty (James II.) required the mayor of Galway to call a common
council, and agree upon such rates of provisions as they should
judge reasonable between buyer and seller, the following were
accordingly ordered, viz. — Iron to be sold to the retailer at 18s. the
cwt. and by him for 22s. — salt at I5s. the barrel, according to the
usual measure of the town, and to be retailed at I7s. 6d. being IJ-rf.
for each quart of heapctl measure — Flemish hops to be retailed at
2s. per lb. — stall-fed beef, the best not to exceed 2d. for the choice
pieces, and i^r/. by the quarterordinary beef not to exceed Id. per
lb. — mutton id. — veal and pork I i^/.— bacon 'jil. — cheese 'J}jd.
— fresh butter id. — the best salt butter 3d. — soap 'id. — candles
iSd. — French wine to be sold to the retailer at jflO the tun, and the
retailer to sell it at 12(/. the quart — brandy to be sold to the retailer
at £50 the tun, the retailer to sell it at 15(/. the quart — the best
beer and ale to be sold at 2d. the quart — and small beer at ^d. —
Lib. C. i* " Colonel Alexander M'Donnell was mnyor until tlie Sth of
December, when lie was rcPioveJ by order of government, iind tlic
above appointed. ° In the sunniier of IGss, a vast swarm of insects,
of tlie Scnrnbcus or beelle kind, appeared on the S. W. coast of
Galway, not far from the town : they were brongh.t by a S. W. wir.il,
and proceeded towards Headford, where, and in the adjacent
country, they lay by thousands among the trees and hedges,
hanging to the boughs in clusters, and sticking to the backs of one
another, like bees when they swarm. In this manner they contiinicd
quiet during the heat of tlve day ; but towards evening they
simultaneously took wing, with a strange noise, resembling the
distant beating of drums, and in such vast and incredible numbers,
as to darken the air for many miles round. In a short time they
devoured ail the leaves of the trees; and the country, though it was
then the niiildle of sunnncr, was left as naked as if it had l)ecn the
depth of winter. The grinding of the leaves in the mouths of this vast
multitude made a sound similar to the sawing of timber. They
destroyed all the pardons round the country, and particularly Mr.
Martin's btautil'ul plantations at Dangan ; entered the houses, and,
crawling about, fell into the food of the peojile ; iind wherever they
happened to strike, they left a slight mark behind. Their spawn they
deposited near th» surface of the ground, where it did considerable
damage, by devouring the roots of the corn and grass. These
formidable invaders weic, however, easily killed : smoke was their
greatest enemy, and one wet da^ destroyed great heaps of them.
They proved good food for the swine and poultrj', and, according to
some, were also used by the poorer sort of people. From the time of
their first ajjpearanee they continued to proceed progressively with
the westerly wind, and in IGDC they reached the Shannon ; but they
were gradually destroyed. The year before, about forty or fifty liorsc-
loads were found lying dead along the shores of the bay for miles
westward of Galway. It was supposed that this new colony, coming
from their native lands, Normandy or Britanny, in France, met with a
coEitrary wind, which having blown them into the sea, they were
drowned, and their bodies cast ashore. Since that time, however,
nothing of the same kind has appeared. — See lionle and Molincux's
Xal. History of Jrcland. " These prices are higher than might have
been expected at so distant a period ; but they were considerably
enhanced by the circumstances of the times and the situatiou of tlie
town, which was at the tunc in daily expectntiou of being besieged.
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.13%
accurate

HISTORY OF GALWAY. 221 Sheriffs. John Gibbs. Richard

"Wall. Same. Same. Thomas Coneys. Francis Knapp. James Ribett
Vigic. Francis Knapp. James Ribett Vigie. Marcus Lynch. Jarvis Hinde.
Marcus Lynch. Thomas Poole. Jarvis Hinde. Thomas Poole. Samuel
Simeockes. Robert Blakeney. Samuel Simeockes. Robert Blakeney.
John Broughton. John Feuquire. John Broughton. By-laws. 1696.
That no person but a freeman keep open shop in Galway or the
liberties thereof, or sell or expose to sale any wares therein, except
on market clays, and paying quarterly."^ 1701. That the two last
mayors do pay =£50 each (out of the arrears due to them) towards
building the Exchange or the Tiiolsel, and that the present mayor
shall have j£200 salary, allowing £oQ for tlie same purpose. In IVO-t
it was ordered, that no mayor should have more than jfloO, (in no7
it was reduced to £).00,) until the Tholsel should be built, and that
the number of aldermen should not exceed twenty-six. 1702. For the
services of lieutenant-colonel Nicholson in fortifying Mutton Island, "
which will encourage shipping to resort to this port," he was
provided with lodgings at the expense of the corporation. 1C91.
Mayors. Sir Henry Bellasyse, bart 1692. 1693. 1G94. Thomas Revett.
The same. Thomas Simeockes. 1695. The same. 1696. Thomas
Cartwright. 1697. John Gerry. 1698. The same. 1699. Thomas
Andrews. ■* 1700. Richard Browne. 1701. Thomas Staunton. 1702.
The same. ' This mayor bestowed an ornamental case to preserve
the king's swonl in St. Nicholas's church. ' This oppressive by-law
was entirely directed against the Roman Catholic inhabitants, none
of whom were then Irce. They petitioned the lords justices and
council against it, but without eft'ect; it continued, therefore, rigidly
in force for many jears after, and was one of the principal causes of
the decay of the town. The) car 1701 was rendered memorable for
the great slioals of herrings which v/ere taken ic the bay, although
only seventy fishing-boats were employed during the season. On the
night of the ISth of September they amounted to 1000 barrels,
which were sold for is.Gd. and, at the end of that and the following
year, for 8(/. a thousand. Codd was also taken in snch quantities,
thongh at an unusual season, that the best was sold for a penny,
and, in 1705, for a halfpenny a piece. At the same time, prime
mutton .sold in the tow n from four pence to six pence a quarter,
and ordinary small mutton for thrtw pence, and [fm.—Aniiuk.
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222 HISTOnY OF GALWAY. Mayors. 1703. James Ribett

Vigie, 1701.. John Eyre. ' 1705. The same. 170c. The same. 1707.
Kichard Wall. 170s, John Gibbs. 170fJ. Jarvis Hinde. 1710. Edward
Eyre. 1711. Tlie same. 1712. The same. " 1713. Robert Blakcney.
1711'. The same. 1715. The same. I71G. Robert Coatcs. 17 17. The
same. 171 8. jVIark Wall. Sheriflfs. John Fenqiiire. George Gerry.
"William Hinde. George Gerry. Marc'us Wall. William Fisher. Same.
William Fisher. Henry Lardner. ' Edward Barrett. Henry Lardnei".
George Staunton. Charles Gerry. Robert Mason. David Tenant.
Robert Coates. Edward Rhodes. Charles Morgan. William Moore.
James Lynch Fitz-Marcus. Thomas Smith. Same. Sanmel Blood.
Thomas Hendron. John Gibbs. Thomas Hendron. Richard
Hutchinson. Geflrey Cooke. John Marmion. John Grindleton. By-laws.
170.5. Tliat all the popish sliop-kecpcrs do appear before council,
and shew cause why tliey should not pay quartcridgc. 17IS. Tlie
several persons who, in Xovember and December common council,
having been so elected manifestly vitli a t last, were elected
members of the esign to evade the statute which 'This mayor
bestowed £200 of his salary towai'ds eouncil, alderman Edward Eyre
(whose father, in 1670, liuildin^' tlie Exchange. obtained a lease of
part of said ground, with several ' Alderman Edward Eyre objected to
this sheriff for other parcels,) declared that he would agree to grant
a having; a popish wife. piece of ground, coiitaining about thirty
jierches, for that " May 12th. — Thcneccssity and advantage, to the
town purpose; in consi(ieration of which, the corporation, and
corporation, of having a spacious entrance open and (himself being
n)a}or,) on the 19th of May (bllowinp, imbuilt licfore Vv'illiam's-gate,
leading to the east suburbs extended the term of his lease to lives
renewable for and to Boher-niore, having been this day presented in
ever. — Curjioration Book.
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HISTORY OF GALWAY. 223 Mayors. 1719. Samuel

Simcockes. 1720. The same. 1721. William Ilinde. 1722. The same.
1723. The same. 1724-. George Gerry. 172.5. George Staunton.
1726. Charles Gerry. 1727. Charles Revett. 1728. Richard Revett.
1729. John Gibbs. Sheriffs. Robert Andrews. John Hautenville.
Francis Wheeler. Tliomas Holhuid. Edward Rhodes. Howell Price.
John iVIarmion. James Ribett. Jolm Marmion. John Cox. Richard
Hutchinson. Francis Wheeler. Charles Rivett. Erasmus Irvin. Robert
French. Robert M'Mullin. John O'Hara. Robert Cooke. Henry Morgan.
Francis Simcockes. Patrick Bkike. Andrew Hohnes. By-laws. on the
25th of said month of Dec. was to be in force, and in order to
perpetuate the government of this corporation in several gentlemen,
and others, in the county of Gahvay, and elsewhere, who have no
interest or concern in the town, or pay any scot, lot, or other
contribution therein, by means whereof the Protestant inhabitants
are greatly discouraged, and that part of the statute, whereby
Protestants are encouraged to come and dwell in the town, will bo
frustrated, if not prevented ; ordered, June 30th, that these persons
be no longer members of the common coimcil. ' The foUowinj;
document will shew the estimation of the Simcockes lamiK' in
Galwaj' since the revolution : — "We, the mayor, recorder, clerjiy,
and the rest of the Protestant gentry of the town of Galway, do
certify that Mr. Richard Simcockes, of this town, mariner, is
descended from an ancient Protestant family of this jilace ; lluit,
soon after the late haii|iy revolution of Kini^ \Villiain 111. of
i^lorious memory, his ,i;randfather, alderman Thomas Simcockes,
was mayor of this town two \ ears successively, as was also his
father, alderman Samuel Simcockes, soon after the accession of his
late majesty. King George I. when, for their well-known loyalty and
warm attijction to his illustrious house in the preceding critical times,
both his grandfather luid faxlicr wa'c, at tile same time, appointed
justices of the peace for this town, in the first connnission that was
ever granted, pursuant to an act of parliament then made for
strengthening the Protestant interest therein, and were honored with
conmiauds in the militia in every array since that happy acra ; in
which stations tlicy aci|uittcd themselves with integrity and credit,
agreeable to the true Protestant princi[)les, which they always
professed, ami which arc still retained by their descendants now
living liere, as we vei'ily believe they are by the said Richard, w ho is
married to tfce daughter of an old Protestant, and, during his abode
here, made constant jirofcssion of them. Given under our liunds this
25lh of February, 1752." Ori-. MS. siiiuid.
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221 HISTORY OF GAL WAY. Mayors. Sheriffs. 1730." John

Staunton. Rickard Fitz-Patrick. Nehemiah JNIorgan. 1731. Walter
Taylor. George Staunton. Henry Ellis. 1732. Charles Morgan. ■
Nicholas Staunton. Patrick Blake, junior 1733. GeofFry Cooke.
Richard Barrett. William Fairservice. 1734. John Bird. John
Simcockes, Hugh Wilkinson. 1735. Dominick Burke. Robert Cooke.
Anthony Taylor. 173(J. John Staunton. Henry Ellis. Patrick Blake,
jim'wr 1737. Dominick Burke. Robert M'Mullin. Thomas Northeast.
173s. Rickard Fitz-Patrick. Rickard Barrett. William Fairservice. 1739/
Henry Ellis. Henry Vauglian. Simon Truelock. 1710. Thomas Holland.
Aston Swanwick. Henry Lewin. 1711. Robert Cook. Croasdailc Shaw.
John Johnson. l7l-~'. .lohn Disney. (jeorge Simcockes. Jolm Hamlin.
By-laws. 1734. Tliiit the recorder, for tlic time being, quatenus
recorder, but no longer, shall sit and vote in the connnon council,
though not admitted a member thereof. — [repealed 21th July,
1772, LiO. I.) — Also ordered, that £'M be paid to alderman Ciiarles
Revctt, apotliecary, to furnish his shop with drugs, proper for
supplying the IVotcstants, or others. * On 10th June, 1730, a patent
for an additional iveekly Monday market, and four additional markets
on every I'oiir Fridays next before Cliristiiias day, together ^^■itll
three additional i'airs on 20th May, 10th September and loth October,
to be held on tlie square plot next the cast {;ate of the town, was
obtained by the corporation.— 4". Geo. II. 'J }i. — (It may here be
added, that the patent for a fair on the 2-lth August and the two
days following, to be held at Fair-hill, or at the abbey of St.
Dominick, near Galway, was obtained on the 1 9th June, 1615, by
Nicholas Darcy, esq. — 11° Ja. I. 2 p.) — In the same year, 1730,
Andrew Lynch and his son? were discharged from gateage, customs
and taxes, for seven years, for keeping the streets clean. "• During
the great frost in 1739, the rivtT was frozen from the bridge to the
mouth of Loiigh-Corrih, and continual rea'cations were held on the
ice. from die Wood-quay to Newcastle and TerrihiTi-bridge. This
memorable winter was followed by famine and pestilence, in which
multitudes of the poor perished; and, during the summer of 1741,
an epidemic fever raged so violently in the town, that the judges
adjourned the assizes to Tuani. — Annals. 1
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HISTORY OF GALWAY. 90.!^ Sheriffs. Michael Fairservice.

Tobias Sherwood. Charles Ilanihn. Tiiomas Sherwood. John Johnson.
John Siiaw. George Thomas. Francis Wadnian. Geori^'e Sliaw.
Edward Shiehis. Francis Hopkins. Henry Covey. Elias Tankerville.
John iMandeville. John Morgan. Jolin Lof'tus. Ixichard Mathews.
George Drury. Aston Swanwick. Jose])h Seymour. By- laws. 17'lw. On
20th February, ordered, that .£900 be granted to alderman Rickard
Fitzpatrick, Iiis heirs and assiigns, by mortgage of all the corporation
lands and revenues, to reimburse liini his expence for several yeais,
in assiduously supporting the rights, privileges and immunities of the
corporation. — Also, that no succeeding mayor be allowed any salary
whatever, but by the appointment of the majority of the common
council. 1752. Ordered, that the following address be presented to
his majesty, Geo. II. to congratulate him on liis safe return to his
British dominions : — " We, the mayor, &c. of tliis ancient and loyal
corporation, beg leave, with humble and joyful hearts, to
congratulate your ni:ijesty on your safe and happv return to your
British dominions, which we consiiier as the greatest bles.-ing to all
your subjects ; and beg leave to assure your majesty, that none of
them are more truly sensible of the happiness we enjt)y under your
majesty's mild and wise administration, or more aidently wish a long
continuance of it ; aiul we will lay hold of every occasion of testifying
the most unfeigned and zealous loj'ally ami aficction to your
maiesty's person and government. — Dated and given untler our
common-seal, at the Tholsel in Gahvay, the lith day of December,
1752." jMayors. 174'3. Thomas Shaw. 17Ik George Piirdon. 171..5.'
Jolni Mills. I71G. Croasdaile Sliaw 17-1.7. James O'Hara. I7-I8.
James Disney. " 17^9. Joliii Eyre. 1750. The Hon. Fras. Annesley. "
1751. James Staimton. 1752. John Hamlin. •The year IV-IJ was
remarkable for a great full of corn this year, whicli greatly rulicvcci
the country, snow, by wiiicli vast nmiibers of sliecp and black-cattle ''
This year a double return was made to the pri\'7 were destroyed.
The farmers surrendered their hokl- coimeil for mayor, aiid the}'
appro\ed of tlie above, who in"s, and the best lands in the province
were set was sworn, by his father, a justice of the peace for the for
5s. an acre. Many, who took long leases at tliis county. 7'he last
major held over until he was cUspossesscil period, were enriched in
tlie space of a few years, wheat by the military. havini soon after
risen from Gs. to 18,j. a cwt. John ' This mayor died in office, and
John Eyre was elected Freiicli, merchant, imported upwcrds of
3000/. worth of in his place. r r
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226 HISTORY OF GALWAY. Mayors. 17o3. Ambrose Poole.

1751.. George Simcockes. 1755. Jolm Shaw. 1756. Patrick Blake.
1757. Robert Cooke. 1758. Edward Shields. 1759. Croasdaile Shaw.
1760. Thomas French. 1761. Charles Revett. 1762. Charles Daly.
I7G3. Henry Ellis. 17Gk Colonel John Eyre.'' 1705. James Daly. 1766.
Henry White. 1767. John Gibson. 176S. = Thomas Taylor. 1769.
Denis Daly, of Dunsandle 1770. Anthony Daly. 1771. Patrick Blake. '
Sheriffs. John Mandcville. James Jones. John Johnson. Samuel
Shone. George Driiry. Hugh Wilkinson. Edward Murj)]iy. James
Galbraith. Same. Same. Richard Blake. Hugh INIontgomery. James
Foster. Henry Covey, James Galbraith. John INIandeville. Richard
Blake. Hngh Montgomery. Edward Mur})hy. James Galbraith. Elias
Tankerville. Charles Lopdell. Luke Dodgworth. Hugh Wilkinson.
George Lewis. Hugli Montgomery. Charles Daly. Edward Sliiclds.
Samuel Grace. Robert M'Miillin. Ednumd Fitz-Patrick. Richard Blake.
George Diury. Elias Tankerville. Thomas Chitterbuck. Luke Thomas. *
Tliis year thci-e wa'; n double return for mayor. The faiiiiidates were
RickardFitzpatrick, and Richard Martin, of Danean. Neither being
aiijirovcd of by the privy •.oiiniil, another election was directed, when
the above mayor \vr4S approved of, and accordingly sworn. " ITO's,
Tlinrsday, October -Ith. — Francis Lynch, of Rahoon, was ■^worn
one of the grand-jurors of the town, and v>as the fivsi i;unLL!n
Oathojic v.lio served as s-uch ' For soine years after this the town
was considcraMf agitated by corporate disputes Ijctwecn this mayor,
liii successor, and their respective friends. — {Sec p. 18S.^ In
Michaeliuas-terni, 1 772, application was made to lilt King's-bcnch
for liljerty to file an information apiiriii Denis Daly for usurping the
office of mayor thai year, but witliont efl'cct; judgment of ouster was,
however, ohtaiiinj by the sheriffs. The former officers, at the same
time, held over, ami retained the corporation seal, and were rcgularlj
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HISTORY OF GALV.'AY, 227 INIayors. 1772. Denis Daly.

1773. Cliarlcs French. I77'l'- Rev. Edmoncl French, 1775. Elias
Tankerville. ^ 1776. James Shee. 1777- Denis Daly. 177s. Peter Daly.
Bv-laws. Sheriffs. Thomas Bodkin. John Thomas. John Morgan.
Jlobert .Squibb. George '1 iiomas. Samuel Grace. Robert OTIara.
James Shee. Samuel Grace. James Biuke. Robert Squibb. "William
Burnett. John Morgan. Michael Kelly. Orilcrod, tlint the frccdoni of
this corporation be presented, in a gold box, to the rin-ht lioiiorable
W'altti- Biirgli, accoiDpaiiicd wiili the following address: — " We, the
mayor, &c. fuHv sensible of the gri'at ability and diligence manifested
liy you in a judicial character anionn-st u-;, :nul of llie virtue and
(irniiiess exerted in your legislative capacity, beg leave, as a small
mark of our gratitude, to ofler you the frc^ecloni of this ancient and
once flourishini town .1 ilistiiiction which your spirited endeavours
have so eminently contributed to recover. We iniist, at the same
time, in common with the rest of Ireland, Ian ent the prevalence of
those coiuicils which extorted a resignation from tiiat servant of the
crown, in wliom the people implicitly conMded, and whose wisdom
adopted the only remaining mode ot averting the ruin of this
countrv." ; elected for some years after, but not approved of by the
privy council ; and tliou^-b the town hud thus to bo:ist of so many
ninglstvatcs, it was, in fact, never less peaceable lliiin dnrinu' that
period. John Staunton, the recorder, died on the sd December, 1772.
James O'Hara, co;insillor, was elected and sworn in his place by tiie
approvctl partv, and Martin Kirwan, counsellor, by the other; and,
alti\ouj;h judgment of ouster was oljtained against the former for
usurpation, he still retained the office. No other charge took place
until the death of Clntterbuck, one of the adverse sheriffs, in 1774,
when his place was Hijiplicd bv Henry Covey, bnriiess. — Orig. MS. '
This year a petition was presenteil to the lord lieutenant and conned,
statin;;, that on the 1st of August, Patrick Blake, mayor, Martin
Kirwan, recorder, Henry Covev, esq. one of the sheriffs, and about
sixty of the comiiion council, assembled, between eleven and one
o'clock, at n convenient place within the town, and proceeded to the
election of corporate officers ; that petitioners, Saiiuiel Snncockes,
Martin Kirwan, Charles Revett, Charles Truelock, and John Haudin,
were elected and chosen mayor, recorder, shei'itT, and town-clerk,
and that their names had been, tlierenpon, presented to U;e privy
council : but tliat afterwards, on the same day, the reverend Edmond
French, who took upon himself to act as mayor, and Samuel Grace
and George Thonjas, as sheriff's, presided at a pretended assen)bly
of the conunon council, for the same purpose. That, petitioners and
many members of the common council there present, protested
against, and objected to, the legality of that assembly ; but,
notwithstanding, James O'liara, Thomas Bodkin, John Thomas, and
Denis Daly, with several other persons who usurped the offices of
common councilmen, insisted that said election should proceed, and,
accordingly, took upon themselves to elect the officers above iianied,
i\\\d present them to the ]irivy council for approbation, though not
in the name or under the common seal of the corporation. —
Petitioners, therefore, prayed to be heard by council, and that they
should be approx ed of, and the others disallowed. — Orig. jI/5, —
'J'liis petition, however, fell to tlie ground ; and the entire opposition
being attributed to the circumstance of originally admitting Patrick
Blake to be sworn mayor, none but members of the name and family
of Daly have been mayors of Gahvay since the year after this pe"
riod»
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22S HISTORY OF GALWAY. Mayors. 1779." Hyacinth Daly.

17S0. Denis Daly. 17SI. Hyacinth Daly. 17Se. Anthony Daly. 1783.
Denis Daly. 1784. Denis Bowes Daly. 1785. Denis Daly. I78C. Rev,
Ralph Dal}'. 1787. Denis Bowes Daly. 1788. Denis Daly. 1789. Peter
Daly. 1790. Denis Bowes Daly. 1791. 179'2. 1793. St. George Daly. '
Richard Daly. " Denis Bowes Daly. 179'i. Major Peter Daly. 1795.
Hyacinth Daly. 1796. St. George Daly. 1797. Hyacinth Daly. 1798.
Denis Bowes Daly. Sheriffs. James Burke. Samuel Grace. John
Bradley. Sanniol Grace. ]\lichael Kelly. Samuel Grace. Michael Kelly.
John Bradley. John Lynch. '\^"ilIiam Frazer. John Morgan. John
Bradley. Robert Squibb. John Bradley. John Morgan. Luke Thomas.
Michael Kelly. Charles Donnellan. William Frazer. Robert Squibb.
Michael Kelly. Edmund Fitzpatrick. John Bradley. Robert Squibb.
Same. Same. Thomas Browne. Charles Morgan. Peter Daly. Edmund
Fitzpatrick. John Bradley. Robert Squibb. Hyacinth Daly. Michael
Burke. Denis Bowes Daly. F'dmund Fitzpatrick. St. George Daly.
Hyacinth Daly. i" 1779, May olst, the Galwav volunteers were cnibo-
Alicli. Blako.csq. of Frcnclifort, capt. of tlieliglit infantrs. r'.icil, ai.U
the followhig offieci's elected : i\Ir. Jasper Lynch, adjutant. ){ic!i-.r,;
Martin, esq. of Dangan, colonel. ' Brother of tlic rinlit honorahle
Denis Daly, and .lan-.cs Shoe, esq. deputy mayor, lientcnant-colonel.
afterwards one of the judi:es of the King's-bench." John K'laI.e,
esr>. of Coolcun, major. ^ This major died in ofHcc, and Deiiis
Bowes Dah, .». O'l-Ii-.-a, esq. recorder, capt. of grenadier company,
esq. succeeded to the end of the year, •'•li.rk I.yi:cli. ts j. capt. of
the IxUti'.llion company.
 niSTORY OF GALWAY. 229 Mayors. 1799. Colonel Peter
Daly. 1800. Hyacinth Daly. ISOl. Colonel Peter Daly. ISO'2. Hyacinth
Daly. 1803. Denis Bowes Daly. 1801'. James Daly. 1805. Hyacinth
Daly. ISOG. Denis Bowes Daly. ISO7. 1808. 1809. ISIO. 1811. 1812.
The same. Hyacinth Daly. Denis Bowes Daly. James Daly. Hyacinth
Daly. Denis Bowes Daly. 1813. Hyacinth Daly. 1814. James Daly.
1815. Hyacinth Daly. I8IG. The same. I8I7. Parnell Gale. 1S18. I8I9.
James Daly. Tlie same. Sheriffs, Denis Bowes Daly. John Thomas.
Thomas Browne. John Thomas. Same. John Strogen. JNIichael
Dillon. Same. Same. Michael Dillon. Charles O'Hara. William Mason.
Charles O'Hara. Same. Same. Same. Same. Same. Thomas Browne.
Francis Eagar. Jethro Bricknell. Francis Eagar. Same. Same. Same.
Michael Dillon. Matthew T. Smyth. Same. Same. Cu Ed«-. III. 1361,
:M:iV 20, . 1375. 1396, INIay Nov. 10, Rich II. s, . , Jan. 26, . IJcii.
IV. 1105, Mm: 12, . EiUv. IV. ] 4-6-1-, Aug. 28, . Rich III. MSI, Dec.
15,' . lien. VIII 1515, July 3, . E(l-,v. VI. 15I-9, Nov. 6, . Elizo ).
157.^, July H-, . Jamc sl. 1610, Dl-c. IS, . riias II. iG-r>, Au-. M, .
.hu-AC -■ IL ]&'l, Ua:. 12, . . MLiiage Charter. T Of these . Charter of
Incorporation, >■ enrolments . Charter of Confirmation, J by
inspexin ARTERS GRANTED TO THE CORPORATION. Murage Charter.
— Tiof. Pat. 34 7?rfiu. ///. Tower of London. Charter of the Staple. —
Id. id Edw. III. Berniingham Tower. Murage Charter. ") Of these
three charters there no extant, but they are recited peximus in the
succeeding grants. i:ike.- Rot. Pat. 4 Edn: IV. Tower of London. New
Charter of Incorporation. No enrolment extant, but recited in the
subsequent cliarters. Former charters confirmed and new privileges
granted. — Itot. Mem, 36 Hen. VIII. Hem. -office. Clur.ter of
Confirmation. — Rot. Pat. 3 Ediv. VI. Rolls-office. New charter
granting various privileges. — Rot. Pat. 20 EUz. ih. Chai'ter
appointing first sheriffs, and erecting the town into a separate
county. — Rot, Put. 8 Jas. I. ib. New Charier of Incorporation Rot.
Pat. 22 Cha. II. ih. Like. (Inoperative since IGOl.) — Rol. Pat. 1 Jama
II. ih.
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230 IIISTOUV OF GALWAY. Recorders. The corporation was

first empowered by the charter of recorders. The lirst elected was
Dominick INIartin, in ]505. and sworn annually with the mayors and
sjierifis. 15V5. Dominick Martin. IGIO. Damian Peck. ' Dominick
iMartin. 1G2.5. Sirilcnry Lynch, bart.' 1630. Stephen Lynch. 1632.
Marcus IMartin. 1633. Stephen Lynch. 163G. Thomas Lynch
FitzMarcus. lOL-S. John Blake. 1G,54. Robert Clarke. 1655. Henry
Greneway. IG57. James Cuffc. 165[). Edward Eyre. 1GG3. Hcnrv
^^'Ilalev. IGGG. John Shadwell IG7O. William Sprigg. IGSG. Sir
Henry Lynch, bart. 16S7. Thomas Lynch EitzIsidore. I69L Nehcmiah
Donnellan. 1G91-. AViliiam Handcock. 16
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HISTORY OF GALWAY. - 231 J Parliamentary

IIephesextation of Galwav, and a List op the MembersH FOR the
Town since the Reign of Elizabeth. % :,{ The most ancient
sninmonses to the parliament of Ireland extant, are directed *■ to
tlic barons and members by name. In the year 1310, Richard de
Biirgo was I siimnioned for C'onnaught. — Rot. Clans, 3 FaItc. II. —
In subsequent records of f that and tlie succeeding reign, otiier
members of the same family were summoned ? J'or the "county of
Connaught." — Id. 4G and 4.-8 Ediv. III. — After tliis period, writs
were directed to tlie sheriffs of counties and magistrates of cities and
towns. It does not appear that Oalway returned any members to the
memorable Irish parliament convened at "Westminster in ISyO ; but,
on the ^'^d of January, the year following, the provost and bailiffs
were summoned to appear at a parliament to beheld at
Trisdeldermot, on Monday next after the feast of embers; and they
were afterwards lined z£\Oi) for not attending. — Rot. Clans. 1 Ric/i.
II. — Alike summons issued, dated 11th .Sej)tcml)er, 1380. — Id. dc
aim. 1. — another 29th April, 13S!:3, and one in 139 1. — Id. de
Ann. 5 and 18. — Similar summonses at the same time issued to the
provost and bailiffs of Athenry. In the great roll of the Pipe, 11 Hen.
VI. in Berm. Tower, the chief magistrate and constable of Galway
were fined lOOs. because, at the council of the lord the king, on
Friday next after the feast of St. Nicholas the bishop, in the 8th year
of the king's reign, they neither attended by themselves nor by
proxy, nor returned the king's writ to them at that time directed. The
same roll contains an entry of another fine of ^10 against them,
because they did not return the king's writ to the parliament lield at
Dublin, on Friday next after the feast of the Holy Trinity, in the 9th
year of the king; and in anotiier record {Rot. Fat. 28 Hen. FI.) the
sovereign and provost of the tov.'n are fined £i'0 for not returning
the king's writ to them, directed to the parliament, held at Drogheda
on Tuesday next after the feast of St. jNIark, 1 150. — Of the names
of the members comprising the several parliaments of Ireland before
the year loJ9 there is no account extant; but, from that period to the
present, the following is a correct list of the successive
representatives of the town of Gahvay: 15J9- Jonoke Lynce, of
Galwa}'. Peter Lynce, of same. [For llic parliamciU of 15C3 no IKt
extant.] 158J. Peter Lynche. Jonoke Lynche. Ptobuck French Fitz-
Jolm. 1G31. Sir Thos. Elakc, of Menlogh, hart. Nicholas Lynch, of
Galway, aid, 1G39. Sir Robert Lynch, of same, hart. Sir Valentine
Blake, of ISIenlogli, bart. [EsiicIIlhI '2Qd June, 1GI2, for tlie
ixbcllion.] 1G13. Valentine Blake, of Muckinis, aid. iGGl. Edward Eyre,
esq. Gcof.Lynch Fitz-Dom. of Galway. j John Eyre, of I'-yrccourt. ,._i
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232 IIISTOKY OF GALWAY. I6S9. Oliver Martin, esq. John

Kir wan, esq. [rarliamcm of James II.] 1692. Sir Henry Bellasyse, ]
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THE HISTORY OF PART III. THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

OF THE TOWN TO THE PRESENT TIME. Collegiate Church of St.
'Nicholas. * This ancient and venerable edifice, which, for extent and
architectural beauty, is inferior to very few ecclesiastical foundations
in the kingdom, stands a lasting testimonial of the piety, wealth and
jniblic spirit of its founders, the former ' The festival of St. Nicholas is
celebrated on tlic 6th of December. lie was a native of Wyi'a, an
archiepiscopal see, and the capital of Lycia, in Asia, of whicii he was
elected archbishop. He died there A.D. 3-12; and tlic universal honor
in which this holy man was held testifies his great merit and sanctity.
He was particularly esteemed the protector of mariners, who never
failed, on going to sea, to implore his mediation for a sncccsbfal
\oya;;c ; and he was also, from the innocence of his life, lield to bo
tlie patron of children. A curious illustration of tlie life of this
primitive saint is contained in doctor Milner's excellent History of
W'incliester. In his Life liy Aiban Butler, the folhjv.ing account of the
tr.anslation of his relics to Italy is taken from Surins and others : — "
(,'crtain merchants of Bari, a seaport in the kingdom of Xapler.,
situate on the Adriatic (Julf, sailed in three sliips to the coast of
Lycia, aiul, watciiiug an opportuait} when no Maliomctaiis were near
tlie place, went to the church in which the relics of St. Nicholas were
kept, which stood in a desert place, three miles from the sea, and
was guarded by a small community of monks. They broke open the
marble coffin in wliich the sacred bones lay, and carried them oil" to
their ships. The inliabitants, upon the a!ai-ni given, pursued them to
the shore with horrible outcries; but the Europeans were got safe on
board. They landed at Bari on the 9th of May, 1087, and the sacred
treasure was deposited by the archbibhop in the church of St.
Stephen. On the first day thirty persons were cured of various
distempers; and, from that time, the tomb of St. Nicholas of Bari has
been tamous for pilgrimages. — Tliis enterprise could only be
justified by the laws of a just war, joined with the apprehension of
the sacrilei;ious impiety of the Mahometans."—r,,/. XII. The
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