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Imagining Terrorism The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969 2009 Legenda Italian Perspectives 1st Edition Pierpaolo Antonello Updated 2025

The document presents 'Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969-2009,' edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary. It explores various narratives, genres, and the rhetoric surrounding political violence in Italy over four decades, featuring contributions from multiple scholars. The book is part of the Italian Perspectives series published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge.

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100% found this document useful (9 votes)
34 views92 pages

Imagining Terrorism The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969 2009 Legenda Italian Perspectives 1st Edition Pierpaolo Antonello Updated 2025

The document presents 'Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969-2009,' edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary. It explores various narratives, genres, and the rhetoric surrounding political violence in Italy over four decades, featuring contributions from multiple scholars. The book is part of the Italian Perspectives series published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge.

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legenda
legenda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of
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ITalIan PeRSPeCTIVeS
Series Editors
Professor Zygmunt Barański, University of Cambridge
Professor anna laura lepschy, University College london
In the light of growing academic interest in Italy and the reorganization of many
university courses in Italian along interdisciplinary lines, this book
series, founded now continuing under the legenda imprint, aims to bring
together different scholarly perspectives on Italy and its culture.
Italian Perspectives publishes books and collections of essays on any period of
Italian literature, language, history, culture, politics, art, and media, as well as
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innovative.
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Patrick Boyde, UK Millicent Marcus, USa
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Victoria de grazia, USa Martin Mclaughlin, UK
John gatt-Rutter, australia lino Pertile, USa
Paul ginsborg, Italy eduardo Saccone, Ireland
guglielmo gorni, Switzerland Rebecca West, USa
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appearing in this series


1. The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi 1817-1837, ed. by Prue Shaw
2. Nelle Carceri di G. B. Piranesi, by Silvia gavuzzo-Stewart
3. Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative, by Rita Wilson
4. Elio Vittorini: The Writer and the Written, by guido Bonsaver
5. Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste, by elizabeth Schächter
6. Italo Calvino and the Landscape of Childhood, by Claudia nocentini
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
9. Fragments of Impegno, by Jennifer Burns
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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17. Il teatro di Eduardo De Filippo, by donatella Fischer

Managing Editor
dr graham nelson, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK
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

LEGENDA is an imprint of the


Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2009

ISBN 978-1-906540-48-7 (hbk)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying,
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Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
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
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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
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