“Whenever the police and the judiciary set off along the black trails, Perugia and Umbria are dragged into it […] On the other hand, it escapes no one that Umbria, geographically and politically, is held to be ‘interesting’ terrain for neo-fascism”.[1] The sentences quoted above, drawn from an article that appeared in “La Nazione” on 7 April 1975, testify to the significance of the Umbrian case with regard to neo-fascist activity in the first half of the 1970s. In that period, in fact, and especially in Perugia, alongside the Fronte della Gioventù (Fdg) and the Fronte universitario d’azione nazionale (Fuan), direct emanations of the Movimento sociale italiano (Msi), various formations of the extra-parliamentary right were particularly enterprising, dynamic and deeply rooted. Prominent among them were Ordine nuovo, Europa e civiltà, the Circolo Ezra Pound and the Lega degli studenti greci. The regional capital was a fertile arena for ideological and generational confrontation. Perugia is a city with a vast student population and, thanks to the presence of the Università per Stranieri, it takes in young people from all over the world. They are people in their twenties and thirties, often enrolled in associations with a strong political stamp. Moreover, in the Perugia district there lived several figures of the extreme right of national standing who could boast important links with the neo-fascist groupings of the capital. Yet, in certain respects, the conditions that allowed neo-fascism to take hold in Umbria came from afar: the region was one of the settings in which fascism had taken root most successfully and where, in the postwar period, the purging of the men of the regime proved less determined. Returning to the early 1970s, while in Perugia the extreme right was set within the frame of a plural civil society and an articulate public opinion, Terni – a provincial capital by the will of a Mussolini anxious to keep in check the subversive potential of the working masses[2]– bore the burden of the prominence of a Pci able to impose itself on a socio-political stage not equally complex and composite. Within the Umbrian political frame, it was the left (communists and socialists) that held the principal governing responsibilities; Christian Democrats, republicans, liberals and social democrats performed a role of opposition in most local administrations and – ça va sans dire – in the Regional Council.

Between 1969 and 1975, 4,384 acts of violence inspired by a manifest political matrix were committed in Italy. 85% of these were concentrated in just 16 provinces out of a total of 95.[3] Over the same span of time, 211 episodes attributable to black extremism were recorded in Umbria: this means that, on average, every 10 days an action of a fascist or para-fascist stamp took place in the territory.[4] It is without doubt a significant figure for an area of some 800,000 inhabitants with no large urban conurbations. It is not surprising, then, that already in 1973 Umbria was among the Regions most convinced of the case for promoting a mass inquiry into the phenomena connected with right-wing extremism. Nevertheless, only in the wake of the shock caused by the Brescia massacre did the investigation take shape. 1974 was the year in which neo-fascist aggressiveness reached its peak, but it was also the moment in which, faced with decisive national and international political changes that tended still further to isolate authoritarian resurgences and subversive ambitions, Italian public opinion began to drive forward with vigour the recovery of the republican institutions.[5]

The Regions first put forward the idea of the inquiry in Turin in December 1973, during a meeting of the Presiding Offices of the Regional Councils called to establish a common programme on the occasion of the imminent celebrations of the XXX anniversary of the Resistance and the Liberation. The project of the investigation fell, in short, within the many intentions relating to the celebratory and commemorative initiatives. The vague commitment turned into a concrete proposal at the prompting of the Lombard Regional Council, which convened in extraordinary session in Brescia on 30 May 1974 (two days after the tragic explosion) to spur the concerted awakening of the democratic institutions. The assembly closed with a motion underlining the urgency of a meeting between the Regions and the head of State: the aim was in primis to bring out how the question of democratic defence required the effective contribution of the sub-national institutional actors.[6] On 24 June, in Milan, at Palazzo Isimbardi, the representatives of all the Italian Regional Councils discussed and approved the proposal for an inquiry aimed at denouncing those responsible for, and the accomplices, financiers and instigators of, attacks, acts of intimidation and violence of clear neo-fascist origin.

The investigation, having grown into a defining element of the celebrations of the XXX anniversary of the Liberation, served to nourish a positive relationship between the newborn regional bodies and public opinion. In the wake of the blast that occurred in Piazza della Loggia, popular anger erupted, giving rise to numerous spontaneous protest demonstrations, or rather, demonstrations not led by parties or other established political formations. The Regions thus sought to ride the emerging social ferment, aiming to mobilise even those sectors of the moderate citizenry that had grown impatient with the advance of neo-fascist abuses. Regional executives and Councils tried, within this frame, to stand in for, support and supplement the work of a State accused on many sides and by many voices of having underestimated or even abetted the “black plots”. In short, on the strength of the situation that had matured, the Regions, through the inquiry, attempted to enlarge their own political weight, to expand their own competences, to widen their own margins of intervention in the jagged web of territorial relations, to engage those cross-sections of public opinion eager for alternative institutional interlocutors. With the “blessing” of the President of the Republic Giovanni Leone, whom the delegations of the Regional Councils met at the Quirinale on 24 July 1974, the operation acquired solid political cover. Faced with this situation, the Msi did not remain inert and silent. It is worth recalling that the birth of the Regions, the fruit of an appreciable thaw in relations between the Pci and the Dc, had been stubbornly opposed by the missini. Almirante’s party saw in them the proliferation of local particularisms and, above all, a strategic institutional stronghold for the left.[7] When the inquiry was about to get under way, within the Regional Councils the Fiamma tricolore – save for a few cases to be found in the South – thus found itself marginalised even more than it was at the national level. The investigation, at least on the official plane, did not directly touch the Msi. Nonetheless, its natural positioning, its systematic connection with the archipelago of extremist organisations and the plain intermingling of their respective rank-and-file militancies led the principal actor of the Italian political right to contest, emphatically and from the very outset, the option deployed by the Regions. The commissions of inquiry, which would be composed according to inclusive criteria, that is, in the spirit of a broad pluralism, would consequently not enjoy the contribution of the missini. In Umbria, the criticism of the investigation was argued with telling clarity in the local pages of “Il Tempo”, a newspaper of frankly conservative orientation[8]: “It seems that the Pci (or perhaps the so-called hardline and less open wing) strongly wanted the regional inquiry into fascism. And there would be nothing wrong in that, had it only been a serious inquiry, aimed at ascertaining, beyond possible doubt, responsibilities traceable to a proven violation of constitutional principles […] It is well known that in certain communist circles a race towards antifascism as an end in itself has now been embarked upon, and not for the sake of the fair eyes of the Republic and of Democracy, but rather for a stale and overworked game of power. For this reason, the inquiry promoted by the Region threatens to turn into an invitation to informing, into the publication of proscription lists, in whose cauldron many political adversaries who have nothing to do with fascism might be held up to public scorn”.[9] Newspapers such as “L’Unità” and “Paese sera”, aligned with the communist line, instead applauded without hesitation the decision of the Regional Council. The critical concerns raised by “Il Tempo” were probably a warning against the risk of emulating, under the banner of the inquiry, the freebooting counter-information and the unscrupulous dossier-building elaborated on both the right and the left.[10] In the 1970s, in fact, communists and neo-fascists drew up and distributed meticulous dossiers reporting the chronologies of the assaults, the names of their perpetrators, physical features, habits and home addresses of the most violent militants. The texts compiled by the Pci and by the red extra-parliamentary movement did not concern solely massacres, coup plots and terrorism on a national scale. Relying on fairly extensive and far-reaching information networks, the communists drafted substantial files on the squad actions that afflicted small towns, hamlets and villages; actions that, as a rule, had no media resonance. While the Pci maintained a fairly prudent approach, the groups of the extra-parliamentary left often used the information gathered to threaten their rivals.[11] The neo-fascist dossiers had a different sense, since they seem structurally preparatory to what sociology calls “eliticide”, that is, the imprisonment or elimination of the figures hostile to the coming of an authoritarian regime.[12] The opposing factions, through counter-information, also pursued a common purpose: to demonstrate that the attacks came from one side alone and that those who suffered them were of necessity forced to take precautions and protect themselves. Counter-information, dossier-building and political violence were therefore closely correlated elements. With respect, on the other hand, to official information, the extreme right of the early 1970s exploited better than the radical left a communications system that was on the rise and ever more inclined to magnify the news: the sensational acts, amplified as never before, inspired in varied contexts imitative phenomena that were neither controllable nor foreseeable.[13]

With regard to the inquiry, it should be noted that 1969, as the terminus a quo of the work of survey and analysis, was more or less taken for granted from the very start. At a conference entitled “Giustizia e trame nere” – organised in Perugia in the spring of 1975 by the Region of Umbria -, Marco Sassano, a journalist of “Avanti!”, stressed that “by now, even in the collective imagination, ’69 represents the beginning of a season of terror”.[14] This notion was therefore not in question at the National Conference of the Presiding Offices held in Reggio Calabria on 15 and 16 December 1974 to debate and lay down the criteria to which the Regions were to adhere in developing their work. On that occasion, in order to mark the “mass” character of the investigation, the involvement was designed and prescribed of the representatives of the public institutions (Municipalities and Provinces in primis), of the parties, the trade unions, the antifascist associations and other opinion leaders of regional standing (intellectuals, magistrates, lawyers, entrepreneurs, etc.). Besides hearing the many testimonies, the Special Commissions set up by the individual Councils were called upon to gather materials of various kinds: in particular news reports, pamphlets, periodicals and magazines, judicial documents and propaganda leaflets. Each Municipality was then required to send a report on the fascist and para-fascist activity recorded within its territory during the period under consideration. Once the documentation had been sifted, it fell to the Commissions to make its contents public through newspapers, radio and television. The publicising of the results of the inquiry was clearly held to be fundamental. In this connection, it should be remembered that around the middle of the 1970s dozens of tracts were circulated aimed at warning the citizenry of the neo-fascist threat. These were short writings that insisted for the most part on the need to give full effect to the republican Constitution, to reform the civil and penal code still of fascist origin, to support a policy of administrative decentralisation in order to supplant the centralising legacy of the Ventennio. In these little volumes, published on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Liberation, the theme of countering neo-fascist excesses was interwoven with the exaltation of the Resistance.[15] The effort of the Regions, then, was forged in keeping with the general sentiment.

Once the preliminary phase was over, the Umbrian Special Commission effectively began its work on 4 February 1975, with the commitment to conclude by May. It was chaired by the communist lawyer and former Perugian partisan Francesco Innamorati, who at the same time also held the role of vice-president of the Regional Council and president of the Council for the celebrations of the XXX anniversary of the Liberation.[16] As planned, the hearings convened by the Commission were attended by political and trade-union leaders, men and women of the institutions and of the world of culture, members of democratic and antifascist associations. Nonetheless, the liveliest hearings and those of greatest interest were the ones attended by the representatives of the youth political organisations and the student collectives. While the young communists, socialists and Christian Democrats were favourable to the Commission’s way of proceeding, the young republicans showed a number of misgivings about the inquiry itself. All of them, however, declared that they had been direct witnesses to some episode of violence perpetrated by the “blacks”. On the subject of neo-fascist raids, beatings and attacks, quite vivid and impassioned were the accounts of the youngsters enrolled in some of the university formations of the left – for example the Uda (Unione democratica antifascista) – and in certain groupings of the red extra-parliamentary movement – such as Avanguardia operaia, IV Internazionale and Lotta continua.[17] On the other hand, violence as a method of political struggle pertained especially to the militant ranks born between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s. A generation that gave outward form, in every gesture, in every thought, in every word, to a political drive. Clothing too was consequently a distinguishing mark, a symbol of an ideological belonging, an instrument for stirring or provoking public opinion. And so, in the places of the city’s social life, crew cuts, sunglasses and leather jackets stood opposed to unkempt beards, jeans and eskimo parkas.[18]

To understand how the Umbrian neo-fascists represented themselves, it is very useful to consult their numerous mimeographed sheets. The leaflets of the Fuan and the Fdg dealt especially with the themes of student politics, frequently denouncing with fervour the “clerico-Marxism” of the textbooks and the teachers who propagandised left-leaning theories in the classroom. The defence against the “communisation” of society included the attack on Municipalities, Provinces and the Region. In the summer of 1974, the Fuan unleashed a fiery verbal campaign against the regional administration, guilty of having disbursed an excessive sum to finance the jazz Festival, “a gathering of red hooligans – complains the university organisation – who exploit music for base political ends”.[19] Rarely did the leaflets of the Fuan and the Fdg allude to acts of violence; when they did, they sought above all to deny or contradict the versions given by the left-wing formations.

The mimeographed sheets of Europa e civiltà touched on the classic themes of political affairs from an intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) angle. In words at least, Europa e civiltà proclaimed itself opposed to violence. Here is what one could read in a sheet circulated in Perugia in the spring of 1973: “Young people! It is not with muscle and weapons that authority is won, and without authority there is no power”.[20] In truth, many members affiliated with this group regularly took part in squad sorties, attacks, assaults and brawls. A cultural slant was adopted also by the Circolo Ezra Pound, from whose printed matter there emerged, among other things, a marked sensitivity to international questions. The association argued against imperialism, against the party system, individualism, materialism, rationalism, etc.[21] The national news organs, like the local newspapers and television, were for the Umbrian neo-fascists the longa manus of a dominant power that meant to repress the legitimate dissent of the rights. This refrain was also in the repertoire of Ordine nuovo, a grouping that employed an extremely violent lexicon. Proof of this lies in some of the headlines that appeared in its weekly between 1971 and 1972: It is time for no-quarter struggle; The watchword is a strategy of attack, and the sortie of the heroes will overturn history.[22] Beat down by force the repression of the democratic State; Deny the parties, the system and the democratic institutions.[23] Order and Revolution at any cost; Ordine nuovo, an instrument of struggle against democracy and Marxism.”[24] The opening line of some leaflets even recited the motto of the Nazi SS: “our honour is called loyalty”.[25]

While communists and socialists, through their own press organs, had been stigmatising with unease the neo-fascist upsurges ever since the 1960s, Christian Democrats, republicans and liberals took up sharper positions from 1972-’73 onward. Even so, among the parties of the constitutional arc there always remained nuances or discordant views. The distinctions, in Umbria, could be clearly perceived at a press conference called by the regional secretariats of the Pci, Psi, Dc and Pri in April 1975 to condemn the wounding of a Perugian student by a well-known extra-parliamentary figure of the right. The communist secretary Giampaolo Bartolini reaffirmed first of all the need for a united and popular antifascist struggle, then added, with a caustic edge, that “while the police act, there is an objective and recurrent delay on the part of the judiciary that has by now become unbearable”.[26] Opting for far more timid and measured tones, both the Psi secretary Luciano Lisci and the Pri secretary Claudio Spinelli substantially agreed with Bartolini.[27] The Christian Democrat representative Livio Braconi, by contrast, reduced the problem of fascist activity to one of the many phenomena of criminality that shook public order. Nonetheless, he maintained firmly that “the judiciary must be asked to clear the city of fascists soon”.[28]

While the left-wing newspapers – for example “L’Unità”, “Paese sera” and “Avanti!” -, had since as early as 1969 been denouncing the collusions between black subversion, the judiciary, the police and the State, dailies such as “Il Messaggero”, “Il Corriere della sera”, “Il Popolo” and “La Nazione”, tied to the moderate and conservative parties, followed a line marked by prudence and by trust in the government and the State authorities. After all, the journalism born in the postwar years was characterised by a high degree of political parallelism; it was a militant journalism oriented towards comment, bound to the prevailing political sub-cultures and dependent in large part on the public sector.[29]

In the aftermath of the Brescia massacre and of the bomb on the Italicus train, after the sharp defeat of the Dc in the referendum on divorce and coinciding with the overhaul of the secret Services led by the then Minister of Defence Giulio Andreotti, the news organs, spurred also by an exasperated public opinion and by a changing international climate, began to support with zeal the democratic recovery of the country. In short, as the attitude of the constituted powers towards the far right shifted, the newspapers and television raised their level of attention to the acts of violence committed by the “blacks”. This renewed attention, at the local level, is strikingly borne out in the way the newspapers recounted two stabbings for which notorious Umbrian neo-fascists were guilty. One stabbing took place on 25 September 1972 in a hamlet of Perugia: the victim was the communist Aldo Seguenti; another took place on 29 March 1975 in the very centre of the city: the man attacked was the young Avanguardia operaia member Angelo Caporali. On the 1972 episode few words were spent, and within the space of a week the affair disappeared from the articles of the main dailies. The parties too, with the exception of the Pci, confined themselves to a formal and composed indignation that certainly did not encourage the press to repeat its coverage. Differently, the 1975 stabbing became a fully-fledged media case. On learning of the violence, the president of the Special Commission mobilised promptly and, in solidarity with the wounded man, called a demonstration joined by hundreds of people. Not only that: Innamorati urged the prefect to act swiftly and immediately placed at the disposal of the police headquarters the materials gathered by his working group. The newspapers would speak of the misdeed for at least two months, reporting at a close pace the physical description and the life history of the assailant, a fugitive in the meantime, illustrating the police searches and, finally, recounting in copious detail the capture of the culprit. The Special Commission would put together an extensive press review on the whole affair.[30] A clear reversal of tendency on the part of the information apparatus can in any case be discerned already in 1974: the bomb that went off on the night of 23 April at the entrance of the Casa del popolo of Moiano (a hamlet of Città della Pieve) aroused, in fact, a prolonged interest on the part of the media, both local and national.[31]

As has been said, when the neo-fascist organisations began to find themselves in difficulty because of the State’s commitment to combating them, they counterattacked with force, targeting the news organs as well, regarded as decisive allies of the repression. Between ’74 and ’75 there was therefore a surge of threatening letters sent to the newspapers; “La Nazione” and “Il Messaggero” were the ones most heavily hit by neo-fascist threats. At their regional editorial offices there arrived, on several occasions, envelopes containing bullets and fake parcel bombs accompanied by deranged messages. The intimidation they suffered drew the local left-wing and centrist dailies together in the antifascist struggle, which was intensified by granting resonance even to minor episodes: to the writings acclaiming Mussolini, to the swastikas increasingly scrawled on walls or on the shutters of shops, the Umbrian press now devoted a space it had never before conceded.

Once concluded, to the detriment of its original aspirations, the inquiry would not stir heated confrontations, open reflections, significant debates in the media or among the manifold subjectivities of civil society, but would fall into a sudden oblivion. The veil of silence that would cover the Umbrian investigation was not offset by the media noise of other inquiries: in Lombardy and in Piedmont too, the two regions that after the Brescia attack moved with the greatest diligence and conviction, the results of the antifascist operation would have scant space in public discussion. The reason is twofold. In primis, the inquiry was born as a political act, so that its intrinsic value lay in the choice of the Regional Councils to mount and develop it. It was therefore the launching of the Special Commissions that set off the debate serving the aims of the democratic parties, which would not then be much interested in stressing, through the analysis of the data that emerged, a message in substance already provided and conveyed. Secondly, towards the end of 1975, Italy found itself on the threshold of a new phase, in which the incipient regression of black extremism intersected with the working-out of the “historic compromise”, in which the increase in red violence reconfigured the assessments and priorities of the left, in which the State was still fragile but the Regions, re-legitimised in June by the vote of 34,063,567 electors (92% of the electoral body), had by now acquired their own stable and solid physiognomy within the institutional geography of the country.

Notes

[1] Archivio storico dell’Istituto per la Storia dell’Umbria contemporanea (hereafter ASISUC), Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 9, fasc. “Ritagli stampa”, Perché a Perugia, in “La Nazione”, 7 aprile 1975.

[2] E. Rotelli, Le trasformazioni dell’ordinamento comunale e provinciale durante il regime fascista, in S. Fontana (a cura di), Il fascismo e le autonomie locali, Il Mulino, Bologna 1973, pp. 73-156.

[3] Between 1969 and 1973, the neo-fascists were responsible for 95% of the acts of violence, in 1974 for 85% and in 1975 for 78%. D. Della Porta, M. Rossi, Cifre crudeli: bilancio dei terrorismi italiani, Il Mulino, Bologna 1986, p. 25.

[4] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975). Relazione finale, b. 12, fasc. “Appendice”.

[5] Among the national factors that in the two-year period 1974\1975 determined and accompanied the change in the political phase were: the reform of the secret Services drawn up by the Andreotti government, the initiation of numerous judicial proceedings against historic leaders of Italian neo-fascism, the incipient political and cultural crisis of the extreme right and the growing competition from extremism of red origin. Among the international factors, mention must also be made of: the resignation of US president Richard Nixon, the fall of the Salazarist regime, the end of the regime of the colonels in Greece, the death of the Caudillo in Spain. S. Ferrari, I denti del drago, Edizioni Biblioteca Franco Serrantini, Pisa 2013, p. 92 e p. 127.

[6] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 1, fasc. “Materiale altre Regioni”, Colpire il torbido gioco della provocazione e della trama: l’ordine del giorno approvato a Brescia, in “Cronache lombarde”, n. 37, 1974, p. 43.

[7] P. L. Ballini, M. Ridolfi, Storia delle campagne elettorali in Italia, Mondadori, Milano 2003.

[8] “Il Tempo” had its political point of reference in the Christian Democrat right, but maintained relations with the neo-fascist world at least from the mid-1960s. Naturally, between 1969 and 1975, it was “Il Secolo d’Italia” and “Il Giornale d’Italia” that were the dailies developing the most constant and structured relations with the fringes of black extremism. Cf. M. Dondi, L’eco del boato, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2015, pp. 87-95.

[9] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 3, fasc. “Corrispondenza”, A chi servirebbero le liste di proscrizione, in “Il Tempo”, 21 marzo 1975.

[10] P. Murialdi, La stampa italiana nel dopoguerra (1943-1972), Laterza, Bari 1974, p. 16 e seguenti.

[11] P. Violi, I giornali dell’estrema sinistra, Garzanti, Milano 1977, pp. 95-113.

[12] G. Panvini, Ordine nero, guerriglia rossa, Einaudi, Torino 2009, p. 170.

[13] R. Speciale, Gli anni di piombo, De Ferrari, Genova 2014, p. 5.

[14] Marco Sassano identifies, between 1969 and 1975, four waves of terrorism differing in methods and objectives. In his view, in 1969 the design of black violence was aimed at unloading the responsibility for the attacks and provocations onto the “reds”; in 1970, neo-fascism attacked democracy by leveraging, on the one hand, genuine popular uprisings such as those of Reggio Calabria and L’Aquila and, on the other, attempts at outright coups, like the one orchestrated by Junio Valerio Borghese; in 1972 the offensive of the extreme right expressed itself eminently through targeted political murders and no longer through indiscriminate dynamite attacks, which returned with mad virulence in 1974. ASISUC, Convegno “Giustizia e trame nere”, b. 17, fasc. “M. Sassano”.

[15] Among the short publications generically mentioned there are two, published by the Lega per le autonomie e i poteri locali, that are rather interesting. They are E. Santarelli, Fascismo e neofascismo, Roma 1974, and G. Verni, Dalla Resistenza a oggi, Roma 1975. This last volume contains a preface by Ferruccio Parri.

[16] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 3, fasc. “Iter legislativo”.

[17] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 3, fasc. “Resoconti riunioni”.

[18] M. Franzinelli, La sottile linea nera, Rizzoli, Milano 2008, pp. 82-87.

[19] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 11, fasc. “Volantini Fuan-Fronte della gioventù (1968-1975)”, Un Festival per teppisti con i soldi dei cittadini umbri, leaflet mimeographed by the Perugian Fuan on 30 July 1974. Cf. also A. Stramaccioni, Storia delle classi dirigenti in Italia. L’Umbria dal 1861 al 1992, Edimond, Città di Castello 2012, pp. 461-475.

[20] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 11, fasc. “Volantini Europa e civiltà (1971-1974)”, La via dell’odio, in “Europa e civiltà”, magazine mimeographed by the association of the same name on 16 April 1973.

[21] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 11, fasc. “Volantini Circolo Ezra Pound (1972-1974)”, cf. Il mito della scienza, document mimeographed by the Circolo Ezra Pound of Perugia on 3 February 1973; Società mitica e società organica, Smettiamocela!, Social-democrazia, leaflets mimeographed by the Circolo Ezra Pound of Perugia from November to September 1972.

[22] “Ordine nuovo”, n. 3, 25 novembre 1971.

[23] “Ordine nuovo”, n. 2, 11 novembre 1972.

[24] “Ordine nuovo”, n. 1, 4 novembre 1972.

[25] The Movimento politico Ordine Nuovo was dissolved by decree in November 1973 by the then Minister of the Interior Paolo Emilio Taviani.

[26] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 10, fasc. “Studente accoltellato dai fascisti”, Unanimi i partiti antifascisti nella critica alla magistratura, in “Paese sera”, 4 aprile 1975.

[27] Ibidem.

[28] Ibidem.

[29] Italian journalism falls within the so-called “Mediterranean model”, to which Spanish, French, Portuguese and Greek journalism are also ascribed. Differently, the “democratic-corporatist” model, which belongs to the countries of central Europe, presents a substantial balance between political press and commercial press. The latter is preeminent in the “liberal” model: in Great Britain, the United States, Ireland and Canada journalism is in fact very much tied to the market and very little to the State and the political parties. Cf. D.C. Hallin, P. Mancini, Modelli di giornalismo, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2004, pp. 67-69.

[30] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 10, fasc. “Studente accoltellato dai fascisti”.

[31] ASISUC, Inchiesta Regione su attività fasciste e parafasciste (1969-1975), b. 10, fasc. “Rassegna stampa: fascismo in Umbria (marzo-settembre 1974)”, D. Allegra, Moiano: dal criminale attentato nuovo vigore antifascista, in “L’Unità”, 25 aprile 1974.

Valerio Marinelli is a researcher at the Isuc (Istituto per la storia dell’Umbria contemporanea) and a scholar of contemporary history at the Dipartimento di Lettere-Lingue, letterature e civiltà antiche e moderne of the Università di Perugia.