Being in a public place, in the Italy of those years, could be a risky proposition. Right-wing terrorists pursued their “strategy of tension” by carrying out indiscriminate bombings: they planted explosives in crowded piazzas, trains, and railway stations. Their goal was to terrorize the population in order to pave the way for a coup. The Ultraleft, instead, was more discriminating in selecting its targets. However, Red Brigades attacks still took place in the street, in broad daylight, and under the eyes of terrorized bystanders—a strategy that was utterly unsettling for the general population in that it further undermined increasingly obsolete assumptions about the safety of the urban everyday (see also Eyerman 2008); taking advantage of Genoa’s convoluted map and its thick web of shortcuts (Dogliotti 2004: 1173), their commandos always managed to escape. Soon enough, Genoa became known as the “capital of the Red Brigades” (Dogliotti 2004: 1177). The tension was so high that the sight of a five-pointed star (the symbol of the Red Brigades) spray-painted on a city wall would immediately trigger media coverage and a formal investigation. In turn, this general anxiety led to an escalation of repressive policing surveillance measures legitimized through the need to prevent terrorist acts. In those years, being searched by the police was a frequent occurrence, and long beards and parkas could trigger a frisking at any time. Very little ground was needed to obtain a formal warrant: my childhood home was once searched by the police on the basis of my father’s visual likeness to a known terrorist.
Though the latter experience injected a degree of anxiety into my family life, as a child I usually found myself watching from the outside. Like many children my age, I normalized the violent world I grew up in because it was all I had ever known. At that time, people in my generation were too young to feel the full political and social import of the events; however, occasionally the angst of adult family members would filter through to us. Barely a pre-teen, on the day of Coco’s murder I was on a city beach. When the management announced the terrorist attack on the loudspeaker, my mother stuffed my friends and me into her Fiat 500 and hurriedly took us all home. The news had frightened her, and she was worried about the possibility of unrest. And when, on the morning of March 16, 1976, Italy’s President of the Council of Ministers Aldo Moro was kidnapped in Rome by a Red Brigades commando that slaughtered his escort only to kill him fifty-five days later, the middle school I attended immediately canceled all classes and sent the students home, where we would presumably be safer. Not only was this decision indicative of the role of the family as the ultimate bulwark of Italian society in the face of a weak state, but it also indexed the general astonishment at the news. Aldo Moro was an embodiment of the institutions, and the whole country was dumbfounded at the audacity of the terrorist group and the vulnerability of the state (Wagner-Pacifici 1986: 90). On that day, my father plunged into a deep anxiety from which he never recovered.
Violence and the threat thereof, those days, had become part of the quotidian. Going to the bank, the post office, or a restaurant could mean being held up in one of the robberies conducted to subsidize the Red Brigades and other extra-parliamentary groups. Going grocery shopping could get one caught between security and the dissenters seeking to carry out an autoriduzione (self-discount) event, and walking by a street protest could get you trapped in violent skirmishes between protesters and the police. For teenagers in my generation, violence was a constant possibility, especially in those high schools that had a consistent presence of either Ultraleft or Neo-fascist activists. Brawls and picketings were frequent occurrences. In discussing his fascination with the local Ultraleft as a precocious fourteen-year-old, Genoese novelist Roberto Demontis (born in 1964) wrote: “Living in a troubled world is very reassuring for a teenager, you feel better when you are surfing an earthquake than when you are caged in the nightmare of a life in which each day is the same. This is why, when you are young—or better, a teenager—you create so much trouble. At times you do it just to see what happens (per vedere l’effetto che fa) for the youth, living in troubled times is wonderful, because you can mirror yourself in the disquiet, you recognize yourself in it.”3 Perhaps the charm of the disquiet is one of the reasons why in those same years one of my childhood friends robbed a local branch of the Neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano: after stealing a typewriter, he and his friends set the suite’s door on fire. They were caught right away; they all earned the sobriquet of “baby terroristi,” and my friend, the only one in the group who had barely turned eighteen, ended up in jail.
My high school was a little different in that it was a numerus clausus public liceo linguistico attended predominantly by academically ambitious girls (and a few boys) with little time for extracurricular activities.4 Yet our school was not spared the violence, either, and we frequently had to evacuate due to bomb threats. Not that we were apolitical: on the contrary, we had an active collettivo femminista. On some level, many of us had developed the awareness that being driven young women in a Catholic country where not even the Ultraleft was interested in seriously supporting our struggles was a political challenge in its own right (Ginsborg 1990). Dressed in hippie garb, we would read feminist magazines such as Effe and Noi donne, eagerly discussing women’s reproductive rights at every opportunity, penning feminist slogans in our journals, and yelling back in unison at anyone who tried to convince us that our place was going to be in the home. The price we had to pay for our own small-scale resistance, but above all for the successes in matters of family law, reproductive rights, and access to employment at the hands of women activists who were a decade older than us, was a backlash: a capillary symbolic and material violence that did not pursue a forthright exclusion, but rather a surveillance and policing mechanism that perpetuated women’s subalternity by means of an incessant public harassment (Gardner 1995). Implicitly meant to remind women and especially vulnerable young girls that they did not belong in public, this harassment manifested as the barrage of slurs, insults, and even occasional physical attacks that could be meted out to us by men of all age groups in any public place: Genoa’s streets and piazzas, but also its stores, churches, buses and trains, parks and beaches, workplaces and schools. In all cases, such aggressions were blamed on the victim’s alleged breach of the unwritten rules of modesty (Guano 2007).
If Genoa’s streets were a war zone for assorted class and gender struggles, my Genoese friends who are older than me still remember how the local university, too, was a political battlefield. Ultraleft activists had the power to shut down the university, canceling all classes, exam sessions, and thesis defenses at will. Some of the faculty and several of the students had close ties to the Ultraleft, and the tension was high. Students would often extract a “18 politico” (“political C-”) from their professors: a passing grade granted to all students, regardless of performance. As to the local faculty, they positioned themselves on both sides of the barricade. In 1978, a Red Brigades commando kneecapped Christian Democratic law professor Fausto Cuocolo in front of his terrorized students. In 1979, Italian Literature professor Enrico Fenzi was arrested for being a member of the local Red Brigades branch.
The City of Shattered Mirrors
The last clamorous chapter in the history of Genoa’s Red Brigades was the 1980 police raid of a covo (hideout) during which all the members of the local colonna (pillar) were killed. By then, the assassination of Guido Rossa had deprived the Red Brigades of much of the support they still enjoyed among the local working class and the intelligentsia: up to that point, they had been the imprendibili (“impregnable”; see Cavazza 2013) who eluded all police investigations and frightened bourgeoisie and state representatives alike. Yet with Rossa they had assassinated a worker, and this compromised the solidarity of even much of the most militant Ultraleft. Politically motivated violence did not disappear from Genoa—the kneecapping of Ansaldo Nucleare CEO Roberto Adinolfi was conducted as recently as May 2012 at the hands of an anarchist commando—but it dwindled to a barely noticeable level. In the meantime, increasingly deindustrialized Genoa had become what historian Paul Ginsborg called a “ghost city” (2003: 17): a city convulsed