2024-01-24 10:50:06
by GIOVANNI BIANCONI
Igino Domanin reconstructs the magistrate’s story for Marsilio: he had investigated the fascists, he was murdered by the red terrorists in Milan on 29 January 1979
There have been “kid judges” in every season. And there still are. At the beginning of the nineties of the last century they were evoked by Francesco Cossiga, who contested the sending of newly appointed magistrates to the border territories; too inexperienced to conduct complex investigations into the mafia and drug trafficking, said the then President of the Republic. But twenty years earlier there had been others involved in equally complex investigations, such as massacres and black plots, financial scandals, red terrorism. Without anyone having any objections.
One was called Emilio Alessandrini, he was born in 1942 in Penne, on the hills of Abruzzo, he had studied in Pescara, and in 1968 he arrived in Milan as a public prosecutor. In 1972 he had not yet turned thirty when he found on his desk the file on the bomb in Piazza Fontana, one of the Italian mysteries on which light has been shed (and not entirely) after decades of misdirections, cover-ups and obstacles put in the way by other state apparatus. Who constructed the “anarchist lead” (false) on the drawing board to obscure the “black lead” (true), which emerged thanks to Alessandrini’s work and then diverted – with another disturbing action – to Catanzaro, a thousand kilometers further south . But in the short period in which he was allowed to travel it, that prosecutor, still fresh from his degree, managed to reveal the neo-fascist matrix of the massacre and related institutional complicity.
«The young Alessandrini becomes the protagonist of an investigation which also marks a fundamental turning point in the Italian judiciary. A boy who has just arrived from the Italian provinces finds himself touching the raw nerve of republican history”, writes Igino Domanin, essayist and high school teacher who is his nephew, son of his sister Mirella. Who, 45 years after the murder – Alessandrini was murdered on 29 January 1979, when he was 36, after leaving his son Marco who had just turned 8 at school – published a “family novel”, A common hero (Marsilio), dedicated to the man who, after the crime and the state funeral in the presence of President Sandro Pertini (Cossiga’s predecessor) «was no longer “Uncle Emilio”, but the magistrate who died as a hero to defend democracy, the State of law, justice.”
The result is a story that intertwines the personal memories of a child with the professional history of Alessandrini and that of Italy in the midst of the so-called “years of lead”, of which he was one of the most emblematic victims. At the hands of the fascists, how was it logical (for those times)? No, from the front line, as the ultra-left newspaper «Lotta continua» titled the day after the crime; a way to underline the absurdity reached by the spiral of red terrorism and by that acronym largely formed by militants coming from LC itself. If it had been the black extremists “everything would be simple to understand”, wrote the newspaper, while the execution signed by “comrades” was inexplicable.
He claimed the front line by claiming that the investigation into Piazza Fontana had been useless, because “the Italian proletarians” already knew the truth, while the prosecutor’s most recent investigations into left-wing armed groups represented “the attempt to restore democratic and progressive credibility At the state”; therefore Alessandrini represented a danger because he restored dignity and prestige to the institutions that they wanted to demolish. Like Guido Galli, the Milanese investigating judge killed the following year, again by Pl.
There is a thread that binds those two victims in toga, starting from their commitment to the National Association of Magistrates of which they were leading exponents in the court where they worked. Galli was even subjected to disciplinary action when he protested about the robbery of the investigation on Piazza Fontana in Alessandrini. Today they would perhaps be branded as “red robes”, too accustomed to expressing opinions. Like those entrusted by Alessandrini to Avanti!, organ of the Socialist Party, three days before being killed, and two days after the murder of the communist worker Guido Rossa by the Red Brigades. Another short circuit in the history of terrorism which he explained like this: «The objective of the Red Brigades is to arrive at the clash in the shortest time possible, removing that reformist buffer which to some extent guarantees the survival of this type of society».
In a hideout of the communist fighting formations, which later merged into the Front Line, a photo of him was found, but it was not enough to entrust him with some form of protection.
In Domanin’s story – together with the holidays spent on the Sicilian sea, the games and trips, the afternoons at the cinema and the basketball performances in front of “uncle Emilio” who had also been a decent basketball player – these details overlap with the discoveries made After. One above all: the assassin commando included the son of a former Christian Democrat minister, deputy secretary of the party that had governed the country for thirty years; a further tangle that on the one hand confuses, but on the other helps to illuminate that dramatic and troubled stretch of Italian history.
At the end of the 1978 Christmas holidays spent with relatives in Pescara, his sister Mirella greeted Alessandrini by asking him if there was anything to worry about that photo found in the terrorists’ base. «He replies that he must stay calm – Domanin recalls -, that he is only doing his job, that no one can love him so badly for this reason. There are only three weeks left before his violent death, and it is the last time I see him.”
In the television images of the attack the child will recognize the Renault 5 in which he was killed, «the car that had brought me home from the beach several times, in the summer of 1978, is riddled in one door, the windows completely shattered. These are the clues to a horrendous and murderous racket.”
The signs of the end of a “boy judge” mowed down by terrorism forty-five years ago, protagonist of a dark time and example for those of today.
The book and the meeting
Igino Domanin’s book A common hero. 29 January ’79, Judge Alessandrini, the years of lead, a family novel is published by Marsilio (300 pages, 20 euros). The author reconstructs the story of his uncle, a judge murdered in Milan by a Front Line commando on 29 January 1979. The magistrate Emilio Alessandrini (Penne, Pescara, 30 August 1942 – Milan, 29 January 1979) conducted the investigation which led to the indictment of the two neo-Nazis Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura for the Piazza Fontana massacre. He later dealt with investigations into left-wing terrorism, of which he fell victim at the hands of Prima linea. Domanin will present his book in Milan on Monday 29 January (6.30 pm) at the Feltrinelli Duomo bookshop. Piero Colaprico intervenes. Born in Chieti in 1967, Domanin is the son of a sister of Emilio Alessandrini. Writer and essayist, Domanin has published two novels: The law of this atmosphere (il Saggiatore, 2013) and Spiaggia libera Marcello (Rizzoli, 2008). Among his essays: Grand hotel Abisso (Bompiani, 2014); Apology of barbarism (Bompiani, 2008)
January 24, 2024 (modified January 24, 2024 | 11:49)
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