2023-10-13 08:20:33
by GIOVANNI BIANCONI
The engineer who supplied the publisher with the explosive from which he was killed while attempting to carry out an attack speaks. In «Gappisti» by Davide Serafino (in bookstores from 13 October through DeriveApprodi), Vittorio Battistoni reveals his role in the armed struggle
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
CHIAVARI (GENOA) — On the morning of March 14, 1972, a few hours before Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was blown up, he was the one who delivered the explosive that killed him to the revolutionary publisher: «When the news with his photo came out in the newspapers I recognized him and I felt guilty; not so much for having given him the dynamite, but because if I had been there, as he had asked me on other occasions, he would not have died.”
Sitting on the sofa of a house overlooking the Gulf of Tigullio, a guest of friends, an 85-year-old gentleman tells the background of the end of Feltrinelli and some episodes at the dawn of the armed struggle in Italy. His name is Vittorio Battistoni, originally from Chiavari, a retired mechanical engineer, a member of the Communist Party in his youth but with anarchist tendencies which led him, after 1969, to approach the Partisan Action Groups founded by the Milanese publisher and the first Red Brigades, in which he never played. With Gap, however, there was a collaboration that lasted a couple of years, in which he was also Feltrinelli’s driver, accompanying him on secret trips in Italy and abroad, while as an illegal immigrant he attempted to organize the anti-coup and revolutionary offensive of which he was a victim.
Battistoni’s testimony, which emerged after half a century of anonymity, constitutes the heart of Gappisti (DeriveApprodi), the book by the historian Davide Serafino which reconstructs the parable of the network woven by Feltrinelli, contemporary with the birth of other armed gangs, by the Genoese group XXII Ottobre at Br.
“I met Feltrinelli at the home of the lawyer Lazagna – says the engineer with anarcho-communist tendencies – shortly after the massacre in Piazza Fontana”. Giambattista Lazagna, from Genoa, former partisan commander and leader of the PCI in Liguria, was arrested in a couple of cases for terrorism, and later released from prison and acquitted.
«Feltrinelli – continues Battistoni – was convinced that they would try to draw him into the story of the neo-fascist bombs attributed to anarchists, as well as the coup d’état plans that were clearly visible behind those attacks; he wasn’t the only one talking about it at that time, but the only one who wanted to do something concrete to avoid it. That’s why I agreed to help him. Through Lazagna he gave me the money to buy a light blue Fiat 850 with which I took him many times to Rome, Florence, Bologna, Milan, but also abroad, to Austria and Germany. He would disappear for a certain period, then through intermediaries he would make an appointment for me and I would be found there. In the car, rather than talking, he read and wrote. Once he arrived at his destination he met people, but I did not attend his conversations, nor did I ask who he had seen or what they had said to each other. Sometimes I had the impression that he had handed over some money, but I didn’t ask questions.”
Battistoni describes a generous man immersed in a secret activity which, alongside his public activity as a publisher, also represented an opportunity to emancipate himself from his privileged condition: «He was certainly not a fanatic, nor were his analyzes wrong. I was fascinated by his personality, by the stories about his childhood lived in a sort of golden world during fascism and the war, by the desire for redemption he took on when a farmer who worked on the family estate in Tuscany opened his doors to him. eyes talking to him about justice and socialism. He wanted to give back at least part of what he had had. After that I also think that leading a revolution was not an appropriate task for him; with the money and resources he had, he could have financed and facilitated many projects, providing a contribution to the cause rather than claiming to become its guide.”
The first actions in which Battistoni participated were the «Radio Gap» press releases, broadcast over the air, overlapping radio and TV broadcasts. In April 1970, thanks to a transceiver and a power supply supplied by the German anarchist Wolfgang Mayer and placed in a rented car, in some neighborhoods of Genoa Feltrinelli’s voice recorded with a cassette player interrupted a television program hosted by Tito Stagno , inviting citizens to an anti-fascist mobilization. The engineer was driving the car: «Over a small radius of action we were able to transmit with a higher power than that of Rai signals, and thus we could interfere. Unfortunately I didn’t keep that first audio cassette with Feltrinelli’s voice, but I have four others recorded by different companions.”
After the proclamations made via radio, replicated in various cities, someone said that it would be useful to have explosives and Battistoni offered to recover a fair quantity: «Around my house they were building a road using dynamite to cut the rock; for two or three days I lurked on the mountain, and with binoculars I verified that at night in the warehouse where they kept the candles there was no one left on guard. Four or five of us went, I opened the door with a crowbar and we took two quintals of explosives already packed in boxes. Lazagna and I shared it; I gave a good half to the German, the rest I kept in the cellar.”
In March 1972, when Feltrinelli decided to blow up a pylon on the outskirts of Milan to darken the city in response to a demonstration by the “silent majority”, that dynamite came in handy. «Afterwards – recalls Battistoni – I understood that he wanted a sensational action to propose himself more forcefully to other groups with which he was in contact, such as the Red Brigades or Power Workers. Once in Voghera we talked about technical aspects, as a watch enthusiast I proposed using a wrist watch to build a timer, and Feltrinelli really liked the idea. Then on March 14, 1972 he arranged to meet me at the Lambrate station, where I arrived with twenty kilos of explosives locked in a suitcase. He was waiting for me with a van and together we went to Segrate for an inspection, he got out to look at the pylon and after a while we left again. He left me at a metro station because he was in a hurry: “Today my minutes are numbered”, he said. I had explained to him how to make the timer, complete with a drawing, even though I knew that an alarm clock or any other mechanism was better; using the wristwatch by making a one millimeter hole in the glass without touching the dial was unnecessarily risky.”
According to Battistoni’s reconstruction, haste and inexperience were fatal to Feltrinelli who, returning to Segrate in the evening with other accomplices, was blown up due to an “accident at work” of which the engineer learned from the newspapers: “Su “l’Unità” had the news of the death of a bomber next to a pylon, while the photograph had also been published in “Corriere della Sera”, and I recognized him immediately. I wasn’t with him because I was against that type of action, I was more in favor of initiatives such as the flash kidnapping of a SIT Siemens manager carried out by the Red Brigades a month earlier, but seeing how it had gone I cried with regret. If they had followed my instructions, everything would have worked out; if I had created the timer, it would not have triggered the trigger before the set time; if I had been there I would have climbed the pylon and no one would have gotten hurt.”
Vittorio Battistoni didn’t go to the funeral – “too many photographers, like at the demonstrations” – and the worry of having contributed, albeit unconsciously, to the publisher’s death did not leave him for a long time. Neither investigators nor investigators ever knocked on his house, only two far-left militants in charge of a sort of “internal investigation” into the end of the fellow editor: “I reported everything, explaining that there were no conspiracies or mysteries behind that accident, just a bit of imprudence and incompetence.”
Fifty-one years later, the “Feltrinelli case” is closed and enclosed in the history of the Gap, from which the figure of Battistoni now emerges (while others prefer to remain in the shadows) to bear witness to an event contemporary to black terrorism and prodromal of the red one . «A minor but significant phenomenon in the context of the armed struggle in Italy – comments the author of the book Davide Serafino -, which paved the way for future choices of others, and it is useful to know beyond the figure of its founder».
October 13, 2023 (changed October 13, 2023 | 07:55)
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#gave #Giangiacomo #Feltrinelli #bomb #killed #time.news