Pushing Past the Night Read Online Free Page A

backfired and turned into yet another public attack on him): “We’ve been too nice to Police Inspector Luigi Calabresi. He gets to keep living peacefully, to keep doing his job as a policeman, to keep persecuting our comrades. But he has to learn that everyone knows his face, including the militants who despise him. And the proletariat has issued its sentence: Calabresi is responsible for the murder of Pinelli and he will have to pay for it dearly.”
    The country was spinning out of control, and one young couple—in early 1970, my mother was twenty-three years old and my father thirty-two—was becoming more and more isolated. One night in a burst of enthusiasm she said, “Let’s go out tonight, to someplace hip like Brera or the Navigli, someplace that’s alive!” He replied with a bitter truth. “I would love to go to Brera, but I’d have to take along an escort …” Those few times that he did get out of work early, my aunt Graziella would rush over to babysit me. My parents used to reserve separate tables at restaurants off the beaten path. Or they would go to the movies, their great passion, taking care to go in only after the show had begun, to avoid recognition. “They were an extraordinary couple who lived in growing isolation from the city.” So said Antonio Lanfranchi, a Milanese businessman who knew them in those years. He was the author of one of the few tributes to my father in
Corriere della Sera
that was not official or from the family. On May 18, 1972, he wrote, “Antonio Lanfranchi mourns his friend Luigi Calabresi.” This was so unusual that Arnaldo Giuliani, the news chief at
Corriere
, looked him up for an interview. When Lanfranchi told me about this episode one afternoon in September2005, I thought he was lying or maybe exaggerating. Then I went to check, and sadly, he was telling the unvarnished truth: only four private citizens had published tributes in the newspaper to Luigi Calabresi, the father of two children with a third on the way, killed by two gunshots to the back, the victim of a rabid public lynching.

2.
piazza del popolo
    M AY 14, 1977, on Via De Amicis in Milan: a young man in a ski mask, bell-bottom jeans, and boots, his arms outstretched in a shooting position, his hands gripping a pistol. The picture is seen around the world. One week later, Umberto Eco writes in the magazine
L’espresso
, “Remember this image, it will become exemplary of our century.” It is the emblem of the clash that set Italy on fire, the symbolic snapshot of 1977, of a generation lost to violence, of a year with 42 assassinations and 2,128 acts of political violence.
    Everyone knows this powerful picture. For some it became an icon of the Years of Lead, the period of political violence in Italy that started in the late 1960s and went on into the 1970s and early 1980s. Many see it as representing the ultimate defeat of ideas, of political protest. Others identify it with strength and rebellion. But no one goes below the surface. Because if they did, if they turned the picture around and looked behind it, they would discover a complex and almost unfathomable world. I was one of the many who knew nothing about this story, and I only came to discover it accidentally, thanks to my mother and a ceremony in Piazza del Popolo.

    A Roman dawn in May 2004. Piazza del Popolo is beautiful. The light is warm, the air almost cold. A girl in combat boots with facial piercings sobs helplessly. Instinctively a woman embraces her, holds her close, and tells her, “It’s a wonderful thing that they’re giving this medal to your father. You should be proud.”
    The day before, the President of the Republic had fallen and fractured his collarbone. There are concerns that he might not be able to present the medals of valor today. Not even the medals to commemorate the victims of terrorism, the gold medals that have taken an eternity to be