Licia Rognini Pinelli obituary
A State that refuses to acknowledge truth is a non-existent State. I do not feel that I have been defeated just because I have not received justice from the courts. Justice resides in the fact that the truth is known to all.
Licia Rognini Pinelli, who passed away at the age of 96 on 11 November 2024, came up with that pronouncement which summed up her life since her husband Pino Pinelli was sent flying from Inspector Luigi Calabresi’s office on the fourth floor of the Via Fatebenefratelli police headquarters in Milan on the night of 15-16 December 1969, the day after the Piazza Fontana bomb outrage in the city. It was a life of uphill effort, strewn with all sorts of hurdles placed in her way by those who pulled the strings in the anti-people provocation in which the anarchists were to be cast – no matter the price – as the scapegoats for those despicable bombs. Throughout her life, Licia sought the truth regarding Pino’s death at police headquarters and she did so with tenacity and clarity of vision. It was a truth that anarchists – and not just anarchists – quickly grasped, encapsulating it in the slogan “Valpreda is innocent, Pinelli was murdered and the outrage was the State’s handiwork”. A truth that the State was never willing to vouchsafe to her, offering instead – after the initial phoney reconstruction that aimed to portray Pino as the man responsible for the slaughter, together with Valpreda and comrades and after attempts to close the file – Judge D’Ambrosio’s (close to the Italian Communist Party) far-fetched pronouncement back in 1975, back in the days of Berlinguer’s ‘historic compromise’, the notion of a “collapse indicated through a shift in the centre of his balance unaccompanied by any loss of muscle tone and often accompanied by uncoordinated movements” – in essence the notorious “onset of illness” – as it was described back in the day – that had supposedly prompted Pinelli, under pressure from an ever more oppressive interrogation, to lurch from the middle of the room and vault over the window bars. Once it had been established that anarchists had had no hand in the outrage which was the doing of fascists in cahoots with State figures, the fable of suicide could no longer be peddled, but neither could there be any admission that those who had been present in Milan police headquarters at the time, or at the Ministry of the Interior in Rome or the Restricted Affairs Bureau had been involved in his death: so the thesis of an “onset of illness” was intended to keep them all safe. But Licia found that thesis unacceptable and carried blithely on with her search for the truth, a truth that in 1970 looked to be close at hand when Inspector Luigi Calabresi, abandoned by his superiors and wearying of a press campaign driven primarily by Lotta Continua, sued those in charge of that publication for defamation, leading to a trial that quickly backfired on him: he went from accuser to accused and his subordinates who had been in the same room at headquarters had begun to provide increasingly contradictory statements, forcing the judge to silence at least one of them, the most far-fetched one. Licia was to state that she felt that the truth never came so close to surfacing as it had at that point. Then Judge Biotti recused himself and Calabresi was murdered, laying that trial to rest. Before then, Licia had ploughed ahead with her campaign, accusing Calabresi (and his colleagues who had also been in the interrogation room) of wilful homicide in June 1971. D’Ambrosio was then to pick up her complaint, only to steer it in the direction we all know about, reaching a finding without so much as an open trial or proceedings.
Year after year, decade after decade, the campaign for truth and justice regarding the Piazza Fontana massacre and the murder of Pino Pinelli has never ceased. Any more than Licia’s attendance, and later the attendance of her daughters Silvia and Claudia, at meetings in all the schools, clubs and wherever they were invited to talk about Pino and the massacre. In 2009 Licia was invited by President Napolitano to visit him at the Quirinale Palace. To her it looked like just the umpteenth opportunity to press for the justice she so craved after all the postponements and closings of files and Napolitano’s words acknowledging the wrong suffered by her partner Pino looked like a door being opened to a fresh set of proceedings that might bring those responsible to book. Not a bit of it. It was merely a political ploy designed to ‘bring peace’ to people between whom there had never been any conflict – the widows, sons and daughters of the anarchist Pinelli and the inspector, Calabresi. And this “peace” was an attempt to lay to rest an entire period of history, whilst actually covering up the responsibility of the political class and of the Italian bourgeoisie in the ‘strategy of tension’.
Even a well researched book written by Gabriele Fuga and Enrico Maltini (published initially by Zero in Condotta publishers and later in an expanded edition by Colibri), lifting the lid for the very first on the presence of Italian secret service agents from the notorious Restricted Affairs Bureau during the interrogations that led up to Pino’s death failed to prompt any sort of proceedings.
Licia was told by a magistrate once that, but for her, her stubbornness and her determination to discover the truth about Pino’s death, Valpreda would have been sentenced to life imprisonment. Not for nothing was Licia always described by the people who knew her as a ‘rock’, as a pebble that derailed an entire train, together with all of the men and women who have been committed over the last half century, to keeping the memory and exposure of the powers-that-be’s misdeeds alive.
On the afternoon of Friday 15 November 2024, her funeral left from the undertakers on the Via Corelli, after her family declined the official funeral suggested by mayor Sala. Several hundred people mingled with Licia’s relatives, daughters Silvia and Claudia and her grandchildren in a farewell that was anything but ceremonious, with banner waving and singing and talk. Lots of speeches were made, focusing on Licia’s human side and her dogged pursuit of the truth. A truth that cannot but entail the machinery of the State owning up to its responsibility for Pino’s murder. Among those attending were political and social celebrities such as Milan secretary of the ANPI [Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia; National Association of Italian Partisans], who had been at the side of the Pinelli daughters in the organization of the funeral. Plus representatives from Milanese society. A lot of male and female anarchists have helped, through their testimonies and presence, commemorate what that massacre [Piazza Fontana], murder [Pinelli’s] and the phoney accusations that resulted in Valpreda, Gargameli and comrades serving three years in prison were all about.
Umanità Nova, 26 November 2024 https://umanitanova.org/licia-rognini-pinelli/
Translated by: Paul Sharkey.