On December 12, 1969 a bomb went off in the Agricultural Bank in Milan killing 17 people and wounding 100. Immediately after the bombing fascists of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) distributed leaflets denouncing the 'red terror' and police in Milan went into action, sweeping up a number of socialist, communist and anarchist activists in the city.
One of these was Giuseppi Pinelli a 41 year old railway worker and anarchist activist, who was also, well known as a pacifist opposed to individual acts of violence. he was arrested and taken to Milan police headquarters for questioning. He had an alibi as he was at an anarchist circle meeting when the bomb exploded but police held him anyway without formal charges.
Pinelli nicknamed Pino was born on 21 October 1928 to Alfredo Pinelli and Rosa Malacarne in the then working class area of Porta Ticinese, Milan, Pinelli left school early to supplement the family income, taking jobs as a waiter and a warehouseman. Pinelli had already decided which side to take, when, at the age of sixteen, he became a partisan dispatch rider of a libertarian brigade. working with a group of anarchist partisans who were his first encounter with libertarian thought. In 1954 he joined the railways as a labourer. In 1955 he married Licia Rognoni whom he met at an evening Esperanto class; they soon had two daughters, Silvia and Claudia.
This is his story, which is not just the story of the eighteenth victim of the bombing of Piazza Fontana, but of a man who loved his family and was proud of his job, who read poetry and flew kites, a man who lived his time with passion, fighting for a better future.
Already politically active with anti-Fascist groups, Pinelli became increasingly interested in libertarianism, a philosophy that favours minimal state intervention in the lives of citizens, and in anarchism, whose proponents believe in the abolition of all government and the organisation of society by voluntary co-operation.
Pinelli was a member of a group that eventually evolved into the Ponte della Ghisolfa Anarchist Club, named after a railway viaduct visible from the Porta Garibaldi station, where Pinelli worked.
After the student unrest in France in 1968, such groups saw their memberships swell as young Italians also began to challenge authority and the state.
That period was also the beginning of the so-called Years of Lead in Italy, when social and political tension was frequently punctuated by acts of terrorism, of which the Piazza Fontana bombing, the target of which was the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura, was the first major incident involving civilian deaths.
Over the next decade or so, organisations at both extremes of the political spectrum, from the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) on the left to the far-right Ordine Nuovo (New Order), were responsible for bombings and assassinations, including the kidnap and murder of former prime minister Aldo Moro and the bombing of Bologna railway station.
The situation was complicated by the existence, admitted only later, of the CIA-sponsored Operation Gladio, a secret network that aimed to manipulate events in a way designed to diminish support for Italy's Communist Party.
The Piazza Fontana incident, which was later established as the work of Ordine Nuovo, was initially blamed on left-wing extremists and sparked a crackdown on such groups, although Pinelli was unaware of this when police turned up at his door within just a few hours of the explosion.
He was used to dealing with the police, although it was usually over matters such as licensing of premises and permission to stage public gatherings.
Luigi Calabresi, at it happened, was the officer he dealt with most, and there was no evidence of serious friction between them. Pinelli did not need to be arrested, voluntarily following the patrol car to the police station on his motorbike. What he did not expect was to find the station packed with other activists rounded up in a general sweep and to be detained for well over the 48 hours permitted, and subjected to intense questioning. He certainly did not foresee that he would never return home.
For 3 days and nights, Pinelli was interrogated relentlessly in the office of Police Commissioner Luigi Calabresi. He was denied sleep, denied a lawyer, and subjected to psychological pressure to confess to a bombing he didn't commit.
Then, at midnight on December 15 1969, Giuseppe Pinelli fell from a 4th floor window of the police headquarters and died on the pavement below. Police immediately claimed he jumped in a moment of guilt confessing to the bombing just before his suicidal leap.
But the evidence told a different story. Pinelli's body showed injuries inconsistent with suicide. Witnesses reported hearing screams and sounds of struggle before the fall. The window was small and high making an accidental fall nearly impossible. Most damning Pinelli had an airtight alibi for the bombing and later investigations proved the explosives used were military grade TNT unavailable to anarchist groups.
According to the authorities present at the interrogation (Guida and Calabresi), he managed to jump all the chairs, tables etc in the way and jump out of the window and killed himself. They also had various testimonies that changed every day, one day they said that he jumped without saying a word, another day they said that he jumped yelling "anarchy is dead", another day they said that he had been extremely happy and joked a lot, the day after that the police declared that he had been in constant pain which is how they justified the fact that they called the ambulance 15 minutes before he was found dead outside the building.
Giuseppe Pinelli didn't commit suicide. He was murdered by police to silence an innocent man being framed for state sponsored terrorism. His death, later called the first victim of the Strategy of Tension beyond the 17 killed at Piazza Fontana, exposed the Italian state's willingness to kill its own citizens to maintain the false anarchist narrative and protect the real neo fascist bombers.
On December 20th Giuseppi Pinelli's funeral was attended by more then a thousand people in Milano, Italy. The funeral was a mass demonstration in protest at the police murder of the anarchist rail worker as part of the strategy of tension.
These events sent a shock wave throughout Italy. There were demonstrations, articles in the press, inquires, etc. In 1971, the policemen in charge of the investigation, Calabresi, was charged with manslaughter. Calabresi, in turn, launched a lawsuit against Lotta Continua, the newspaper who had exposed many of the inconstancies in the police version of events. These came to an end in May on 1972 when Calabresi was assassinated in front of his house by 'unknown assailants.'
Elio Petri, Italy’s greatest political film director of the 1970s, would make a two-part investigative documentary on the death of Giuseppe Pinelli entitled Documents on Pinelli. Petri, actor Gian Maria Volonte’ and screenwriter Ugo Pirro would continue to collaborate throughout the decade in a series of films based on political and social issues.
It was a generation of journalists who began to uncover and reveal many of the details of Piazza Fontana and the death of Pino Pinelli in police custody (alongside the subsequent legal persecution of another innocent anarchist, Pietro Valpreda).
Camilla Cederna's book Pinelli: A Window Onto the Massacre is still a model of investigative reporting even though it was originally published less than two years after Piazza Fontana and Pinelli’s death in police custody.
But in June 1970, a book coming from outside of the traditional field of journalism would have a powerful impact on a whole generation. Selling more copies than all other volumes on Piazza Fontana and the Pinelli case put together, the volume entitled A State Massacre offered what the authors, a group of militants from the extra-parliamentary Left, would call a ‘counter-investigation’.
Indeed, such a samizdat-like publication by a small unknown publishing house would capture in its title the essential truth of what decades of judicial investigation would later gradually reveal. That this was, in effect, a state-sanctioned massacre, whereby significant state actors and agencies were either complicit or, in some cases, actively involved in the campaign of terror during the late sixties and throughout the seventies.
Pinelli was posthumously cleared of playing any part in the bombing, and on 13 March 1995, after more than 25 years and countless court cases and appeal hearings, Judge Salvini indicted 26 Italian neo-fascists and secret service officers for their role in the Piazza Fontana massacre. Several of their number were sent to prison. It was not until 2009 that the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano paid tribute to "an innocent man who was twice victim, first of very heavy and unfounded suspicions, and then of a sudden and absurd end "
Dario Fo, one of Italy's best known playwrights used these events as inspiration for his political satire and controversial play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist . In the play, which he presents as a farce, Fo sends up the police as slow and dim-witted, tricked by a fast-talking fraudster known as The Maniac, who employs a series of impersonations to confuse the officers, into contradicting themselves and revealing that there has been a cover-up involving the death of an anarchist.
Still performed today, it is the best known of all Fo's 80-plus plays, certainly outside Italy. It has been performed in more than 40 countries.
Giuseppe "Pino" Pinelli is also remembered by Enrico Baj's painting Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli. It is a large scale mixed-media twelve meter long installation which encompasses an entire wall and moves out onto the floor.
The work makes direct reference to Carlo Carrà's 1911 Futurist painting The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, which is the earlier artist's most famous work.
The work was created for the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Therein the work was set to be displayed in the Great Hall of Caryatids of the palazzo, in the spring of 1972 but on the day of its opening, the Police Commissioner of Milan Luigi Calabresi was assassinated by members of Lotta Continua and the exhibition was delayed indefinitely.
The work was finally exhibited at the Palazzo Reale in the summer of 2012 and again at the palazzo on the occasion of the 2024 retrospective of Baj's work honoring the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The work has been exhibited at the Museo del Novecento in Milan since February 2025.[6] The work is also partly based on Pablo Picasso's mural Guernica.
A plaque honouring Giuseppe Pinelli placed by friends
