1968 - youth unrest and democratic culture

Italy and 1968

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Italy and 1968

Youthful Unrest and Democratic Culture

Stuart J. HilwigProfessor of History, Adams State College, USA

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© Stuart J. Hilwig 2009

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First published 2009 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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For Charlotte, Jack, and Xandra

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vii

Contents

List of Figures viii

Preface ix

1 Introduction 1

2 The Italian Student Revolts, 1967–68 12

3 The Case of Turin I: Defending the Ivory Tower 34

4 The Case of Turin II: A City Reacts from Precinct to Parish 58

5 The National Dimension I: Constructing an Image of Protest 80

6 The National Dimension II: Italy’s Politicians Confront the Issue of University Reform 114

7 Conclusion: Revolution or Rebellion? 131

Notes 141

Bibliography 170

Index 179

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viii

Figures

2.1 “Hippy Dance” in Rome 27 2.2 Women on top: “Belle Ragazze” demonstrate in Turin 31 2.3 “No to Sexual Repression” 32 5.1 “The Bramantesco Gate turned into a place of battle” 88 5.2 “The Battle of the Valle Giulia” 90 5.3 Protesters in Turin’s Corso Vittorio 92 5.4 “A group of students shout during a demonstration in the

Piazza Solferino” 97 5.5 “The failed march of the filocinesi” 98 5.6 Italian flower children: Rebels or pranksters? 103 5.7 “Daddy’s Girl” Laura DeRossi after her release from jail 105 5.8 “An Important Moment of Democratic Action in the

University” 109 5.9 Laura DeRossi and Luigi Bobbio reunited after her release

from jail 1105.10 The Left’s view of the police 111

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ix

Preface

My interest in Italian history began in high school when I took a part-time job in a pizzeria owned by a Sicilian immigrant. Watching my boss as he cut the form of a cross in the pizza dough or as he unveiled some of the mysteries of Italian cooking, I could not help but be drawn to the culture that my mother’s side of the family, the Fiores, had long since abandoned after coming to America at the turn of the last century. At Vanderbilt University, I pursued an interest in Italian language and European history and somewhat belatedly became a scholar. Fortunately, the History Department at Ohio State University was willing to offer me admission to their graduate program and I ultimately earned both a Masters and Doctorate degree in Modern European history.

While at Ohio State, as I sifted through the mountains of books on 1968, I hit upon the central idea of this manuscript; a view of the Italian student revolt from the perspective of the so-called establishment. Realizing that a massive hole existed in both the academic and popular literature on the era, I sought to find out what university professors, parents of activists, cops, journalists, factory workers, priests, and politi-cians thought of the radical students. Frequently neglected in the mem-oirs and academic studies of the 1960s, I sensed that there was a much more complex story behind the non-students’ response to the Sessantotto (Italian ’68) than the literature suggested. Needless to say, my decade long odyssey in researching the establishment’s role in the Sessantotto reveals a varied and sharply divided array of memories and experiences to what was the Italian Republic’s greatest period of civil unrest since 1945. The Italian peoples’ understanding of the 1968 phenomenon, as in other countries, continues to be heavily influenced by the mass media. This study also sheds light upon the role of the press in constructing a mythic 1968 that is both global and local at the same time, fiercely divisive and also transcendent, and still fascinatingly controversial.

In 1998, at a conference organized by the Gramsci Institute and Johns Hopkins University’s center in Bologna entitled “The roots of the crisis,” I presented a paper on the establishment’s response to the student revolt of 1968. To my dismay, my work was deemed an apology for the foes of the sixty-eighters. Though this reading was far from my intention, I continued to work on the response of non-students to the university upheavals of the late 1960s. Three years later, I published a short article based on interviews

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with the parents of student activists that has helped to reveal the gray zone that truly exists between the activists and the so-called establishment.

Finally in 2008, forty years since the “year that rocked the world” it seems that scholars are willing to peer across the barricades and see what non-students had to say about the student rebels who seized campuses and headlines in 1968. A recent series of conferences on European Protest Movements sponsored by the European Commission has done much to promote a new generation of scholars working on 1968 and many are beginning to step across the barricades that not only divided the genera-tions forty years ago, but have also divided scholars studying the student movements ever since. This study is neither an apology nor a condemna-tion of the establishment’s role in the Italian student uprising of 1968; it is simply, in the spirit of Marc Bloch, a search for understanding. Having been born in 1968, I was too little to carry a banner or march against injustice but like many of my generation, I still stare in awe at old photographs of the Civil Rights marchers, the Vietnam protesters, and those who took to the streets from Paris to Prague, Tokyo to Turin, and everywhere between.

My research has taken me back and forth across the Atlantic and I have many people to thank on both shores. In the United States, my first debt of gratitude goes to my family who nourished my interest in history since 1968: my wife, Stephanie; children, Charlotte, Jack, and Xandra; my mother, Constance (Fiore) Hilwig; grandmother, Birdella Tiffany; and brothers, Greg and Jason. At Ohio State University, many people helped to shape this manuscript, first and foremost, my doctoral advisor, Carole Fink, whose insight, patience, and humanity made it all possible. Also at Ohio State this work benefitted tremendously from the help of Claudio Fogu, Leila Rupp, John S. Hill, Frederic Spencer, Lawrence Bell, and Robert Zalimas. At Adams State College, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of History, Government and Philosophy, and the School of Arts and Letters who have encouraged my research and teaching inter-ests since 2000. Also my students at Adams State, through their questions and insights, have made me a better scholar.

On the other side of the ocean, I would like to thank the encouraging words and assistance of Luisa Passerini, Silvia Bossi, Angelo Galeano, Davide Borsa, Cristin Visentin, Marco Scavino, Peppino Ortoleva, Nicola Tranfaglia, Robert Lumley, and John Foot. In Italy, one does not study contemporary history so much as one lives contemporary his-tory and I especially want to thank the individuals who allowed me to interview them in 1997 and 2002. These conversations proved not only invaluable for my research but have become some of the most cherished moments of my life. Because of these people, traveling to Italy will always feel like a homecoming to me.

x Preface

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1

1Introduction

Historians are often captivated by certain years that mark great begin-nings and endings or seem to epitomize the Zeitgeist of a particular era. Most notable among these mystical annum that are celebrated almost to the point of personification are the years of revolutionary upheaval: 1776, 1789, 1848, and 1917. Academics and non-academics speak of a “Spirit of ’76,” the French briefly made 1789 the year 1 in the revolu-tionary calendar, Italian and German nationalism was said to have been “born” in 1848, and for the Russian and Mexican people, a new society was created in 1917. In the last third of the twentieth century, the year 1968 joined the ranks of the historically magic dates of revolution.1 During that year, an explosion of civil unrest occurred across the globe. From Tokyo to Paris to Mexico City, protesters flooded onto university campuses and city streets to challenge the reigning order. Politically, this assault on the ruling political systems failed, as the unrest was put down almost as quickly as it arose. Nowhere was this “last great wave of European revolutions that followed World War I” more inexplicable than in Western Europe, where stable democratic governments and general prosperity should have been an antidote to rebellious impulses.2

This book contributes to the literature on the student rebellion of the 1960s in three key ways. First of all, in contrast to previous works that have focused almost exclusively on the activists themselves, this study looks at the response of the so-called establishment to the dem-onstrations in Italy in order to analyze the wider social, political, and cultural repercussions of the student uprising.3 The reason much of the existing literature has centered upon the activists is due, in part, to its autobiographical nature and also due to the methodological approaches taken by scholars. Many researchers have employed theories from social science in their analyses of the student movements of the 1960s and

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2 Italy and 1968

although these studies have yielded new perspectives and a greater academic understanding of the 1968 phenomena, they still leave out the response to the students. Historian Wilfried Mausbach has pointed out that “social movement theory can not detail the impact of protest on political decision-making. By its very nature it is mostly uninterested in and often ignorant of the so-called establishment.”4 Others have also noted that scholars rarely consult government archives when analyz-ing the political response to the student movements.5 By looking to the other side of the barricades, at the response to student activism on the part of parents, the press, local and national politicians, workers, professors, police, the church, and ordinary citizens, this study offers a new perspective by which to judge the impact of the student rebellion of the sixties.

One of the chief difficulties in exploring the establishment’s response to protest is the paucity of written sources. Unlike the protagonists who wrote, and continue to write, extensively on the student revolts, ordi-nary citizens have left few records of their thoughts or involvement with student protesters during the late 1960s. Aside from journalists’ articles in the press and the published speeches of politicians, only a handful of parents, professors, and workers have written about their involve-ment with the student movement. The majority of the members of the establishment have not “gone on record,” leaving a crucially important perspective on the student revolts shrouded in silence. This work makes use of personal testimony and the techniques of oral history to recover these lost voices of the Sessantotto. Furthermore, oral history enables the scholar to understand facets of contemporary history that cannot be gleaned from the written record. Historian Giovanni De Luna has argued that the youth revolt of the 1960s, in particular, bears the stamp of orality and any study of the period must attempt to reconstruct the unwritten record of the Sessantotto.6

Second, this study seeks to return the student upheavals to their national and local context by examining the ways that the Italian people dealt with student unrest. It will focus on the city of Turin during the tumultuous years 1967 and 1968, and then compare this local case with the larger national reaction to protest in the pages of the Italian press and in the speeches of Italy’s politicians in Rome. This approach differs from much of the literature that has tended to lean more heavily upon the international dimensions of the 1960s student revolts and seeks to balance the global causes of student revolt with a thorough investiga-tion of local and national aspects of student activism.7 Perhaps a more nuanced way to understand the period is to say that the rebels were


Introduction 3

called to action by local issues but shared global sentiments. This inter-mingling of local and global forces is aptly captured in historian Mark Kurlansky’s recent book on 1968 where he notes, “people were rebelling over disparate issues and had in common only that desire to rebel, ideas about how to do it, a sense of alienation from the established order, and a profound distaste for authoritarianism in any form.”8 The various stu-dent movements communicated with each other indirectly through the press and television enabling them to share slogans, tactics, and goals internationally and instantaneously.9 A recent edited volume on the transnational dimensions of the student revolt confirms the existence of linkages among different student New Left groups across Europe but also concedes that “Even though anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and international solidarity were diffuse but common elements of the cogni-tive orientation of these movements, specific national issues generally determined the characteristics of protesters.”10 Similarly, Arthur Marwick has written that although the student movements could be deemed “transnational,” the protesters’ actions in 1967–69, “usually related to specific local situations, and [were] accordingly, less ‘transnational.’”11

Italy’s movimento studentesco was most certainly part of this transna-tional phenomenon but it is also important to look at the particular local and national forces that influenced and motivated the activists. What made the various student movements unique was the interplay between global and local influences and in the Italian case, one must explore the meaning of the “global ’68” against a backdrop that included a history of fascism and resistance, war and rebuilding, regionalism and massive demographic change, and Catholicism and communism. By analyzing provincial Turin rather than more cosmopolitan places such as Paris, West Berlin, or Berkeley, this dissertation seeks to reconnect the events of 1968 to local and national history.12

Third, this work deepens our understanding of the student revolts of the 1960s by including the role of the press in shaping the course of the student movement and the establishment’s response to it. There are only a handful of studies that focus upon the students’ interactions with the media and very few that analyze the press’ impact upon non-students during the late 1960s.13 This work not only explores the ways that the popular press in Italy framed the image of the student dem-onstrators and goaded activists into more extreme forms of protest but also the affect that the press’ representations of the student movement had upon non-students. For many members of the establishment and observers of the student movement, the images and rhetoric of the press is what would become the Sessantotto (’68) in their collective memories.14


4 Italy and 1968

The pervasive power of the press to shape attitudes and realities has been well documented by scholars,15 and oral historians and cultural anthropologists have noted that the words and images circulated by the media often become the stuff of popular myths that are incorporated into personal recollections of the past. Anthropologist Ruth Finnegan has argued that “Myths and images current in particular epochs or in particular cultures themselves affect family and individual memories, and shape the ways they represent the past, even their own experi-ences.”16 For those watching from across the barricades, the popular press became not only a filter for information about the student move-ment but also a creator of alternate narratives of student rebellion. For Italians, the press’ images of the student movement were deeply embed-ded within a historical context that could be used by the conservative or left-leaning press to either condemn or applaud the actions of the students. These real or imagined links that the press used to connect student actions with the Fascists, Third World revolutionaries or anti-Fascist Resistance fighters found their way into the public utterances of Italy’s politicians and the consciousness of its citizens. As a common thread throughout this study, the role of the press provides a fascinat-ing counterpoint to the documentary evidence of the establishment’s response to the student revolt.

The West European student movements of the late 1960s arose from a multitude of causes. Despite a remarkable era of postwar peace and prosperity, a vocal element of those born after the Second World War had become dissatisfied by the mid-1960s. On an international level, they were appalled at what they considered the US neocolonial war in Vietnam, the dictatorial Colonels’ Regime in Greece, and the Manichean politics of the Cold War. Writing at the end of that tumul-tuous decade, philosopher Hannah Arendt remarked that much of the younger generation’s anger and frustration with their political leaders stemmed from the fact that they were the first people to come of age after the invention of the atomic bomb.17 Closer to home, students in Italy, France, and West Germany were saddened by the continued poverty amid the growing affluence, epitomized by the poor migrants from the southern reaches of Europe who came to toil in the factories of Turin, Milan, Lyon, and Stuttgart. Middle-class students in Italy’s universities also became aware of the frightening disparities in educa-tion and material comforts that still divided urban and rural Italians.18 Italian, French, and West German students in particular, were weary of the politically conservative and sclerotic governments that had arisen after the war to assure domestic peace and combat communism.


Introduction 5

Rejecting both the West’s Christian Democracy and the East’s Stalinism, they sought a third way in New Left Marxism inspired by Third World revolutionaries and the philosophers of the Frankfurt school. Many also adopted the counterculture’s rejection of bourgeois lifestyles.

As their frustration over the global causes of injustice grew, it would be a local issue that ignited this quiet rage into full-blown protest and rebellion. The students needed to look no further than their own universities which were outdated, elitist, and completely incapable of coping with the flood of enrollments made possible by the postwar economic boom.19 The first rumblings of protest for university reform in Western Europe occurred in 1965 in Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany and continued to flare up until the autumn of 1967 when campuses all over Europe experienced the occupations of university buildings and street demonstrations. The unrest culminated in the spring of 1968 with demonstrations and street fighting in nearly every major city of the world, highlighted by the spectacular occupation of the Latin Quarter in Paris by students and workers.

The democratic governments of Europe crushed the physical and political threat to the established authorities with police repression. Although the activists failed to topple any governments in 1968, Charles de Gaulle and the Grand Coalition in West Germany were voted out the following year. In Italy, a series of unstable center-left governments did attempt to address the problems of the students and workers with vary-ing degrees of success. Though the student rebellions failed to radically transform the political landscape in any of their respective nations, they did succeed in reshaping the realms of cultural and social relations. In Italy, the student rebellion of 1968 helped prepare the ground for the massive labor strikes in 1969 that achieved significant gains for indus-trial workers, led to the passage of some university reforms, and marked the beginning of a women’s movement that eventually secured the legal right of divorce in 1974.20

While the barricades were still being cleared, academics and non-academics sought to understand the student revolt. Motivated by per-sonal political sympathies and, in some cases, their desire to participate in the movements, these scholars sought to provide a real time under-standing of the youth revolts while students marched in the streets. French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre welcomed the student revolt as the New Left’s first social movement and collaborated with the eminent English philosopher Bertrand Russell in condemning the US war in Vietnam.21 Another supporter of the New Left, the French sociologist Alain Touraine, offered one of the first academic analyses of the period


6 Italy and 1968

claiming that the student movement was simply a reaction against the technocratic world of the postwar era and the vanguard of a new prole-tariat that would sweep away the inequalities of mass society.22 Similar to Touraine, the Italian Communist politician and writer Rossana Rossanda saw in the student explosion a refusal among Italy’s students to be drawn into the capitalist machine and the emergence of a new form of class struggle.23 The youth revolt also prompted the response of harsh critics such as the liberal political theorist Raymond Aron, who claimed the stu-dents seemed to be ridiculous actors in a poorly-rehearsed revolution that trampled upon civil liberties.24 The social philosopher Jürgen Habermas initially sympathized with student activists and then later labeled them as “left-wing fascists.”25

By the early 1970s, the student movement still simmered throughout the industrialized world but it was clear that it had already peaked and had begun to splinter into a multitude of diverse social movements. An increasing number of scholars from a variety of disciplines weighed in on the student revolt, building their own proverbial barricades in a growing field of literature on student activism. But the canvas was still not dry, the actors of 1968 were still taking their curtain calls, and the attempts to provide scholarly explanations for the sudden and seemingly inexpli-cable outburst of student unrest tended to echo either the students or their adversaries. In general, political scientists and sociologists provided the first theories on the events of 1968. These social scientists laid the groundwork for a structural understanding of student protests that still influences the literature of today. Interpreting the student protests as the symptom of a systemic crisis within postwar society, these scholars tended to see the student upheavals as the culmination of a generational conflict that reached a boiling point in 1968. They argued that the “baby boom” of the postwar period had produced an inordinately large cohort of adolescent and college-aged youth by the mid-1960s. They further theorized that in comparison with their parents who had lived through the Great Depression and Second World War, the “baby boomers” shared less in common with their parents than any other generational cohort in history. The relative comfort and stability of the postwar years made it possible for the students to turn their natural propensity for rebellion and change against their elders causing the protests at the end of the decade.26

In the 1980s, the idea of generational conflict still informed much of the work on the student revolt but many scholars began to add other factors to the equation arguing that a number of causes had been building since the 1950s reaching a flashpoint in 1968.27 With the twentieth anniversary


Introduction 7

of the 1968 revolutions, more complex hypotheses emerged, often com-bining the theory of generational cleavage with causes of student unrest rooted in national political crises and outrage against the war in Vietnam.28 The year 1988 also saw the appearance of the first revisionist critiques. In an article that appeared in Telos, historian Paul Piccone took a critical swipe at the previous works on the student revolts claiming that their authors had been caught up in a spirit of creative mythmaking. The desire to mythologize the year 1968 stemmed from the desire of former activists to glorify their youths as they approached middle age. Furthermore, he claimed that the media had not only inflated the importance of student protests, but also created the myth of an international student revolt by connecting, what Piccone claimed were, unrelated events such as the protests in Paris with those against the Vietnam War in the United States. For Piccone the real source of the student protests was to be found in the separate and unique national conditions in 1968.29 Although missing the important nexus between national and international events, Piccone’s essay did point out the fact that much of the literature on the student protests was autobiographical and that few national studies existed to test the validity of the global explanations for the student upheavals in 1968. What was still missing in the 1980s, however, was an investigation of non-student sources to ascertain the larger reaction to the students’ challenge to the postwar society.

In the 1990s, scholars continued to posit a variety of theories for the student upheavals, seeking to emphasize global developments such as the rise of the New Left, the ideological and inspirational influence of Third World revolutionaries and social theorists from the Frankfurt School, and the slowdown of the global economic miracle.30 Along with these international developments, increasing attention was paid to national crises such as the struggles for university reform and political change.31 A good example of this effort to combine international and regional analysis is the political scientist Donatella Della Porta’s com-parative study of social movements in Italy and West Germany. In this work, she claims that young people in Italy and West Germany often imitated America’s postwar counterculture but their political protests were uniquely European.32 In the third decade after 1968, there were also conferences and collaborative volumes.33 The literature produced in the 1990s has been more eclectic as scholars have begun to investi-gate cultural sources such as the cinema, music, and fashion.34 However, as in the past, the work has tended to be “activist-centered” offering barely a glimpse of the broader societal response to the actions ofstudent protesters in the 1960s.35


8 Italy and 1968

In 2000, with the arrival of the new millennium, the student rebel-lions of the 1960s could presumably become events from the last century and thus the subjects of detached academic study. The English title of Wolfgang Kraushaar’s monograph 1968 as Myth, Cipher and Caesura indicates that the eventful year is now one to be debunked or decoded rather than recorded as nostalgic memory.36 Though many former activ-ists continued to publish on the subject of the 1968 protests, a growing number of younger scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to offer evidence and explanations for the year that “rocked the world.”37 Following Arthur Marwick’s lead, a number of scholars began to look at the unique cultural and intellectual causes of the 1960s youth revolts.38 Other scholars began to look at the student movements’ connections with the later protest movements and organizations of the 1970s.39 Still other researchers continue to probe the international connections between the various movements of the 1960s.40 Taken together, these recent trends suggest that the 1968 student movements have become the subject of serious academic study as scholars have widened their focus beyond the activists and are beginning to look at the response and influ-ence of non-student actors in shaping the events of the late 1960s.

Turning our attention to Italy, the scholarship on the Sessantotto has followed these broader trends and has been characterized by similar academic debates among scholars of modern Italian history. Like the literature on the student movements elsewhere, scholars of the Italian student movement have sought to uncover the roots and causes of the protest movements at the end of the 1960s. Some have claimed that the old, endemic problems of Italian society reemerged in the 1960s after having lain dormant during the years of fascism. These theorists claim that the student demonstrations simply reignited old tensions that had existed within Italy since the early twentieth century. Still others view the student explosion as a uniquely postwar phenomenon. These scholars argue that the massive and disorienting changes in the Italian political system and daily life wrought by the miracolo economico led to the explosion of youthful unrest.

Those scholars who focus on the long-term continuities within Italian history locate the roots of the university crisis in the political and economic conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Echoing the voices of the students themselves, the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has claimed that the Italian students finally revolted against the traditional, “almost feudal” university structure in order to force it to adapt to a modern society.41 The sociologist Sidney Tarrow has placed the upheavals of the late 1960s within a larger historical cycle of “parabolas


Introduction 9

of protest” that have run through contemporary Italian history. Tarrow claimed that the 1965–75 decade of unrest resembled the years of civil unrest 1919–20, the so-called Red Years, when communists and fascists fought each other on the streets of Italy’s cities.42 A recent volume has also compared the late 1960s to the years immediately preceding the Fascist takeover and focuses upon the workers and students’ struggles during these two periods.43 These theorists emphasize the persistence of pre-modern structures in the Italian universities and the importance of the fascist legacy, which, as we shall see, became a significant issue among the students and the Italian public.

Leading the other group of scholars who stress the role of postwar changes in Italian society is the historian Robert Lumley. He has studied the civil unrest in Milan and has stressed the changes since the Second World War, including the large numbers of southern immigrants who participated in the industrial strikes of 1969. Lumley also attaches great importance to the Catholic Church’s Vatican II that attempted to recon-cile differences between Catholics and the Italian left thereby weakening the Christian Democrats’ hold on political power. Pope John XXIII’s calls for an understanding between the Italian left and right also prompted many Catholics to join their socialist and communist coworkers in the massive strike wave that spread across Italy in 1969. Paul Ginsborg, the noted historian of contemporary Italian society, has also argued that the Italian student rebellion emerged from the new conditions of the 1960s. These included the appearance of New-Left Marxism and of Catholic Action initiatives, the failure of traditional political parties to break the inertia of parliamentary government, and the impact of interna-tional events such as the Vietnam War and the military dictatorship in Greece.44 Historians Jan Kurz and Marica Tolomelli have emphasized the “devastating effect on society” brought on by the economic miracle and its role in widening the generation gap between those born after the war and their parents’ generation.45 For these scholars, the civil unrest in the 1960s was directly related to the expanding economy and demographics of postwar Italy.

Former participants, as in other countries, have tended to dominate the literature on the years of students’ protest and a recent volume notes the predominance of former activists writing on the Italian ’68 and the large number of memoirs on the topic.46 In 1988, one of the centers of the student rebellion, the University of Turin, became the meeting place for a conference on 1968 and resulted in a collection of essays representing the first academic attempt to analyze the eventful year. That edited volume, La cultura e i luoghi del ’68, includes both local


10 Italy and 1968

and international studies as well as explorations of the “cultures” of the student movements.47 Prominent among the authors are a number of former participants who are currently professors at the University of Turin and their essays are primarily focused upon the students but the work does represent a turn toward viewing the Sessantotto as a period of historical study.48 In their work, one finds both academic analysis and reflections based upon their personal experiences of the student movement. Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation stands as a forceful example of this literature. Combining oral history of former Italian student protesters with her own contemporary diary entries, Passerini has written a work that is both academic and polemic. Its format manifests a “1960s” quality by actively combining the personal and the political. In essence, Passerini has claimed that the acquisi-tion of power and the liberation of oneself from old hierarchies lay at the center of the student rebellion.49 Luigi Bobbio, a former leader of the student movement and now an attorney, gave an intellectual and cultural interpretation of the unrest, arguing that the upheavals were motivated by the loss of belief in the idea of progress. According to Bobbio, this idea had been dispelled by the atomic bomb and the US war in Vietnam.50 Marco Revelli has argued that the central issue was the struggle for power in the universities and in the larger national structures.51 And lastly, Peppino Ortoleva interpreted the student rebellions first and foremost as efforts to create a new cultural syn-thesis and social framework, and only secondarily, as movements for political change.52 Unlike other scholars who have cited pragmatic causes for the student uprising located in either the pre- or post-war Italian past, these Turin scholars have offered ethical and global rea-sons for the student protests, suggesting their continued adherence to generational, idealistic, and cosmopolitan interpretations of the 1960s youth rebellion.53

From this survey of the scholarly work on the Italian ’68, two trends seem clear. There were undoubtedly several causes for the student unrest ranging from international to national to local concerns. Most scholars have contextualized the demonstrations as expressions of either pre- or post-war Italian developments. However, the existing historiography of the Sessantotto lacks balance due to the predominance of works written by articulate and influential former activists who have achieved posi-tions within the university and public life.54 Their recollections, which often present positive assessments of the movements and exaggerate the role of the student leaders, ignore the views and the responses of non-activist students as well as of the “other side.”


Introduction 11

Some more recent works have begun to investigate the “other side,” focusing on those the students actively sought to mobilize, the work-ers. Historians Marica Tolomelli, Diego Giachetti, and Gerd-Rainer Horn have all written on the Italian student movement’s often problematic relationship with the working class.55 Sociologist Liliana Lanzardo, a former activist at the University of Turin has published an excellent chronology of one of the student working groups’ efforts to mobilize FIAT workers.56 This interest in the workers is a logical avenue for research given the scholarship’s previous student-centered trajectory. The workers were, after all, supposed to be the students’ allies and prin-cipal beneficiaries of the revolution that they were leading at the end of the 1960s. The existence of numerous student-worker groups in Italy such as Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua attests to the linkages between the universities and the factories in 1968.

Beyond these studies of the student movement’s relationship with the working class, the literature remains silent. Almost nothing has been writ-ten on the views of those the students called the “establishment:” police, professors, the clergy, parents, politicians, journalists, or ordinary citi-zens who most certainly interacted with the student activists and whose response undeniably shaped the goals, tactics, and events of the student rebellion.57 This work fills this lacuna by initially examining the residents of Turin, a city that found itself convulsed by student protest during the Sessantotto, so that it will be possible to weigh the interpretations of the former Turin activists against the views of the establishment. Also by look-ing at the other side’s response to the student movement, one can more fully understand the broader repercussions the students had upon the Italian people. Moving from a case study of the Turinese response to student rebellion, this book will examine the national response to student demon-strations and occupations as expressed by Italy’s political leaders and the press. Focusing on the Parliamentary debates over university reform, this study will elucidate the role that Italy’s leaders played in the Sessantotto. An examination of Italy’s major newspapers will help us to understand the role the media had in framing a multitude of Sessantottos in the late 1960s. Ultimately, what Luisa Passerini has written about the activists can also be said of the establishment: “there are as many 1968s as there are individual destinies, and the mark left by the real ’68 is not uniform.”58


12

2The Italian Student Revolts, 1967–68

The roots of the crisis: The Italian universityand society since 1945

Most scholars would agree that the initial spark that ignited thedemonstrations in Italy’s universities at the end of the 1960s came from longstanding ills within academia itself. Italy’s antiquated institutions of higher education reflected the nation’s historic problems of underde-velopment. Symptomatic of this inability of the universities to adapt to changing times was the student rebellion in Trento. The alpine univer-sity became one of the first centers of student revolt precisely because it was the only place one could study sociology in the entire country and thus concentrated a number of highly politicized and socially active students in a small, conservative town. As historian Gerd-Rainer Horn convincingly demonstrates, the Italian government’s initial hesitancy to confer a degree in the subject, led to the first occupation of the university in January 1966.1 This is but one example of the inadequa-cies of these archaic institutions that were revealed during the student movement’s initial demonstrations for educational reform in the mid-1960s. As we shall see, the student movement at first formed to address problems in the universities, but by the end of the decade they had left the campuses to extend their critique into all of society.

More so than their northern neighbors, Italian universities failed to keep pace with the massive economic transformation that had reshaped Italy following the Second World War. The rapid, but uneven growth of the Italian economy in the 1950s distinguished it from the other West European nations by combining elements of distinct modernity with extreme backwardness.2 With the help of Marshall Plan assistance, the postwar Republic of Italy underwent a period of rapid economic


The Italian Student Revolts, 1967–68 13

development similar to the Federal Republic of Germany. Both nations continued to experience growth in productivity of over 4 percent a year in the mid-1960s.3 However, Italy’s “economic miracle” was more radical than Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder in that large areas of Italy in the 1950s were transformed from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. Although starting from a lower base level, Italy registered greater gains than West Germany, its per capita income rising 47 percent from 1950 to 1960 and the national economy producing growth rates of 6 –7 percent a year from 1958 to 1962.4 Almost overnight, the northern industrial triangle of Milan, Turin, and Genoa ballooned in size drawing on cheap southern labor. After Italy entered the Common Market in 1958, this industrial heartland joined its northern neighbors in a wave of economic prosperity, but the rest of the country remained less affected. Italy’s “miracolo economico” failed to improve conditions in the south, the Mezzogiorno. In fact, the burst of industrial productivity in this one region exacerbated the age-old division between north and south by drawing large numbers of primarily male laborers from the Mezzogiorno. Thus, southern Italy continued to languish in an economic torpor that was exacerbated by political corruption and neglect.

The sweeping social changes brought by the Italian economic miracle had scarcely any effect on the political balance of power. Throughout the 1950s, Italy’s Catholic centrist party, the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, DC), maintained coalition governments supported by conserva-tives and liberals. Like their German counterpart, the Italian Christian Democrats tied their nation to NATO, championed the emerging united Europe, and developed a social market economy propelled by several semipublic corporations. The DC worked very hard to discredit the poten-tially powerful Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) which controlled 30 percent of the vote making it the largest communist party in Western Europe.

In tacit recognition of the DC’s declining popularity in the 1962 elections, party leader Amintore Fanfani initiated his famous “opening to the left,” by inviting the Italian Socialists and Social Democrats to form a coalition government to oppose the PCI. The Socialists’ move toward the center and the PCI’s inertia drew many students and disaf-fected socialists to New Left conceptions of socialism. Although the communist and socialist parties had a wide following among workers and intellectuals due to their historic record of antifascism, neither adopted a revolutionary platform, opting to work with government. But, unlike the docile West German trade unions, the antifascist legacy had left residues of militancy among Italian labor.


14 Italy and 1968

Along with the multiplicity of political parties, Italian politics was beset with constant infighting. Consequently, the ponderous structures of the Italian political system remained in a state Giorgio Galli has characterized as “lentocrazia” (“slowocracy”).5 This “lentocrazia” stemmed from the divi-sions among the Italian Socialists who periodically battled among them-selves and also from the mini cold war between the conservative-centrist Christian Democrats and the opposition Communists.6

Consequently, the political leadership ignored the problems of the Italian universities at a time when thousands of middle-class families were finally able to afford to enroll their children in institutions of higher education. Similar to the crises created by over-enrollment that affected West German and French universities at the same time, the wave of students that inundated Italy’s campuses laid bare serious prob-lems within Italian higher education and society. By 1967, overcrowd-ing had become an acute problem. The University of Rome, originally built for 10,000 students, had 63,000 enrolled in 1968.7 In addition to the problems of overcrowding and outdated equipment, the tradition-bound faculty refused to revise curricula to reflect contemporary condi-tions. For example, the political science syllabus at the University of Rome ended with Rousseau. Furthermore, professors in Italy often held political posts far from the university causing them to delegate most of their teaching duties to lecturers and assistants. These problems led to a very low graduation rate and produced students who were ill prepared to face the challenges of the rapidly changing society of the 1960s.8

This growing crisis in the Italian universities forced the government to address issues it had ignored since the end of the Second World War. In May 1965, Minister of Education Luigi Gui offered a series of moderate university reforms.9 The Gui Bill was supported by the majority Christian Democrats and their coalition partner, the Unified Socialist Party.10 The minority Communists, Liberals, and neofascist, MSI, bitterly opposed the coalition’s reform bill. The Communists claimed the bill did not make significant changes, the Liberals argued that Gui’s proposal would limit academic freedom, and the conservative parties feared the government’s plan went too far. The Gui Bill did not propose sweeping changes in the universities but called for modest increases in faculty hiring and more opportunities for working-class students, but it also contained provisions that allowed professors to continue to work outside the university.

The most controversial point of the Gui Bill was the proposed numerus clausus that would solve overcrowding by restricting enrollments in many disciplines. Like their counterparts in West Germany and France, the Italian government had simply chosen the least expensive and presumably easiest



way to deal with the exploding number of university applicants in the 1960s. The Italian students, like their colleagues in West Berlin and Paris, interpreted this clause as an attempt by the national government to limit opportunities for working-class students. The opposition Communists, Liberals, and neofascists successfully blocked the passage of the Gui Bill, and with it, any initiative for university reform from above. As legislators harangued each other in the Chamber of Deputies, the two major student associations, the left-wing, Union Goliardica Italiana (UGI) and the Catholic student association, Intesa, walked out of the National Union of Italian University Students (UNURI) and formed various protest groups to oppose the Gui Bill.11 Though Gui’s proposals did not become law, they did give the students a “measure of their misery” and provided an initial focal point for rebellion within the universities.

When a stalemated government ignored their demands for major university reforms, the Italian students adopted more radical positions. Eschewing their traditional student organizations that had devolved into recruitment centers for their parent political parties, the students came together in general assemblies to make decisions. Historian Giovanni De Luna noted that the formation of the general assemblies in the Italian universities was the first step in the transformation of the student body into a political entity. The general assemblies not only brought together students of different departments who had previously voted separately, but also destroyed the old institutions of student representation. The gen-eral assemblies marked the shift from representative to direct democracy.12 Throughout the peninsula, students demanded a complete reorganization of their universities to solve the problems of overcrowding, inadequate funding, outdated teaching styles, and the authoritarian, almost “feu-dal,” bearing of the professoriate. They blamed the high attrition rate in Italy on an archaic university system that placed too much control of a student’s curriculum in the professor’s hands.13 At many of the northern universities, students attacked the oligarchic structure of academia call-ing the professors “padroni” (masters) or “baroni,” and demanding a more egalitarian relationship between students and their instructors.14 This spirit of antiauthoritarianism further spread to the home with many of the student activists also rebelling against the hierarchical structures in their own families.15

If some students felt themselves to be isolated in their nuclear families, many more felt abandoned by their political parties. The political right had lost its most powerful spiritual leader when Pope John XXIII publicly refused to endorse the Christian Democrats in the 1963 elections and called for a dialogue between Catholics and Communists, thus reversing


16 Italy and 1968

over a half century of fervent papal anticommunism. After the Second Vatican Council loosened many other doctrinal taboos, John XXIII’s political initiative encouraged many Catholic students to join with the socialist and communist students in their battle for university reforms.16 Unlike West Germany or the Northern European countries, where Catholic student organizations competed with Protestant student groups, the over-whelmingly Catholic student body in Italy was heavily influenced by the Second Vatican Council (1962– 65) and John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) that called upon the government to actively work for the improvement of society and the education of all its citizens.17

At the same time that Pope John XXIII was working to reform society from the top-down, a village priest named Don Lorenzo Milani was endeavoring to change Italian education from the bottom-up. His efforts to expose social inequities and improve rural education in Italy would be recorded in a small book, Letter to a Professor. Written in the form of a group of schoolboys describing the poverty and educational inequities of their small Tuscan village, the book inspired many in the student movement to seek educational and social reform.18 Though the Italian students read Mao, Marx, and Marcuse like their counterparts through-out the world, they also had uniquely Italian accounts of social injustice to fuel their rage. According to Robert Lumley, the language of Letter to a Professor had many similarities to Marxist writings and became acommon meeting point for Catholic and left-wing students.19

While the Pope and Don Milani were beginning to implant the seeds of social activism among Catholic students, increasing numbers of students were responding to new political leaders and new conceptions of Marxism. From the students’ point of view, only the ideas of the New Left could fix the old university. The ideology of Italian leftist students offers an excel-lent example of the interplay between both the international and national dimensions of 1968. From beyond their borders, the Sessantottini drew ideas from theorists of the Frankfurt School, and the writings of Lenin, Marx, Mao, and C. Wright Mills.20 Within the peninsula, the student activ-ists borrowed from a rich Marxist tradition that included Antonio Gramsci, and the contemporary theorist, Raniero Panzieri.21 When combined and put into action, the activists created a unique version of the Italian New Left, the Nuova Sinistra.

The New Left rejected old Stalinist notions of communism particularly after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Hungary in 1956. In Italy, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, continued to support the Soviet-led invasion of Hungary pushing many young communists in to the arms of the Nuova Sinistra. Furthermore, Italian students scorned



the PCI’s adherence to a non-revolutionary stance and declaration that the party would work within the democratic system of Italy’s postwar republic. For left-wing students throughout the world, the US naked aggression in Southeast Asia and the Soviets’ hypocritical attack upon their comrades in Eastern Europe belied the moral justification of either Western democracy or Stalinist socialism.

Italian students of the Nuova Sinistra were drawn especially to the examples of Third World communist leaders such as Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung, and Ho Chi Minh.22 This was partly because the millionaire publisher and supporter of Marxist insurgencies, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, had further increased his fortune by printing huge numbers of cheap paperbacks on Marxism and Third World revolutionaries. The tales of the Bolivian rebel Che Guevara and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution instilled a romantic “Terzmondismo” or “Third Worldism” in the rhetoric and ideology of the student New Left. The Chinese Cultural Revolution’s admonition of a continuous revolution against all the hierarchical struc-tures in society came to have particular resonance among Italian students who saw themselves as being only one point in the demolition of the old structures of society. From Mao, the Italian students also learned to resist institutionalizing the revolution and some would adopt violence as a means to achieve their goals.23 They also found parallels between the neocolonialism practiced by the West in the Third World and the exploitative relationship northern Italy exercised over the southern half of the peninsula.24 From Che Guevara, a few of the Italian activists would adopt his Foco theory idea that small groups of guerilla soldiers could spark a mass popular insurrection against the government. Political sci-entist, Marco Revelli, notes that the Turin students consciously adopted a “guerilla culture” mentality after the violent police evacuations of uni-versity buildings in January 1968.25 In general, Terzmondismo imparted an aggressive militancy to many radical students and a sense that their revo-lution must not end in simply changing the structures of the university.

In 1964, the German-born professor of social philosophy at Berkeley, and a key ideologue of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, published his critique of modern society called One Dimensional Man. By 1968, a trans-lated version had become a bestseller in Italy. Marcuse provided the stu-dent Left with a neo-Marxian critique of postcapitalist society. He argued that the comfortable nature of consumer society enabled a small powerful group to manipulate and control the sated masses. He further identified the media as a key instrument in this manipulation of the masses thus giving student activists a target for their attack on consumer society.26 After large numbers of Catholic students joined with the Left, socialist


18 Italy and 1968

and communist students found themselves in leadership roles, and they incorporated many of the New Left ideas in their critical assessments of the university and the larger society. For Italian students the key political enemies beyond the campus were the Communists who refused to take to the streets and the Unified Socialist Party (PSU) who, in joining Fanfani’s government, had allegedly betrayed their revolutionary roots.27

From within the historic trajectory of Italian communism, the stu-dent Left was greatly inspired by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. While in a Fascist prison, Gramsci wrote his major ideas about communism in what later became The Prison Notebooks. Gramsci believed that there could be several different paths to a socialist society and that each nation must adapt the Marxist message to their unique circumstances. Gramsci focused upon the ways that culture reinforced the mentality of capital-ism and theorized that violent, sudden revolution would not be enough to overturn the capitalist system. Instead, Gramsci argued, a “long march through the institutions” was necessary to completely restructure the system.28 In another example of the interplay between the national and transnational nature of the student movements, it was actually the West German student leader, Rudi Dutschke, who called upon student rebels to settle in for a Gramscian “long march through the institutions” rather than a quick seizure of power by the proletariat. The Italian students thus drew upon both their own national tradition of socialist theory that had been reawakened by the leader of the West Berlin student movement.29

Following in Gramsci’s footsteps, Raniero Panzieri, a former editor of the Socialist Party’s journal Mondo operaio and translator of Marx’s major works, elaborated a new doctrine called operaismo in the 1960s. Publishing them in a journal he founded called the Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks), Panzieri sought to revive the essentials of Italian socialism by calling for a return to direct democracy through the general assembly and for the rejection of the large national unions in favor of shop floor organization.30 Panzieri’s theories would become tremendously influen-tial for both students and workers in the 1960s and 1970s and another journal aimed at Italy’s youth, Quaderni Piacentini (Piacenza Notebooks), sought to spread information on the New Left and antiimperialist strug-gles throughout the world.31 Many of the student activists adopted the ideas of Panzieri in 1967–68 when they occupied university buildings and instituted general assemblies.

This catalog of student issues clearly shows that the left-wing stu-dents had begun to speak out about broader issues in Italian society and politics. As in France, West Germany, and the United States, the students’ attack on the university oligarchy was linked with a broad criticism of all



political authority figures. The students adopted New Left politics in defi-ance of the traditional Italian left that had joined the ruling coalition and of the Communist Left that remained in non-revolutionary opposition to the DC since the founding of the republic.32 By spurning the mainstream parties of both the Left and Right, the Italian students challenged the reigning political values and practices of the postwar era.

The university and city besieged, 1966–1968

A review of the major episodes of student unrest will help us trace Italy’s student revolt of the 1960s.33 Isolated student protests against university conditions had occurred in the first half of the decade, but the first inci-dent that catapulted university dissension to national prominence occurred in April 1966 when a young architecture student named Paolo Rossi died in Rome after being caught in the middle of a battle between communist students and neofascist Missini. With the Gui reform proposals serving as a catalyst to politicize the previously apathetic student body, tensions ran high as the students voted in their annual student government elec-tions. At the University of Rome a riot erupted between students follow-ing contested election results. Many believed that Rossi had been killed by neofascist students. Seventy thousand people, including Pietro Nenni, head of the PSI, attended Rossi’s funeral.34 Much like the death of Benno Ohnesorg in West Berlin the following year, Rossi’s death provided a cause for student activists, polarized the extreme left- and right-wing students, and had a national impact as well.

The following spring, protesters at the University of Pisa drew up their “Theses of Sapienza,” comprising a list of university reforms along the lines of Panzieri’s operaismo.35 By the autumn of 1967, communist stu-dents, in the spirit of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, began calling for a policy of direct action for reforms in the universities. In November 1967, build-ings at both the University of Turin and the State University of Milan were occupied by student activists. At Turin, the students invaded the Faculties of Architecture, Humanities, and Education after the Rector and Academic Senate had voted to move the Science Faculties outside of the city to a suburb called La Mandria. This act was seen as an attempt to remove part of the university from its role in civic life.36 In Milan, students occupied buildings to protest a proposed increase in fees.37 By early December, university buildings were also occupied at Trent, Florence, Naples, Pisa, and Genoa, but, the rebellion remained strongest in the northern indus-trial cities. In February 1968, students occupied several buildings at the University of Rome, and by the end of the month, nineteen of the


20 Italy and 1968

thirty-three state universities had been occupied. Although this tactic was repeated by activists throughout Western Europe and the United States, Italian students nostalgically claimed that their conquest of university space was rooted in the factory occupations of the 1920s when workers defied the Fascist regime.38

In truth, the student occupants of 1968 were more akin to the activ-ists of 1848 than to those of the 1920s. Most of them were well-educated children of the bourgeoisie who claimed to speak for the masses. Laura DeRossi, daughter of a wealthy building contractor, who became one of Turin’s most publicized female student leaders, fit the profile of the movement’s leadership.39 Just as Mazzini, claiming to be the father of a New Italy, had attempted to install a populist democracy in Rome in 1848, so the student leaders of the 1960s sought to construct a new sociopolitical order. Remarking on the wealth and academic creden-tials of the New Left activists in the 1960s, sociologist Cyril Levitt has argued that the student movements of the 1960s were essentially revolts of a privileged class against the very society that had provided them with their elite standing, without which no one would have listened to them.40 In November 1967 the activists in Turin drafted a formal Charter of Demands, the Carta di Rivendicativa. These included the right of student representation in the Academic Senate which governed the university, the right to debate professors in class and take courses outside one’s major, the obligation of professors to grade students on col-lective work, and a role for students in determining course curriculums and the allocation of funds within the university.41 Because the professors were accustomed to having total control over their courses and students, these revolutionary demands were opposed by most of the faculty.

The university occupations frustrated university administrators’ attempts to continue normal academic functions. Eventually the rectors called the police in order to remove the protesters. As Seymour Martin Lipset has argued, the forced evacuations signified a drastic change in Italian society’s relationship with its universities, because they destroyed the historic autonomy and sanctity of university buildings and cam-puses. Even the Nazis had respected the independence of the universities when they occupied northern Italy in 1943.42 The police evacuations not only confirmed the activists’ claims that the state was repressive but also strengthened their resolve to continue their actions.43

This conquest of academic space was often as important to the young activists as the conquest of ideological space. Former activist Marco Revelli remarked that the occupation of the Palazzo Campana in the heart of the university and the city gave participants a sense of “euphoria



and power” because they had “carved out a community outside of all traditional groupings.”44 Passerini has noted that the conquest of a major space within the university was not only in defiance of the professors and an emulation of the factory occupations of the past, but also emerged from practical concerns. The Palazzo Campana was the only building with halls large enough for mass meetings and rooms for committee activities. In the heart of the city, the university was centrally located and also close to activists’ homes.45

Diego Marconi, a former occupant of the Palazzo Campana in 1968, recalled the emergence of a counterculture during the period of occupations:

I remember one evening when there was a protest committee, it coincided with supper and so you had to set the table there, in a lecture hall. We set the table and started singing: “Our country is the whole world,” and meanwhile they were cooking stuff, dishing out pasta and it was a very beautiful moment.46

Each attempt by administrators to remove students brought increased incidents of violence. In the early spring of 1968, the students in Turin again set the pace of the student revolt by instituting a series of “white occupations” which were copied at several other universities. During these “white occupations,” groups of students would disrupt lectures and demand that the professor debate them on certain issues. Both Marco Revelli and Luisa Passerini noted how these tactics turned the student movement into a festival in which the students created “spec-tacles” that turned classrooms into stages.47 The white occupations also foreshadowed the violent confrontations between the students and civil authorities that occurred a month later. Serena Nozzoli a former student protester at the State University of Milan recalled:

I had already seen terrorism in 1968. … the feet on the professor’s desk, bringing up Che Guevara as a topic for the economics exam, with this insolent pretense, this arrogance provided by numbers … things slightly reminiscent of Mussolini’s thugs that however, all seemed like revolutionary demonstrations, while I saw in them a type of violence … taking advantage of the mob to do things they wouldn’t have done themselves.48

The attack on the Italian universities that had begun as a series of peaceful occupations eventually gave way to more provocative tactics


22 Italy and 1968

as continued police evacuations caused students to retaliate. The use of violence by the students was infrequent. The leaders were often torn between their two models of revolution; that of Martin Luther King Jr’s Civil Rights Movement and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Peppino Ortoleva has also noted how the student movements fused such diametrically opposed concepts as

the exaltation of violence with the diffusion of the theory and prac-tice of non-violence, militant atheism with a Christianity in search of the original authentic message of Jesus, the exaltation of … “liberty,” and the idealization of Stalinism.49

For Italian students, the industrial workers’ passive resistance to fascism in the 1940s contrasted with the aggressive guerilla tactics of the anti-fascist Resistance of the same time period. For some activists, however, the repressive measures of the police appeared to justify the use of vio-lence in return.

Bomb scares also became part of the university occupations after a rudimentary time bomb was placed in the Faculty of Jurisprudence at the University of Rome in February.50 Another bomb was found in the Faculty of Architecture in the Palazzo Campana at the University of Turin in May 1968 but, like the one in Rome, it did not explode.51 Although the press deemed these “acts of terrorism,”52 none of these devices ever exploded in the universities and no conclusive evidence was ever found linking them to student activists. Had the students intended to use terrorist tactics, they could have destroyed university buildings all over Italy. The bomb scares of 1968 should not be compared with the “anni di piombo” (years of lead) of the 1970s and 1980s when various left and right wing extremists and mafiosi committed political murders and blew up public buildings throughout Italy.53 To be sure, there were reports that activists in Turin, Milan, and Rome had accosted janitors who had been in the buildings during the time of the occupations but there is little evidence that they had ever intended to kill people or destroy public buildings.54

Historians of the Italian student movement, Jan Kurz and Marica Tolomelli, clearly show how the explosive growth of the student move-ment had succeeded in shutting down the nation’s universities:

By late February 1968, tens of thousands of students were on strike, and hundreds of thousands of students were unable to continue their studies in a regular fashion. The universities were blockaded, besieged, or occupied; professors faced locked or empty lecture halls. Instruction



took place on an irregular basis, and exams were postponed or can-celled. For all practical purposes there was no contact between students and teaching staff. Counter-courses, general assemblies and commis-sions, discussions, occupations, and demonstrations had replaced the daily study routine for activists.55

As the students took over their universities and adopted bolder tactics to fight authority within the schools, university administrators and faculty resorted to frequent use of the police to evacuate student activists in the vain hope of restoring order in their classrooms.

The forced evacuations of the universities through the winter of 1968 did not succeed in restoring order but did widen the scope of the student movement by driving the protesters out into the city streets. This move-ment from the protected sphere of the university into the public spaces of urban life represented a further encroachment on Italian civil society. Scholars of the Italian student movement are in agreement that the inva-sion of the public space in February and March 1968 was another crucial turning point in the unrest of the 1960s, because the student protests were no longer solely a “university problem” but a real threat to public order. Just as the Parisian students set up the barricades in the Latin Quarter in May 1968 and West Berlin students marched on the city’s main shopping thoroughfare, the Ku’Damm, the spectacle of students in the streets forced the public to take notice.56 Marco Revelli character-ized this shift from peaceful occupations to street demonstrations as the beginning of the “guerilla phase” of the student movements.57 The period from February to June 1968 witnessed an increasing number of violent confrontations between students and the police. The popular press frequently misrepresented the street demonstrations as chaotic and violent spectacles. Although peaceful street demonstrations had already occurred in Turin and Milan on a small scale through the winter months, the student protests in the streets of Italy’s cities did not receive major press attention until March 1968.

On February 29, police in riot gear forcefully evacuated students from the University of Rome’s Faculty of Architecture located in the Villa Borghese. Regrouping in the Piazza di Spagna, the students first marched to the Italian Parliament’s Palazzo Chigi to protest Minister of Education Luigi Gui’s education reform bill and called for the dismissal of their rector, Pietro D’Avack. The following day, on March 1, the pro-testers decided to retake the Faculty of Architecture and collided with police in the park surrounding the architecture building called the Valle Giulia. The melee that ensued marked a dramatic shift in the tactics of


24 Italy and 1968

the student movement as the students met police attacks with violent reprisals. The press reported that approximately 3,000 students partici-pated in the riots and the initial 150 police had to be reinforced by the carabinieri.58 The famous “Battle of the Valle Giulia” proved to have an effect similar to the student–police battles of the Chicago Democratic Convention riots of 1968.

The popular presses’ coverage of the Battle of the Valle Giulia turned the event into a national spectacle. As documented by Todd Gitlin, the press became a guiding force in the student movement when it became an actor itself. Students throughout Italy took revenge upon the press for its coverage of the events at the Valle Giulia and the press’ silence on the subject of police brutality. On March 7 students in Turin gathered to demonstrate for the release of a student named Avanzini who had been arrested for the occupation and vandalism in the Palazzo Campana. When some workers joined the students, the crowd reportedly reached 5,000 participants. Carrying signs entitled “Italia=Spagna,” the crowd made its way through the center of the city with some participants smashing the windows of La Stampa’s editorial office.

Other student protesters in Florence assaulted the offices of the con-servative daily, La Nazione, which had a major circulation in central Italy.59 Italy’s largest and most antistudent newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, also did not escape unpunished. Demonstrators from the University of Milan made its press offices a frequent target of attack in the spring of 1968. Throughout Western Europe the battle with the conservative press became a common feature of student demonstrations. In West Berlin, students attacked Axel Springer’s editorial offices and in Paris they struck the offices of Le Figaro. The conservative and centrist presses, which had become the voice of a consumer society and the so-called Establishment, was the stu-dents’ chief tormentor and readily available target for their anger.60

The students also vented their rage against the centers of political power. On April 28, 1968, university activists staged a massive demon-stration in Rome in front of the Palace of Justice. They had gathered to protest the incarceration of two students who had been accused of setting fire to an office of Boston Chemical Company, a producer of the flammable napalm jelly used by the United States in the Vietnam War. The protest of April 28, however, quickly became a demonstration against the Italian government, due in part to the impending national elections. The conservative press reported that the demonstration had suddenly turned violent and that the students had resorted to their usual tactics of throwing bottles, overturning cars, and using tables and seats from a nearby café to build barricades.61



By May 1968 the demonstrations in Italy had grown larger and more threatening. The students took to the streets, seemingly in response to the shooting of the student leader Rudi Dutschke in West Berlin dur-ing the Easter holidays and the student–worker protests in Paris. The street battles in Paris during May 1968 were heavily publicized in the Italian press. Parisian students had initially protested for university reforms but eventually turned against de Gaulle’s government and were joined by thousands of urban workers in May 1968.

The student movement’s decline in the late spring of 1968 was due to a number of causes. In part, the movement died precisely because it had successfully shut down the Italian university system. By attack-ing the “sacredness of the professors and the universities,” the activ-ists dispelled the magical atmosphere of rebellion that had existed in the autumn and winter.62 Believing they had won their first victory by defeating the authoritarian structures in their universities, they turned to other conflicts where their prospects of winning seemed less likely. The outcome of the national elections of May 1968 offered little pros-pect of university reform or broader political changes from above thus causing a large number of students to give up the struggle while a small group turned to organizing the growing labor discontent.63 The Roman student movement never regained its mass support after the Battle of the Valle Giulia, and in Milan a handful of students organized the remain-ing activists into an official organization called Il Movimento Studentesco which continued to stage demonstrations into the 1970s.64 In Turin, the student movement lost most of its mass support by the return to classes in the autumn of 1968 and was later eclipsed by the workers’ revolt the following year known as the “Autunno Caldo” (Hot Autumn).

More recently, a series of student demonstrations in the early 1990s resulted in the occupation of the Palazzo Nuovo, the seat of the Faculties of Letters, Law and Education.65 However, the Italian student movement, like its counterparts elsewhere never regained its former size or momentum after 1968. It withered because many of the less committed activists turned their attention away from the university during the summer break. In Turin, the student leaders refocused their attention on the discontented work force at FIAT’s giant Mirafiori plant. By the spring of 1969, the government and press had shifted their attention from the students to the greater problems of labor unrest that culminated in a wave of strikes throughout Italy in the “Hot Autumn.” Ultimately, the disintegration of the center-left coali-tion that began with the general elections of May 1968 ensured that the Gui Bill for university reforms was put on hold and eventually


26 Italy and 1968

dropped. No substantial university reform bill was passed by the Italian Parliament in 1968. Despite the massive amount of publicity generated by the student protests and the dramatic incidents of civil unrest in 1968, the students’ failure to attain any significant reforms suggests that forces of the so-called establishment remained stronger than the movement. However, where the students failed on the issues of politi-cal change and university reform, they did bring large numbers of the middle class on to the side of the Left, shattered the social conformity of the 1950s, and helped spark the great labor movement that struck Italy the following year during months of industrial strikes known as the Autunno Caldo (Hot Autumn) in 1969.66

Traditional values under attack: The counterculturein Italy, 1965–1968

The student activists not only tried to invade and occupy public space in Italy during the 1960s, they also tested traditional values. The bur-geoning youth culture that had spread throughout the west also found its way to Italy as the increased wealth provided opportunities for young people to indulge in new fashions, motorbikes, and Rock-n-Roll music. Along with this consumer culture, came the ideas and attitudes of a counterculture born in the United States. Arthur Marwick has pointed out that the word “counter-culture” had been linked to youth since the term first appeared in March 1968 in an article entitled, “Youth and the Great Refusal” written by American scholar Theodore Roszak.67 The sociologist Lewis Feuer characterized the protests of the late 1960s as simply another cycle of the younger generation’s attempt to humiliate the older generation.68 Similar to Freud’s ideas in Totem and Taboo, the university became the gathering place for the tribal sons to symbolically kill their father figures. However, in 1968, many of the tribal daughters also arrived to undermine their elders.69

Like the other countries of Western Europe, the counterculture’s relaxed attitudes toward life were expressed in its unique clothing, music, and fashion. According to Marwick, the counterculture first officially arrived in Italy in 1965 when long-haired youth from Britain, West Germany, and France, who sought to emulate the British rock band, the Beatles, began to gather in the Piazza beneath the Spanish steps in Rome.

Older Italians living in the cities generally detested these capelloni or “long hairs.”70 Diego Giachetti has noted that during the 1960s the Italian press used the words capelloni, studenti, and estremisti as syno-nyms for the word “giovani” (youth) and that this association was not



without an element of truth.71 The new emerging youth culture did represent an aesthetic of rebellion as much as the students’ placards of Che Guevara and Mao. Many young and college-aged Italians eagerly absorbed the new attitudes of the capelloni, rebelling against traditional society through new forms of dress and dance as seen in Figure 2.1 which shows two participants in a “hippy dance” at a “flower festival” in Rome.72 For the most part however, Italian students continued to dress more conservatively than their counterparts in northern Europe,

Figure 2.1 “Hippy Dance” in Rome (La Stampa, November 29, 1967, p. 5).


28 Italy and 1968

often adopting only small portions of the counterculture’s dress such as blue jeans and “Eskimo” jackets.73

For many of the university activists, the ideas of the counterculture merged with their political convictions.74 Commenting on this nexus of politics and lifestyle, historian Peppino Ortoleva remarked that the revolt of the 1960s was much more than a political protest; it was intended to be a broad cultural revolution in which the terms “Left” and “Right” came to symbolize “Birth” and “Death” respectively.75 Most of the younger generation sided with the Left, and “Birth,” indicating that the political battles of the late 1960s were intimately bound with generational con-flict in Italy. Thus it was inevitable that student leaders who supported the New Left, a movement still in its political infancy, came into conflict with their parents, many of whom had participated in the antifascist Resistance and were partisans of the aging Old Left.

This battle between new and old began first at home. Guido Viale, a leader of the student movement in Turin remembered, “There was a rebellion against the family—against the economic dependence, against the segregation it imposed on the students.” Viale further noted that many activists saw the hierarchy within the Italian family as the building block of an authoritarian society.76 This rejection of the family took even more extreme tones as evident in Fiorella Farinelli’s testimony, “The best poster on the walls of my Faculty (at the University of Pisa) was, ‘I want to be an orphan.’ I shared that feeling, I took a picture of it, I brought the poster home, it was the one I liked best of all.”77 The students’ attacks on their families were extremely jarring. As Joseph La Palombara has argued, because the basic unit of Italian society was the family, any attack on the family was an assault on the basic building block of Italian life.78 Social theorist Giorgio Galli has argued that the counterculture was much more disruptive to Italian society than in the United States or northern Europe, because Italian society had an allegedly stricter moral code based in Catholic doctrine. 79

Members of the clergy also saw the counterculture as a sign of emerg-ing social ills. A priest named Don Mario Canova was so incensed by reports of the counterculture and the behavior of the New Left that in March 1968, he reported to Il Risveglio, a conservative local paper from a suburb of Turin, the following:

In a meeting of New Left-wingers one can find everything: boys dressed like savages, semi-nude girls, bearded people, dirty people, smelly peo-ple, beatniks, marijuana smokers, homosexuals. In conversations with



these followers of the New Left, one hears all kinds of things: swearing, sexual experiences of all types, obscene discussions.80

Don Canova and many others came to associate the youth countercul-ture with ideas of social atavism and disease.

Even more threatening to traditional society was the small, but well-publicized rise in the use of recreational drugs in Italy in the late 1960s. The Church led a strong attack against the emerging use of drugs and its alleged connection to rock-n-roll music. The Osservatore Romano devoted a three column article to “LSD: God of Bacchanalia” on December 1, 1967 coinciding with the first major wave of university occupations. The article claimed that these drug users dropped LSD to evade their social responsibilities and had lost their faith in God.81 By casting the discussion of drug use in terms of a crisis of religious faith, the Church represented the counterculture as an attack on the moral bases of society and thus reminded its readers that the problems of the late 1960s went beyond the realm of the political.

Along with the rise of recreational drug use among young people, the Church also connected American Rock-n-Roll music with moral decay. Historian Peter Hebblethwaite has noted that although the Vatican welcomed the American presence in Europe after the war, it always con-nected the United States with some trends hostile to the Church, such as Freemasonry, Protestantism, and a practical materialism epitomized by Hollywood.82 In the 1960s, the Church feared new trends in secular edu-cation along with changes in popular music. An article in the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano entitled “The Marxism of Progressive Education” linked drugs, rock-n-roll lyrics, and the New Left to the “progressive education” practiced in Western universities and high schools. According to the Osservatore, this “progressive education” from the New World was leading to a rising number of “hippies” in the Old World and beatniks such as Pete Seger and Bob Dylan had used seductive musical lyrics to spread communism and drug use among American and European youth.83 This connection of the counterculture with a communist con-spiracy followed the historic view of the Catholic Church that linked secular communism with a decline in personal morality and the onset of social decay.84

One of the most jarring attacks on traditional views came from female activists whose struggle for sexual and political equality shook the patri-archal bases of Italian society. The sudden appearance of aggressive, politically active women, often marching in the streets without men, came at a time when Italians were also deeply divided over the issue


30 Italy and 1968

of divorce, thereby intensifying sensitive gender issues within Italian society.85 A farcical depiction of gender stereotypes in Italian society, director Pietro Germi’s 1962 motion picture hit, Divorce—Italian Style, evinced the continued cultural biases against divorce within Italian society. The film played upon the old notion that it was harder for a husband to divorce a bad wife than murder an unfaithful one. In 1967, the women’s liberation movement had gained enough supporters to find an audience for a journal entitled, Donna e Società (Woman and Society) and the counterculture’s message of sexual liberation encour-aged many women, particularly those in the university, to take control over their sexuality.86

For a predominantly Catholic nation with circumscribed economic, political, and personal roles for women, the images of women leading protests undoubtedly shocked bourgeois society. The historian Natalie Zemon Davis has written of the visual power and political impact of gen-der role reversal in imagery depicting revolutionary mobs. Seeing young women in leadership roles disturbed all traditional elements of Western society that defined protest and revolution as activities led by men.87 French historian Dominique Godineau noted that during the first days of the 1789 Revolution, “Women sounded the tocsin, beat drums in the streets of the city, mocked the authorities and the military… . They played the role of ‘firebrands.’”88

The national press featured many young “firebrands.” Figure 2.2 shows a crowd of “belle ragazze” (beautiful girls) demonstrating in Turin against the arrest and incarceration of a student evacuated from the Palazzo Campana.89 The smiling group of women in the right back-ground reveals the playful spirit of mocking contempt which Godineau noticed in crowds of revolutionary women and which Luisa Passerini identified as a key component of the Turin demonstrations. Passerini has argued that in order to become emancipated, many of the women activists acted like men and took prominent roles in demonstrations.90 These masculine roles for women not only provided the media with provocative new images for their front pages but also changed the habits and lifestyles of the activists themselves. Media theorist, Kathrin Fahlenbrach has argued that the interaction between the West German student movement and the media ultimately altered both the protest-ers’ tactics and their lifestyles in order to “stage” their demonstrations more effectively.91 Fahlenbrach’s observations on the coevolutionary nature of activist and media interaction fits well with the changing role of women in Italian society that can be traced in part to their presence in the mass demonstrations of the Sessantotto.



The student activists, unlike their elders, embraced the “new woman.” Figure 2.3 shows another playful example of the students’ assault on the prescribed sex roles in Italian society. Possibly influenced by the shock-ing and liberating ideas of the Situationists,92 a banner on the student union at the University of Rome showed a seductive picture of actress Racquel Welch accompanied with the slogan “No to sexual repression.” The banner revealed the typical blending of humor and politics in the students’ critique of Italian mores as they chose to place their radical message next to a well-known actress who symbolized aggressive female sexuality in the late 1960s.93

Despite the gains of women’s liberation in the 1960s, several scholars have noted the continued predominance of patriarchal views within the Italian student movement. The new rhetoric of sexual emancipa-tion frequently became a sophisticated pick-up line, and the leader-ship of the activists was almost completely male.94 Former Communist Deputy and supporter of student activism, Giorgina Levi recalled that the women usually did the tasks that male activists did not want to do, such as cooking food and running errands. The male leaders even called them the angeli di ciclostile (“angels of the copy machine”).95 Rapidly changing gender roles, new styles of clothing and music, and drugs all posed a significant challenge to traditional Italian culture. However, the mass media tended to overemphasize the counterculture

Figure 2.2 Women on top: “Belle Ragazze” demonstrate in Turin (La Stampa, April 25, 1968, p. 2.).


32 Italy and 1968

because it was sexy and sold newspapers.96 Few Italian student activists grew beards, developed drug addictions or wore outrageous clothing. In the press photographs of large crowds of demonstrators, one also saw many who remained clean-shaven and well dressed even during the height of the protests in the late spring of 1968.

From this survey of the students’ challenges to Italian society in the late 1960s, a few key themes are paramount. The student move-ment in Italy as in other parts of Europe and the United States had originated in a massive demographic bubble of young people who had grown up in a period of affluence and entered the universities in record numbers in the 1960s. For Italy, this caused acute problems of overcrowding and exposed problems such as the antiquated syllabi and teaching styles of the professoriate. As with the construction of Nanterre outside of Paris, the University of Turin, sought to relieve overcrowding by moving its Science Faculties to the suburb of La Mandria and the Minister of Education planned to build a whole new university in Rome.

Figure 2.3 “No to Sexual Repression” (Corriere della Sera May 19, 1968, p. 15).



When the pace of university reform moved too slowly and students felt ignored by the university administrators, they took action. Similar to events at Columbia, the Sorbonne, and the Free University of Berlin, students occupied university buildings throughout northern Italy in 1966, 1967, and 1968. For Italian students however, the university occupations represented a historic genre of protest that could be traced to the heroic actions of the antifascist workers who occupied their facto-ries in 1943 in defiance of Mussolini’s Republic of Salo and the German invasion. By the winter of 1968, however, the university administrators began to call in police and carabinieri to forcibly remove students pro-voking more extreme forms of retaliation from the activists including demonstrations and marches in the city streets. Along with the inva-sion of public space which occurred in Italy and elsewhere, there also emerged a youth counterculture that shocked older citizens by its outra-geous clothes, music, language, and changing views toward sexuality.

The one entity that served to both harass and publicize the students and their behaviors was the popular press. The conservative dailies in Turin and Milan, La Stampa and the Corriere della Sera, took a special, usually hostile, interest in the student activists and tried to shape popular attitudes by detailing their excesses and minimizing the brutal responses of the police. Although the conservative and popular press frequently denigrated the students, they also served as their mouthpiece. Maria Valabrega, a journalist who had been on special assignment to the University of Turin in 1967–68, remembered that she had been given a copy of the student’s Charter of Demands (Carta di Rivendicativa) to publish in La Stampa. She also recalled students coming to her office to discuss the newspaper’s contents.97 Thus, the press served not only to disparage the student movement but also to feed its vanity, giving the movement a level of attention that went far beyond the actual challenge it posed to Italian society at the end of the 1960s.


34

3The Case of Turin I: Defending the Ivory Tower

In as much as the student revolts of the 1960s can be explained by demographic trends, opposition to the Vietnam War, the New Left, or a rejection of postwar politics, a good deal of the crisis derived from the university itself. The Italian universities, already in a state of advanced decay, made easy targets for disgruntled students. Aside from the prob-lems of overcrowding, outdated curricula, and lack of services for work-ing students, the student rebels chiefly took issue with the attitude of the faculty. Calling them baroni and signori (lords), the student activists castigated authoritarian professors, who, when they were not absent from the university, conducted oral examinations like members of the inquisition.1 Nicola Tranfaglia, a professor of contemporary history who began his teaching career in 1969, recalled one bête noir of the student movement, a colleague named Luigi Firpo, who always began his courses of political history with a lecture on anthropology. As the students gradually looked up in dazed confusion, Firpo would stop talking and announce that, “This demonstrates that I can do whatever I want!”2

The abuses of power by the faculty and abysmal conditions in the universities have been well documented; however, few scholars have inves-tigated the professors’ views of the students and of the university in the late 1960s. Guido Quazza, a professor of education at the University of Turin, wrote in 1970 that, “one notices the poverty of documentation on the part of the professors in this crisis compared with the extensive bibliography of student sources.”3 One way to examine the students’ chief opponents is to follow the debates among the faculty at the University of Turin during the years of peak activism in 1967 and 1968. During these two tumultu-ous years, the Rector, Mario Allara, met frequently in both scheduled and emergency sessions with the heads of the university’s departments who comprised a Senato Accademico (Academic Senate). The minutes of the


The Case of Turin I: Defending the Ivory Tower 35

Senato provide us not only with the professors’ views of the activists but also reveal the divisions within the faculty over the issue of university reform. The minutes have an advantage over discontinuous sources such as the press and student accounts, because they track events at the univer-sity from beginning to end, providing a more complete description of the university’s reaction.4 As we shall see, the faculty of the University of Turin, like other Italian universities, had done much to provoke student rebellion; however, the professorate was neither wholly antistudent nor united in their reaction to the students. Some chose to retreat to their ivory tow-ers and call in the cavalry while others entered occupied classrooms and sought a genuine dialogue with the activists.

Like the city surrounding it, the University of Turin claimed links to the heroic legacy of the Resistenza, counting several faculty members who had fought as partisans or participated in the intellectual resistance to fascism.5 This legacy of antifascist resistance among the faculty would play out in a number of ways. Some professors, particularly those from the non-Communist resistance, rejected the students’ attempt to reopen the dialogue on the lingering remnants of fascism in the university and society, claiming that democracy had been achieved in 1945. Others joined with the students in reinvigorating the cause of anti-Fascism in postwar Italian life. In either case, the Italian activists, like their coun-terparts in West Germany, stirred old memories and reopened a difficult dialogue about the Italian past and present.6

A vocal minority of the professors at the University of Turin recognized that their university and the entire system of higher education needed major reforms. Guido Quazza, president of the Faculty of Education in 1967–70 and a supporter of the students’ demands, quoted his former teacher, Giorgio Pasquali who in 1941 had written:

The Italian university, with all of its intellectual freedom, has remained attached to a system based on the medieval university and the Jesuits’ colleges…7

In 1967 Quazza embraced the students’ call for a new university and connected it with his own youthful resistance to the Fascists more than twenty years before. He insisted that “the leaders of the country have a duty to try to understand the Student Movement and reform the university, a duty they assumed the day after Liberazione!”8 However, Quazza was practically alone among the faculty of the University of Turin in his enthusiasm for student-led reforms. Quazza, more than any other faculty member, sought a dialogue with student activists


36 Italy and 1968

and truly believed that his students represented the continuing spirit of antifascism in postwar society.

Others professors such as Athos Goidanich of agronomy, Pietro Sartoris of veterinary medicine, and Giorgio Gullini an archaeologist in the Faculty of Arts and Letters, favored a hard line, advocating police intervention and expulsion of the rebellious students. These faculty members invoked a different memory of the Resistance by casting the students as nuovi fascisti (new fascists).9

The Rector, Mario Allara, who had been born in Turin and trained as a scholar of the civil law, had been appointed by the Committee of National Liberation to head the university after the war. Despite this favorable connection to the Resistance, the student activists came to view him as a repressive “Franquist” overlord of the university.10 However, in examining the debates within the Academic Senate, we shall see that in comparison with many of his colleagues, Allara favored a more cir-cumspect approach to student unrest endeavoring to find a middle way between Quazza’s pro-student enthusiasm and the hard-liners. In this respect, Allara was typical of university administrators in the 1960s alter-nating between dialogue with the students and repression.11 Although Allara had a reputation for humiliating students who failed his examina-tions by scribbling in their grade books, he did not take a completely negative stance toward the activists.12

Ultimately, Allara’s attempt to find a middle way led to an inconsistent policy of concession and crackdown that caused Quazza and the Faculty of Education to break with the university’s main governing body, the Senato, and initiate reforms on their own. The inconsistencies of Allara’s policies also served to heighten student agitation and disruption in the Humanities Faculties, forcing professors such as Norberto Bobbio to seek individual meetings with student activists.

Professor Giuseppe Grosso, who was the Dean of the Faculty of Law and had been elected Mayor of Turin in 1965, influenced many of Rector Allara’s decisions. Like many of his colleagues, Grosso shared strong connections to the antifascist Resistance but seemed ill-prepared to deal with the student activists of the postwar era. As a professor, he had been known to throw the grade books of those who failed his examinations across the lecture hall. The student rebels’ lack of respect and violation of their professors’ authority appalled him.13 However, as the mayor of one of Italy’s largest cities, he knew that the university’s reaction to the protesters would have local and national repercussions. In an article written for La Stampa entitled, “In the universities one defends the free-dom of teaching,” Grosso compared the student movement’s demands



to control the contents of their courses with the fascist students’ attacks on the great pre-war Turin professors, Mario Ruffini and Luigi Einaudi, who had refused to bow to demands for a nationalist curriculum.14 But, in discussions with his colleagues, Grosso proved to be less of a hard-liner than the above quotation would indicate, opting for a slow, more conciliatory policy toward the students.

Professor of Law and Senator of the Republic, Norberto Bobbio, found himself in vastly different circumstances than his colleagues because his son and pupil, Luigi, had become one of the leaders of the student move-ment. In 1967 Luigi was the first member of the communist student organization (Unione Goliardica Italiana) ever to be elected Secretary of the student government (Interfacultà). He and his fiancée Laura DeRossi, the unofficial leader of the women students, sought to disrupt the very university that had employed Luigi’s father since 1948. Like Quazza, Bobbio had fought in the non-Communist Resistance and saw the mer-its of many of the students’ demands, but in 1967–68 student activists including his son, had placed him in the role of the oppressor. Ironically, Norberto Bobbio, had been one of the guiding intellectuals of the postwar Republic, building his career on a continued commitment to, and analysis of, Italian democracy. Indeed, he had an excellent reputation even among the activists for his teaching.15 In 1964, he published Introduzione alla Costituzione, a text for middle school children explaining the Constitution of the Republic, as well as several essays on Italian political parties and democratic government.16

For academics and former partisans like Bobbio and Quazza, the left-wing student movement provoked mixed emotions. On the one hand, their personal political views paralleled those of the students in their commitment to antifascism in the new Italian Republic. On the other hand, they felt obliged to defend their position as university profes-sors; a position that radical students claimed was by-definition author-itarian and repressive. Despite their comparable antifascist credentials, Bobbio and Quazza did not agree on the students’ connection to the wartime Resistance. Speaking years after 1968, Norberto Bobbio argued that the students had not opened a new discussion of fascism but were more concerned with “bourgeois democracy” in Italy and primarily sought to replace representative democracy with direct democracy, or, as he derisively noted, “democracy of the piazza.”17

Quazza, on the other hand, enthusiastically embraced the students’ claims to be the vanguard of a renewed struggle against the lingering elements of fascism. In an article from the journal, Resistenza, entitled, “(With)in the youth protests—the spirit of the Resistance,” Quazza


38 Italy and 1968

emphatically expressed his belief that the student movement had rein-vigorated the debate on the wartime resistance and agreed with the students’ contention that protesting against the Vietnam War was a contemporary form of antifascist struggle. Quazza further argued that the Cold War politics of the 1950s and 1960s had led him to agree with the students’ contention that the Resistance legacy had been betrayed or lost. More specifically, Quazza disagreed with Bobbio’s critical view of the students’ calls for direct democracy and compared the students’ general assemblies in the occupied universities with the autonomous partisans’ brigades that comprised the Committee of National Liberation (CLN) during the war.18 Such differences of opinion held by two former comrades-in-arms revealed the simmering debate that had not abated since the war and which the students eagerly took part in the 1960s.

Paradoxically, the professors whose courses were most affected by the demonstrations and occupations seemed more willing to compromise with student demands than those who taught in the faculties that remained relatively calm. Hard-liners such as Goidanich, Gribaudi, and Sartoris, who taught in classrooms far from the Palazzo Campana attempted to impose their law and order views on the others and demanded police intervention. For example, during the occupation of the Humanities Faculties in the Palazzo Campana during the month of December 1967, Gribaudi reported to the Senato that only one les-son had been interrupted in the Faculty of Economics. He nonetheless condemned the occupation of the Humanities building, warning that, “foreign elements that foment agitation might enter into the student groups” and “an energetic action with the threat of disciplinary meas-ures must be taken against those responsible for the agitation.”19 Unlike other universities such as the State University of Milan where medical students were the first to occupy their faculty, at Turin, the faculties of science, medicine, economics, and agronomy saw little unrest though their professors feared the contagion of activism might spread to their side of campus.20

Prior to the tumultuous academic year 1967–68, a number of earlier demonstrations had tested Rector Allara’s authority and divided the faculty. In February 1967, student activists meeting in the basement of Turin’s Chamber of Labor had planned to occupy the Palazzo Campana. Student organizations of all political stripes: Catholic, liberal, communist, and even monarchist, had agreed that an occupation of university build-ings would be the best way to draw attention to university reform.21 The occupation of the Palazzo Campana and the Institute of Physics took place on the morning of February 9, 1967, and prompted Rector Allara



to call an emergency meeting of the Senato Academico the following day. Hard-line professors, Athos Goidanich and Giorgio Gullini, gained the upper hand and convinced Allara to send in the police under the pretext that the occupation of public buildings was illegal.22

Three days later, following a second occupation, Rector Allara again sided with the hard-liners, but began to show a policy of caution that would characterize his responses throughout the period of unrest. Allara immediately telephoned the Minister of Public Instruction in Rome, Luigi Gui, and received assurances that he could do “whatever it takes to restore order.” Although bolstered by Gui’s assurances of unconditional support, Allara, still implored his colleagues to “reflect on the most humane way, the responsibility of adopting measures in regard to the students and not violate the laws of the state.”23 In the following three days, a graduate assistant presented a list of demands to Rector Allara, and on February 16, the Senato passed a motion demanding that the activists cease the “illegiti-mate occupations” as a precondition for any discussion of their demands.24 This policy of setting conditions for negotiations with the activists became typical of the university’s reaction to the student movement.

These early demonstrations ultimately led to the temporary closure of the Palazzo Campana on February 18, 1967 and, more importantly, revealed the divided nature of the faculty. In a meeting on the twenty-third, Rector Allara informed his colleagues that the Faculty of Education had unanimously declared the Senato Accademico’s closure of the Palazzo Campana an illegal act.25 Guido Quazza, Dean of the Faculty of Education, later noted that his faculty had voted against the closing of university buildings and voted in favor of allowing the students a role in the administration of his faculty. Furthermore, he claimed that his elec-tion as Dean of the Faculty of Education in June 1967 reconfirmed his faculty’s stance against the “state of siege” adopted by the other profes-sors.26 Quazza’s forceful pro-student position combined with his faculty’s inherent interest in education and new forms of pedagogy undoubtedly led his departmental colleagues to adopt the most favorable view of student actions at the University of Turin.

Factions also bedeviled the student revolutionaries. Student leader Marco Revelli recalled that the initial unity achieved during the February 13 occupation quickly broke down in the face of vastly different views on voting procedures. The left-wing students wanted all decisions to be made by the General Assembly in a kind of direct democracy that included only those taking part in the occupation. However, the right-wing students favored a delegate democracy with decisions made by student representatives from each of the university’s faculties.27


40 Italy and 1968

Reminiscent of the voting controversy during the Revolution of 1789, this argument over direct or delegate democracy during the Sessantotto represented an underlying struggle for power within the movement. The right-wing students knew that the vast majority of students who had participated in the occupations were members of the communist student group, the UGI (Unione Goliardica Italiana) , and would thus dominate the General Assembly formed in the Palazzo Campana during the occupations. The Left, on the other hand, knew that outside of the Humanities Faculties, most of the other students had remained relatively quiet and might not elect representatives who favored the revolutionary demands that they posed toward the university.

By the end of February 1967, the initial protests for university reform had subsided. After the initial shock had worn off, some professors and several teaching assistants saw the validity of student demands and announced their solidarity with the student activists in a letter to the Rector signed by representatives from the “Associazione Torinese Assistenti Università e Politecnico” and the “Associazione dei Professori Incaricati.”28 After classes resumed in March, an uneasy peace descended upon the faculties of Turin and no major disturbance place until the fall.

At the end of September 1967, the Senato reconvened to discuss the acquisition of a new site for the Humanities Faculties. The building program had been part of Rector Allara’s ambitious reconstruction plan to recoup university space destroyed by wartime bombings. The choices had been narrowed to two and the Minister of Public Instruction had been pressing the administration to expedite its decision in order to assure budget approval for the academic year. After minimal debate, the Senato voted to build new university buildings at La Mandria, a suburban location far from the center of Turin where most of the uni-versity was located. The Mayor of Turin also favored the decision to build at La Mandria. Like the French Ministry of Education’s decision to accommodate the growing Parisian student population by building a new university at Nanterre, far outside the center of Paris, the deci-sion to build the new university facilities in La Mandria would prove fatal to the autumn tranquility at the university. Like their counterparts at Nanterre, the Turin students resented any attempts of the univer-sity administration to remove them from the center of civic life, and protests swept the university on November 22, 1967.29 Five days later, student rebels occupied the Palazzo Campana to express their anger over the La Mandria decision as well as the lack of progress on univer-sity reform. Lasting an entire month, this was the longest universityoccupation in Italian history.



On the afternoon of the twenty-second, in his address to the Senato, Allara was unsure of the causes, but speculated that the protests were either connected with those at the Catholic University of Milan, or with the La Mandria decision, or with the Gui Reform Bill that was presently being debated in the Parliament.30 He described the occupation as the act of “a minority of unsatisfied students.”31 Grosso agreed, claiming that the occupants were a “small minority, some not even students,” and warned that summoning the police would only “solidify the students on the side of the agitators,” and proposed an appeal to the students to return to their studies.32 Quazza also called for caution and understanding, noting that the decisions made in Turin could have profound consequences for all the Italian universities.33 The hard-liner Goidanich implored his colleagues to remember their “duty to impart instruction and culture to the students who pay their fees and should be defended against the ‘moral violence’ of the few.” He opposed dealing with agitators or treating the students as equals, a step he feared would have “revolutionary” consequences.34

By the end of this tense session, Allara attempted to steer a path between the hard-liners and the moderates by claiming that he was bound to uphold the laws of the state and acknowledged his duty to report to the police anyone who committed crimes within the university. Throughout the unrest of 1967–68, Allara would be torn between his official role as Rector and his personal unwillingness to punish the student rebels. He and the Senato deferred to their colleague Giuseppe Grosso, the Mayor of Turin, who had proposed a moderate line, urging the students to return to nor-mal university life, stop those who disrupt the university, and work with the faculty to promote reform. Only Guido Quazza, the faculty leader most sympathetic to student demands, voted against his colleague’s proposal.35

Grosso’s cautious plan of appealing to the sensibilities of the students failed to produce a massive defection of the allegedly “sane” occupants of the General Assembly in the Palazzo Campana. The Senato had underestimated not only the students’ level of politicization, but also the level of merriment experienced by the occupants of the Palazzo Campana. A former participant and historian of the student movement, Peppino Ortoleva, recalled,

the Palazzo Campana was really a lot of fun, it was mostly fun because there had always been a lack of private space in Italy for young people, but now we had it!

Ortoleva further indicated that the private space offered by the occupied building allowed for unprecedented sexual freedom.36


42 Italy and 1968

While the student activists drew up a list of demands for reform and made love in the occupied rooms of the Palazzo Campana during the month of December, Rector Allara searched for a way to end the occupa-tion and regain control over the university. Receiving assurances from the Turin Court of Appeals that a court order could be used to forcibly open the entrances to the Palazzo Campana, Allara began to contem-plate police action in early December.37 On the fourth, in the face of increasing disruptions and continued occupations, the Senato agreed to a vaguely worded proposal of Professor Grosso authorizing the Rector to call the police if the agitation should continue to grow.38 Supported by his colleagues and the local judiciary, Allara phoned the Prefect of Turin, who was in charge of the police, and the Director General of University Instruction in Rome to notify them of his plan to send the police into university buildings. Despite the assurances he received, Allara understood the momentousness of his impending action.

Since the activists appeared intent on prolonging their occupation through the Christmas holiday, Rector Allara summoned an emergency meeting of the Senato for December 23. New developments suggested that the time had come for police intervention. First, Allara noted that the new head of the student government (Interfacultà) had reported that only the students from the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy were still in favor of continuing the occupation and those from Law and Education wanted the agitation to end. Information provided by the janitors indicated that the number of occupants had steadily decreased in the last few weeks, and thus it might be easy to expel the remaining demonstrators. Grosso reported that the mother of one of the occupants had said that, “short of salvaging their prestige, they [the occupants] would not resist the intervention of the police.” Furthermore, the Rector had received a petition from students who wanted the occupants to be expelled after Christmas.39

The prolonged occupation also forced the faculty to consider can-celing classes for the rest of the academic year. Many professors had expressed concern that the quarterly examinations scheduled for the beginning of February would have to be postponed or canceled. Seeking to establish a return to normal university functioning and quell the fears of his colleagues, Allara announced that the examinations would take place on schedule.40 The meeting ended with a resolution claiming that the Faculties had kept an open dialogue with activists, censuring the radicals, and calling for action.

The occupation of the Palazzo Campana on the part of a group of stu-dents is purely an act of defiance without any apparent justification.



[Therefore] The Senato Accademico mandates the Rector to request the intervention of the public forces at the time which he believes is opportune, and in any case, no later than 9 January 1968. 41

All the members of the Senato voted for the resolution with the exception of Guido Quazza who called for a voluntary evacuation by the students.42

Allara did not wait long to use his mandate, calling for the evacuation of the Palazzo Campana on the evening of December 27. The initial evacuation succeeded without incident, but the following day, students evaded police patrols and reoccupied the building. The Rector again called on the police to evacuate the palazzo and had the names of the occupants reported to the police.43 Almost thirty years later Professor Bobbio reflected, “The big turning point was when the police entered the university to evacuate the students. This had never happened before [in Turin]. It was like entering a church.”44 The sanctity of university space applied to all the Italian institutions of higher learning and the invasion of this quasi-sacred area provoked a backlash among the wider community. In an unsigned article to the periodical Resistenza, one com-mentator noted that even former Partisan and Rector of the University of Florence would not allow the police to enter the university when fascists disrupted his inauguration address in 1945.45 French professors would express similar shock and disbelief when their universities were invaded by the police the following spring. Many actually joined with students in demanding that the police evacuate the grounds of the Sorbonne in early May 1968.46 Ultimately, the decision by university administrators to allow the police to evacuate student protesters proved counterproduc-tive as it merely led to a chaotic cycle of occupation and evacuation and increasingly violent confrontations between students and police.

The failure of police intervention to crush student activism caused Rector Allara to take harsher measures in an effort to regain a grip over his university. At another emergency meeting of the Senato held shortly after the first police evacuations, Allara demanded that Vittorio Rieser, a teaching assistant in sociology be dismissed, and Anna Bravo, from the Department of History, be suspended without pay for six months for her participation in the occupations. Furthermore, he proposed that the stu-dents who had been reported by the police be subjected to disciplinary hearings beginning on January15.47

Norberto Bobbio’s son, Luigi was among those reported to the Rector by the police and was asked to appear before the Academic Senate for disciplinary proceedings. The Senate charged Luigi on three offenses: (i) for having broke in a door to the meetings of the Administrative


44 Italy and 1968

Council of the University and impeding their work; (ii) for having partic-ipated in the third occupation of university buildings on January 10; and (iii) for having disrupted lessons in the Palazzo Campana on January 13. The Academic Senate scheduled the hearing for January 27 and allowed Luigi the right to defend himself.48 In retrospect, the charges against Luigi Bobbio seemed minor. Aside from some destruction of property, the main offense committed by Bobbio was the disruption of university space and functions, essentially a test of the academy’s power. Similar to the police entrance into university grounds, the student disruption of lessons was akin to the profaning of sacred space. Interestingly, the university administration could simply have allowed the police to arrest students like Bobbio and press formal criminal and civil charges, but instead it chose to first deal with the students internally—a decision undoubtedly affected by the fact that many of the student activists came from prominent Turin families. The university’s decision to proceed with an internal disciplinary hearing may have also represented the universi-ty’s desperate desire to regain the sacred space and sense of control lost to the student occupants.

This decision to deal with student “agitators” internally would not be unique to the University of Turin and a similar decision-making proc-ess would be repeated at many universities during the tumultuous years of student protest. Later in March 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his famous March 22 Movement that had staged protests at the University of Paris at Nanterre would be called before a similar disciplinary hear-ing at the Sorbonne rather than facing civil and criminal trials by non-university authorities. In both cases, the attempt to quiet student agitatori in Turin and enragés in Paris only served to fuel the fire of the student movements.

Through the months of January and February, the demonstrations and occupations increased as the Rector’s continued use of the police only prompted students to reoccupy the university buildings in greater numbers. Between December 1967 and February 1968, Allara called in the police five times to evacuate the students.49 By initiating disciplinary measures against some of the leaders, Allara unwittingly created a set of martyrs for the movement. As police security tightened in January, the movement borrowed an old union tactic called the sciopero bianco or “sit-down strike” that disrupted classes without actually occupying any buildings.50 The scioperi bianchi provided an excellent example of the student activists’ creative ability to modify their tactics of civil disobedience. Just as striking industrial workers had previously used occupations, work stoppages, sit-ins, and slowdowns to non-violently



challenge corporate or Fascist powers, so too did the Sessantottini. The students recognized the fact that the university could not legally deny entrance to lectures to any student who was registered at the university, but also could do almost nothing to stop student interruptions within the classroom. Even the most anti-activist professors refused to bring police into their lecture halls.

As the administration steadily lost control of the university in the winter of 1968, some professors took individual steps to open a dialogue with their students. Professor Quazza and other open-minded faculty attended the students’ general assemblies and Professor Bobbio took up the pen. In an opinion piece entitled, “A dialogue difficult but necessary,” to the journal Resistenza, Bobbio conceded that the students were justi-fied in many of their grievances. He personally admitted that some of his classes began with 300 students but normal attendance was often as low as twenty. Continuing further, he noted that oral exams no longer served their purpose and only promoted a university that is “notionalistic” rather than “critical.” Ultimately, Bobbio shrewdly recognized the fact that what was at stake was political power within the university. He called upon his colleagues to address these issues and at the same time questioned the sincerity of the agitators.51

Other faculty members attempted to continue as if nothing had happened but found their authority continuously challenged by the student rebels. One of Rector Allara’s law classes was disrupted by a sciopero bianco on January 13. According to Allara’s report to the Senato, during his morning lecture on civil law, a group of students had stood up in class and called for a discussion of university reforms. When he agreed to meet them later in the Aula Magna, the students returned to their seats but “ostentatiously kept their hats on, read newspapers, or continued to talk among themselves.” Unable to proceed, he called in the police to remove the “disturbatori” from his classroom. He later heard from the janitors that one of the students had ripped a crucifix off the wall on his way out of the building.52 However, this negative experi-ence did not stop Allara from keeping his promise to the occupants of the Palazzo Campana and distributing the students’ list of demands (Carta Rivendicativa) to the faculty.53

Opposing Allara’s efforts for a peaceful solution with the activists and probably feeling the increasing pressure from his constituents, profes-sor and mayor, Giuseppe Grosso demanded that the Senato defend its liberty from the “tyranny of a minority” and offered a resolution that favored “all means offered by law” to stop those who used violence to impede university activity.54 The resolution passed with only one


46 Italy and 1968

negative vote from Guido Quazza, who warned that the proposal would only lead to more occupations and ultimately to the closure of all the Humanities Faculties.

Quazza’s admonition proved to be prophetic as further disruptions occurred through January. Sensing that police repression would not stop the demonstrators, the Rector showed signs of conceding to the stu-dents when he called on the Senato to end the university’s disciplinary proceedings against the activists (although he supported the continued civil proceedings against the students being conducted by the Turin Court of Appeals). Allara further asked the Senato to allow commissions that included professors and student representatives to meet in the university.55 Allara’s position of January 27 represented a significant break in his past resistance to all student initiatives, and from the begin-ning of February through the month of June, the Rector would slowly lose ground to the rebels, despite his frequent threats against them. His concessions of the twenty-seventh also represented a last ditch-effort to save the February examinations.

The month of February saw no let up in student demonstrations, with students occupying the Institute of Physics and threatening to seize the Mathematics and Science Faculties. The February examinations had become the crucial bargaining point for both the professors and the student rebels. The rebels had hoped that the threat of disrupting the examinations would force the professors to accept their demands, as Allara had contemplated in late January. However, out of frustration and an increasing feeling of powerlessness, the professors considered cance-ling the examinations in the hope that they might convince the majority of the students to return to their classrooms. With both faculty and activ-ists on a collision course, the Senato sought to buy time and postponed the February examinations indefinitely, hoping to find an accord with student rebels.

As tensions mounted through the first two weeks of February, the Rector began to consider canceling the entire academic year, a deci-sion that he told La Stampa, “would be attributed to the students.”56 However, he was not ready to make good this threat, and on the nine-teenth, he allowed student representatives to speak directly with the Senato Accademico. Two students from the occupation, Diego Marconi and Andrea Mottura, claimed that the agitation would stop if the Senato agreed to allow student representatives full voting rights in parity with the faculty. They also asked for the cancellation of some classes so that joint faculty–student meetings could take place.57 This idea of a joint faculty–student committee derived from the student movement’s



demand for co-gestione or labor–capital co-management originating in Raniero Panzieri’s theories of operaismo.58 Following Marconi and Mottura, the Senato heard from a group of five student representatives who opposed the agitation and requested a meeting with professors and agitators in the Aula Magna of the Palazzo Campana for the following afternoon.59

This meeting represented a compromise for both the Senato and the rebels. The professors agreed to form the joint student–faculty com-mittees and cancel classes for the first week of March, and the activists agreed to cease all disturbances and allow the February examinations to proceed. The following day, the Senato Accademico resolved to form three committees for the Humanities Faculties (Law, Education, and Letters) and to suspend activity in the Humanities for the first week of March, barring any new disruptions.60

The tranquility that settled on the University of Turin following this historic meeting in which the professors had agreed to meet student rep-resentatives as equals, a concession that Professor Goidanich had once called, “revolutionary,” was shattered by the students themselves.61 One week later, Rector Allara received a new and more provocative set of demands from the student activists. Recognizing the importance of the media in spreading their message to all the students, the activists requested radio and television links from the meetings to other rooms in the university, the right to revoke and replace student delegates at any time, the authority to designate non-students as representatives, and the right to form a union with assistants and other professors. Allara and the Senato, reluctant to disrupt the momentary peace, offered the following concessions: the publication of the minutes of each meeting, the right of each Faculty to have three alternate student representatives, and the inclusion of assistants in the discussions. However, the Senato refused to allow non-students the right to participate and rejected the activists’ request to raise the number of student representatives from each Faculty.62

The Senato’s refusal to accede to all the students’ demands touched off a massive series of occupations and protests on February 29 known as the “occupation of the barricades.” Marco Revelli has interpreted this move to the barricades as a major escalation in the Turin student movement, initiating a violent phase in the Sessantotto. At this crucial juncture, several activists invaded their professors’ offices and carried their protests out into the city streets.63 Some students claimed that violence was inevitable, given the repressive nature of the university faculty. Echoing the words of Chairman Mao, Guido Viale, a leader of


48 Italy and 1968

the Turin student movement, ominously noted in his memoirs that, “as long as the enemy is recognizable and identifiable, as long as high and low points exist on the pyramid … revolutionary violence seems justified.”64 Clearly, the increasing use of violence during what Marco Revelli has called the “guerilla phase” of the Turin student movement65 and the reluctance of the activists to work with the faculty despite their victory in the area of school reform, indicates that for the most radical activists, mere reform of the university was not enough. Undoubtedly the Maoist and Guevarist ideas of a continuous revolution that would transform all of society drove the students to continue their revolution and widen their circle of insurrection. Guido Martinotti cites an article in the Quaderni Piacentini written during the Turin occupations:

The first goal of the assembly and of the demonstration we were setting up was to organize a permanent fight against the power of the academic authorities, capable of challenging such a power. A challenge does not consist of simply removing the power, nor of a simple protest. It means creating continuous difficulties in the exercise of this power. 66

Guido Viale, one of the Turin student leaders also discussed the desire for an unending struggle in his Contro l’Universita and argues that the movement must not become “an ordinary administrative organism” but remain “as an instrument of struggle that seeks to avoid institu-tional control.”67 When viewed in these ideological terms, it becomes apparent that the radical leadership of the Turin student movement would not have been satisfied with even revolutionary changes to their university but viewed the institution as merely the first step in their “long march through the institutions.”

Aside from the violent scuffles that were about to take place, histo-rian Giovanni De Luna, has argued that the actions of Turin students had already turned violent before the “occupation of the barricades.” Referring specifically to what he has termed “verbal violence,” De Luna argued that the student strikes and occupations had belliger-ently shattered the previously docile relationships between students and professors. He further observed that Turin’s society was dominated by a belief of “ciascuno al suo posto” (everyone in his place) and that the student demonstrations represented a marked break from the traditional, passive place held by the students.68 The fact that such a radical departure from the rhythms of ordinary life in Turin would be initiated by the children of the respectable classes shook the psychic fabric of the entire city.



The decision to occupy the barricades at the end of February may be a reflection of student leaders’ fears that the acceptance of the concessions offered by the Academic Senate would spell the end of their movement. By agreeing to the terms, and working with the professors, these anti-establishmentarians would become part of the system. Along with their co-optation by the academy, they would also have to surrender the occu-pied spaces that they had appropriated within the university. In sum, the movement would cease to move.

With the first reports of renewed and more violent protests and van-dalism, the Senato voted overwhelmingly in favor of police interven-tion. Only Quazza argued that the Senato should have conceded to all the students’ demands as an expression of good faith, and he blamed the Republic’s politicians for the newest outbreak of violence.69

The following day, professors, students, and citizens of Turin were all greeted by news of a violent street battle between police and students that had taken place at a park called the Valle Giulia near the University of Rome’s Faculty of Architecture. Unlike Turin’s Mario Allara, the Rector of the University of Rome, Pietro D’Avack, had consistently refused to deal with student rebels and ordered police to evacuate occupied build-ings prior to the “Battle of the Valle Giulia.” With dozens of students hospitalized and 160 injured police (46 who were later hospitalized), the March 1 events in Rome signaled a violent shift in the course of the movimento studentesco throughout all of Italy.70

Four days later, as the smoke still cleared from Turin’s “occupation of the barricades” and Rome’s “Battle of the Valle Giulia,” Quazza and the entire Faculty of Education voted to denounce the “repressive” actions taken by Allara and the Senato. The University of Turin’s profes-sor of education called for serious discussions of reform and renounced any authority to take police action against the students. The Faculty of Education also broke ranks with the other Humanities Faculties by declaring that the delayed February examinations would proceed despite Allara’s decision to evacuate and close the Palazzo Campana.71 The defection of the Faculty of Education dealt a severe blow to the unity of the professors and provoked criticism by the local press and right-wing student groups.72

With the loss of the Faculty of Education, the appearance of counter-courses in the Palazzo Campana, and continued disturbances throughout the university, Allara began to distance himself from the hard-liners. On March 12, the Rector reported to the Senato that he would make a personal appeal to Judge D’Amare for the provisional release of student leader Federico Avanzini who had been detained after his recent arrest.73


50 Italy and 1968

In the meantime, the Senato Accademico at the University of Rome had issued a stiff ultimatum breaking the occupation that followed the Battle of the Valle Giulia, and by the end of March the students in Rome had returned to their classes.74

In Turin, however, no such ultimatum was issued, as Rector Allara and the Senato desperately searched for a middle way. At the beginning of April, the Senato considered canceling the entire academic semester due to widespread demonstrations and scioperi bianchi that had spread to the previously docile Faculty of Medicine.75 However, Allara still hesitated, mentioning that many parents had called for the resumption of classes, and that nullifying the semester would damage the reputation of the university. Quazza argued for the reopening of all the Faculties, claim-ing that his Faculty had already achieved some successes by working with the students and implementing new teaching methods. Professors Grosso and Goidanich, on the other hand, maintained a besieged atti-tude, denouncing the “so-called counter-courses.” Professor Giorgio Gullini of Arts and Letters, who had experienced several disturbances in his lectures, took a moderate position, arguing for a guarantee from the student activists before reopening the Humanities Faculties.

Ultimately, the conciliatory view of Guido Quazza, tempered by Gullini’s caution, won over the other faculty. On April 2, the Senato Accademico resolved to reopen all Faculties on the twenty-second after meeting with student activists to discuss new pedagogic methods.76 In light of the uncompromising stance taken by the professors in the early months of the occupations, the April decision represented a victory for the student activists and a serious kick in the teeth to the professors who had originally refused to deal with students as “equals.”

A strange calm descended upon the University of Turin during the month of April as student activists busily jostled for control over the negotiations with the faculty. The Senato had insisted that the student representatives be democratically elected in a secret ballot before dis-cussions could take place.77 Professor Norberto Bobbio, who generally sympathized with the student activists, condemned the General Assembly of the Palazzo Campana as undemocratic. Bobbio recalled,

The assembly of the students was not a democratic assembly. The lead-ers were always the “contestatores,” they did not have secret ballots, and only the elite spoke. 78

Although Bobbio did not mention his son among the “elite,” other professors including Giorgio Gullini referred to student leaders Luigi



Bobbio and Guido Viale as two “extremists who had declared them-selves contrary to every democratic method!”79

As the month progressed, the professors began to worry about prag-matic concerns such as the payment of fees and the possibility of extend-ing the semester into the summer months. Meanwhile, the students argued over the content of the future seminars and demanded more concessions such as the control of exams, the right to question professors, a permanent space for the movement within the university, and phone and copying privileges.80 In mid-April, the Senato offered the student movement nine important reforms: the right to question professors dur-ing class, an increase in the number of seminars, interdisciplinary courses and examinations, more evening classes for working students, abolition of pre-examinations and conferences in the Humanities, elimination of the undergraduate thesis in the Law Faculty, extra examination sessions for working students, removal of attendance requirements in most faculties, and the inclusion of a student observer in all examinations.81 Aside from the global demands of the student activists that called for a reordering of the hierarchical nature of late capitalist society and an end to the war in Vietnam, the movement had scored a tremendous victory in the area of university reform. The concessions offered by the Senato went far beyond the hopes of most of the activists who had originally occupied the Palazzo Campana in 1967. Taken at face value, the Senato’s resolution would have offered the students “cogestione” or co-management over much of their academic life and represented a substantial defeat for the conservative members of the faculty.

The movement toward reform was halted four days later by a new round of disturbances in the Palazzo Campana. At 7 p.m., on April 23, Rector Allara was informed of a bomb threat. Reaching the limits of his patience and negotiating skills in dealing with the activists, he dramati-cally announced to the Senato that, “today it (the student movement) no longer wants the reform of the University, but only wants the destruction of the University.”82 Allara proposed that they close all of the Humanities Faculties and invalidate the semester. Just as the professors began to discuss the Rector’s proposal, an urgent message arrived informing the Senato that students were scrawling “obscene words” on the walls of the Palazzo Campana. This news quickly ended all discussion and the Senato Accademico voted unanimously to close the Faculties of Law, Education, and Letters for an indefinite time due to the “perpetuation of violence on the part of the students.”83

The bomb scare of April 23 became the pretext used by the Rector to permanently close the Humanities Faculties. If much of the Rector’s


52 Italy and 1968

hesitation in the past could be attributed to the generally non-violent nature of the student actions, the threat of real danger posed by the bomb scare removed all doubts. The police did find a device hidden under a podium that appeared to be an explosive device and although no students were ever officially charged for making the threat, the local press quickly informed the citizens of Turin that once again the student “filocinesi” (Maoists) had turned to terrorism.84

The closure of the Humanities Faculties lasted through the month of May while the Faculties of Medicine, Science, and Economics continued to hold classes with only minor disturbances. The odd existence of build-ings guarded by police only a few blocks from busy classrooms within the University became a divisive issue within the Humanities Faculties in the first week of May. Predictably, the first faculty dean to protest the problem of a selectively closed university was Guido Quazza. In a meet-ing of the Senato held during the first week of May, Quazza argued that public opinion had forced the closing of the Humanities, and that his Faculty had made real progress in reforming its curriculum. He asserted that like the Faculties of Medicine, Science, and Economics, his Faculty should have autonomy and informed the Senato that his Faculty had already voted to resume teaching based on a guarantee of cooperation from the activists.85

Initially, Rector Allara and Professors Gullini and Goidanich opposed autonomy for the Faculty of Education, demanding that the Humanities maintain a united front against the activists. Adopting a siege-like tone similar to the popular press, Gullini and Goidanich both voiced their disapproval of Quazza’s renegade position and felt that division among the faculties would be a sign of weakness. However, a speech by Professor Deaglio from the Physics Faculty began to sway Allara away from the hard-liners. Deaglio read a declaration from the General Assembly of stu-dents at the Institute of Physics that declared itself in favor of Quazza’s reforms. The declaration further claimed in slightly hyperbolic fashion, that Quazza’s reforms were the “first crack in the front of the academic extremists,” and that the agitation would continue [in the Institute of Physics], “until the last resistance within the Faculty crumbles.”86 Changing his original position, Rector Allara threw his support behind Quazza’s reforms because he felt that opposition to Quazza would only create more division within the ranks of the professorate. Allara’s sup-port proved crucial and in the end, the Senato voted in favor of granting autonomy to the Faculty of Education.

Throughout the rest of May, individual professors continued to hold discussions with student activists, and Quazza’s Faculty of Education



experienced some success with its new seminars.87 On the thirteenth, Allara received reports that the students’ earlier unity had begun to crumble. Sensing that he could still retake control of his university, the Rector informed his colleagues that, in his opinion, the student body could be grouped into three categories: the dwindling “Movimento Studentesco” or “agitators,” the “Moderati,” and “the mass [of students] who do not fit in the first or second group.” According to Allara, the “mass of students” had expressed concerns about the validity of the aca-demic year and threatened to circumvent his authority by petitioning the judges of Turin to have the agitators removed from the Humanities buildings.88 Four days later, Professor Grosso put further pressure on the hard-liners within the Humanities by informing the Senato that no other university in Italy had closed its buildings longer than the Faculties of Law and Letters. Taking Grosso’s cue and given the apparent weariness of the student rebels, the Rector urged the Senato to make one last attempt to open the Palazzo Campana for the month of June.89

By the end of May, a new spirit of optimism had settled among the faculty as the Senato listened to positive reports from the Faculties of Education, Medicine, and Pharmacy. Rector Allara added that in meetings with students from Law and Letters, the number of radicals had dropped significantly and many of the extreme demands had been set aside. The Senato eventually voted in favor of a new set of 22 reforms that kept many of the concessions offered in April but limited the students’ earlier demands for parity with the faculty.90 Although the Senato had retreated from its earlier offer of near parity with students in the administration of the university, the proposals of May 27 still offered the possibility of radical reform that far exceeded Minister of Education Luigi Gui’s con-servative reform bill. The Senato’s resolution also represented a victory for the reformers like Quazza who felt the students did deserve real change within the university. By the end of May 1968, the student rebels at the University of Turin appeared to have won their revolution.

The spirit of conviviality which had infected professors and students in late May was soon clouded by student demonstrations in the city streets on June 1. This demonstration, during which workers briefly joined the students on a march through the center of Turin, reignited the spark of activism among left-wing students. However, a serious back-lash from neofascist students occurred on June 4 when fistfights broke out in the Palazzo Campana between one group carrying a Black Flag and another carrying a Red Flag. Despite its eerie resemblance to clashes between Fascists and Communists during the “Red Years” that preceded Mussolini’s seizure of power,91 Allara chose to ignore the incident and


54 Italy and 1968

did not call in the police, opting instead to follow Guido Quazza’s view that the battle showed that student activists were growing tired and divided.92

In the last of his series of letters on the debate over university reforms in the journal, Resistenza, Professor Bobbio expressed his frustration with the movement. Bobbio had earlier supported the dialogue between student representatives and professors but closed with his condemna-tion of a movement that refused to be institutionalized and “continues to destroy models and solutions without proposing new ones.”93

By the end of June, the student occupations had ended and the vast majority had returned to their studies. Nevertheless, these new distur-bances had allowed the faculty to table their reform proposals of late May. The faculty never officially adopted the reforms proposed by the Senato. Instead, each professor remained free to determine the level of student involvement in the curriculum and the classroom. Ultimately, the students did not achieve their goals until some of them became university instructors in the late 1970s.

Marco Revelli, currently a professor of political science at the University of Turin and a former activist, interpreted the power strug-gle in Gramscian terms. He has argued that the occupation succeeded because it struck at the base of the professors’ power.94 Without the students’ presence in the classes, the professors lost their power within the university system. By refusing to take the traditional oral examina-tions and “play by the rules,” the student activists had revoked the professors’ power over the fate of thousands of young people.

However, as this study shows, the students’ suspension of the acad-emy’s power was only temporary. In the end, time worked against the students. The leading university faculty all held lifetime appointments and could wait-out the activists until calm returned. The students on the other hand, could not rely on parental support indefinitely and ulti-mately needed to complete their degrees or leave the university. Only the children of the wealthy could afford to remain at the university for years without completing their degrees. Or as Andrea Liberatori, a journalist for the communist newspaper L’Unità, remarked,

The ones who participated in this movement, they were not the masses; they were the elite, the avante garde, because not many families could afford to keep their children in the university for eight or ten years.95

Also, simple weariness and the approach of summer holidays weakened the spirit of activism. As, professor and mayor, Giuseppe Grosso had



surmised, the activism and occupation of university space had begun to lose its magic in the late spring and his original view that the “sane” students would seek a return to normal university functioning seemed to hold true.96 At the crucial junctures of February 20, April 19, and May 27, the faculty offered substantial concessions to the activists but later retracted them when student rebels continued to disrupt classes and occupy buildings. Former protester Marco Revelli came to a simi-lar conclusion as Grosso, noting that by the late spring, the activists had succeeded in destroying the “sacredness” of their professors that had conferred a kind of illicit excitement to their activities and fueled the spirit of rebellion. For many of the student rebels, the cultural dethroning of their academic masters was as important as the actual reforms they sought.97

Why had the students refused to accept the faculty’s compromises in 1968? There are a number of reasons for the students continued protest despite apparent victory in the area of university reform. Foremost among these reasons is the ideological motivation of the radical leaders of the movement. Drawing upon the ideas of Marcuse, Mao, and Guevara, they clearly viewed their struggle in much larger terms and connected their attacks on university authority with a larger societal struggle. Even in the early stages of the movement, there were hints that the students would not be satisfied by a victory over their professors. The Pisan students’ Tesi della Sapienza, written in the spring of 1967, clearly noted that the hierarchy and inequali-ties of the university were a reflection of society in general.98 The Turin student’s Carta rivendicativa promulgated at the end of January 1968 left open the possibility that the students’ list of demands could change at any time and that, “at any moment the student movement must be in a position to redefine the goals of its action with respect to society.”99 By the middle of February 1968, the more radical occu-pants of the Palazzo Campana had clearly adopted a broader strategy for their revolution as is evident from an article in the student-pro-duced Giornalino, “One can not defeat the system of authoritarian control and ideological conditioning of the school without directing the struggle against all forms of oppression and exploitation inher-ent in the whole social system.”100 Luigi Bobbio, one of the student leaders in Turin later wrote,

Through a year of struggle against the university, the students who participated in the movement arrived at the idea of the necessity of combating power in all of its aspects … The movement posed therefore


56 Italy and 1968

the problem of involving other social strata, other situations of oppres-sion, in order to widen the front of the struggle. Among a part of the students there was an extraordinary confidence in the possibility of changing the world, of transmitting to others the new “truths.” 101

The evolution of wider revolutionary goals for the student movement and the student leaders’ resistance to any attempts at institutionalizing their struggle helps to explain the Turin activists’ unwillingness to accept the major educational reforms offered by the faculty at the University of Turin. On the other side, the astonishment of Rector Allara and his faculty members at the students’ continued agitations suggests that they seriously underestimated the importance of ideology in the mobiliza-tion of students and their commitment to a struggle that extended far beyond the university doors.

Another important factor in explaining the failure of the students to accept the reforms offered by the faculty can be found in the role of the movement’s leaders. Most likely, student leaders, caught in the sudden limelight of their peers, fueled by political zeal, achieving local notoriety in the press, and reveling in the excitement of antiauthoritar-ian activities, had found in the movement an end more important than their original goals of university reform. The transformation from uni-versity activist to “celebrity” has been well-documented in Todd Gitlin’s The Whole World is Watching. Just as media attention and an entourage of groupies goaded the American protest leaders into more extreme statements and calls for action, the sudden notoriety accorded to Italian activists like Laura DeRossi, Guido Viale, and Milan’s Mario Capanna necessitated a continuous series of new actions and pronouncements.102 For them, any bargaining with the “baroni” would mean an end to their occupations and scioperi bianchi, which were the modi vivendi of the movement. Had the students accepted these proposals, the movement would have slowed and eventually stopped.

Still another reason for the students to continue their revolt despite the offer of major university reforms may be the fact that the school authorities in Turin had reacted with relatively less violent measures than those used by other university officials in Italy. Unlike the University of Rome where the bloody Battle of the Valle Giulia on March 1 ended with 46 policemen in the hospital and hundreds of injured students, the University of Turin never experienced the level of violence encountered in Rome.103 Thus it could be argued that if the faculty and local authori-ties of Turin had been more repressive, the movement may have been crushed earlier. On the other hand the more conciliatory attitude among



the Turin faculty epitomized by the genuinely pro-student position of Guido Quazza, may have also reduced the amount of violence that occurred at the university. In any case, events in Turin had reached a crescendo by the spring of 1968. The national elections in May 1968 had already begun to divert attention away from the universities and the June 1 demonstration that auspiciously saw the appearance of workers from FIAT proved to be the Turin student movement’s last hurrah. Norberto Bobbio’s son and former student leader Luigi Bobbio remembered return-ing to the university in the autumn and discovering that the spirit of militancy had already shifted from the university to the workers.104


58

4The Case of Turin II: A City Reacts from Precinct to Parish

Studies of the European student revolts of 1968 have tended to focus on cosmopolitan centers of rebellion such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome. Fewer scholars have examined the provincial cities that also experienced severe unrest such as Leeds, Lyon, Stuttgart, and Turin. This concentration on capital cities has served to emphasize the international qualities of the student demonstrations and perhaps lent a sense of centralization that was really not the case. Although Paris, as a historic center of revolution retained its guiding role for the French in 1968, other Western European nations experienced widely diffuse and unpre-dictable points of conflagration in the late 1960s.

This scattering of rebellion is most evident in Italy, where not less than 36 universities experienced student occupations in 1968. As many schol-ars have noted, the heart of the student movement was to be found in the northern industrial cities of Italy and only later spread to Rome and the south.1 With its wealthier population and greater numbers of col-leges and universities, the north of Italy felt the first stirrings of student discontent in the mid-1960s. In these northern cities where the antifas-cist tradition was strongest, the student movements quickly came to be dominated by left-wing activists who not only built on a local tradition of resistance that traced its origins to the factory strikes of the 1920s, but also sought close contacts with the factory workers whom they sought to mobilize.

In almost no other city was this left-wing, antifascist, and industrial tradition stronger than Turin. The birthplace of the Risorgimento, Turin dis-tinguishes itself from other Italian cities by its almost northern European character. It is an eighteenth-century city where the medieval Palazzo Madama is overshadowed by the grand Palazzo Reale (Royal Palace) that was modeled after Versailles. The streets were constructed on a gridiron,


The Case of Turin II 59

reminding visitors that Turin is a modern, secular city, the ancestral home of the House of Savoy, but also a city of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Turin’s modernity is most clearly epitomized by the dominant role played by the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (FIAT). Turin is quite simply the Detroit of Italy. During the Second World War, the owners, the Agnelli family, placed their factories at the service of the Fascist government but the workers of FIAT, maintained a diffident and even hostile attitude toward Mussolini’s regime.2

In the postwar period, Turin became one of the cities most affected by the “miracolo economico” as the FIAT factories rose to meet the needs of the growing automobile market at home and throughout Europe. In order to fill the factories, massive numbers of poor, unskilled workers moved to Turin from the south, and between 1945 and 1970, the city’s population doubled from about 600,000 to 1.2 million.3 The influx of southern immigrants changed the city as old urban areas like the Barriera di Milano became overpopulated tenements to accommodate the work-ers. The workers at FIAT were forced to work faster and for longer hours to meet the growing consumer demand during the postwar years. The established and skilled workers of Turin had strong left-wing ties through organized labor and a tradition of resistance to fascism. These union affiliations and sense of antifascism would play significant roles in the workers’ connections to the student movement and the labor unrest of the 1960s. In 1962, the metalworkers throughout the city struck and were joined by many southern workers from FIAT in a violent series of strikes and street battles known as the Battle of the Piazza Statuto. As Paul Ginsborg noted, the combination of discontented southern labor-ers and members of the old Resistance made Turin a particularly volatile city in the 1960s.4

Outside the factories, the influence of the Resistance tradition was also felt heavily among the well-to-do college students whose parents had participated in the Piedmontese Resistance. These children of the Resistance, people like Luigi Bobbio and Marco Revelli, became leaders of the student movement at the University of Turin and often con-ceived of their protests as a new form of antifascism.5 Amidst this back-drop of regional distinctiveness, this chapter will investigate the people of Turin’s reaction to the student movement in the late 1960s. In par-ticular, it will focus on three groups outside of the university which had intense contact with student protesters: those responsible for maintain-ing civic order, Turin’s municipal police and carabinieri; the people for whom the students claimed to emulate and lead, the workers of FIAT; and the spiritual leaders of the city, the Catholic clergy.


60 Italy and 1968

The police: “Children of the poor”or “Justfollowing orders”?

The majority of Left-leaning student activists held a negative view of the police, seeing them as violent, servi di padroni (servants of the bosses) who sought only to repress the protesters and uphold the establishment.6 On the other hand, many of the police regarded the student movement as a dangerous threat to civic order. Their mutual animosity was rooted in fundamental differences based on class, politics, and personal sense of duty.

Before analyzing the responses of the police, we must first examine their role in postwar Italian society. Italy has approximately five dif-ferent police forces that deal with distinct facets of security and public order. Some branches of the police investigate financial concerns; others deal with traffic and the railways. However, the two main branches of the police that came into contact with the students were the Polizia di Stato or the municipal police that were under the control of Turin’s city government and the local units of the carabinieri. Unlike the Polizia di Stato, the carabinieri remain unique to Italy, functioning as a branch of the national army. The recruits of the carabinieri come from all over Italy and are subject to military discipline. King Vittorio Emmanuele I originally created the carabinieri to keep order in the countryside. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the carabinieri had enjoyed a reputation as a well-trained and effective police force, but by the 1960s, their professional standing had become significantly tarnished by their link to General DeLorenzo who attempted a coup against the national government in 1964.7

In Turin, the police had also gained an infamous reputation for their role in repressing labor strikes at FIAT during the Piazza Statuto demon-strations in 1962.8 Therefore, not only the students, but many left-wing workers also viewed the police as servants of Agnelli and the other authorities in Turin. But how did the police feel about controlling dem-onstrations and evacuating students from university buildings? The oral recollections of former police officers who served during the late 1960s, and official reports from Turin’s chief of police, the Questor and his superior, the Prefect, tell a story of growing tension between the students and local authorities. During the years 1967 and 1968, the police were increasingly called upon to intervene in the areas of the university and to control the escalating battle for civic space in Turin’s streets.

The Office of the Questor maintained public order and investigated crime and in the late 1960s, Turin’s Questor, Elvio Catenacci, observed



and tracked the movements of the activists and dispatched police and carabinieri to evacuate the protesters from university buildings and main-tain order at demonstrations. According to administrative procedure, the Questor reported all significant police activities to the Prefect who acted as federally appointed security officer to watch over the province and report directly to Rome. The reports of Prefect Giuseppe Cafo and Questor Elvio Catenacci indicated that the student protests were a cause for con-cern among the police and officials of Turin, but not one as threatening as the local press, La Stampa would have had its readers believe.

From January to September 1968, Prefect Cafo sent 21 dispatches to the Ministry of the Interior in Rome concerning student activities. Far from messages of alarm, these dispatches were of an impersonal nature and simply noted the changing numbers of both carabinieri and municipal police deployed in the university area. In Turin, the majority of the police sent to watch and control student activism came from the 1st Reparto Mobile (Mobile Unit) of the municipal police and the 1st Battalion of the carabinieri. These two groups were both housed near the center of Turin.9 Throughout this period, Prefect Cafo normally stationed 50 municipal police and 50 carabinieri to watch student activities in the area of the Palazzo Campana.

Although little is known about the origins of these police, it seems likely that the municipal police came from Turin and the nearby prov-inces, and the carabinieri hailed from regions beyond Piedmont. For the most part, the police of all types in Italy were recruited from the poorest classes of society and about 63 percent originally came from southern Italy.10 For many former southerners like Angelo Gentile, a position in Turin’s municipal police force offered an escape from the poverty of his rural Calabria.11 Gentile had grown up under the Fascist regime and even served as a driver for the German Army during its occupation of Italy in early 1943. For the most part, he had accepted the fascist ideol-ogy and supported the Italian invasion of Ethiopia as well as Mussolini’s attempts to modernize the country. Speaking of the student protest years nearly thirty years later, Gentile recalled:

The student demonstrations provoked nostalgia for Fascism and the political past, because the citizens felt abandoned by the state which did not defend them against the hoodlums who blocked all of the activity in the center of the city. They [the students] were the abso-lute masters and no one could object out of fear of surrendering to this bunch of hotheads who as individuals were rabbits but in mass they became lions capable of destroying everything.12


62 Italy and 1968

Along with his nostalgia for fascism, Angelo Gentile, like other police officers who came from humble origins, believed that the stu-dents were simply spoiled rich kids who wanted “l’anarchia generale e totale” (general and total anarchy), and that “they did not study, they destroyed.” He claimed that during one incident a group of “hotheads” had attempted to block and terrorize the center of Turin. However, the Prefect had refused to send in the police because he had orders from his superiors in Rome not to authorize any action against the “contestatori.” In Gentile’s opinion the student leaders were all “figli di papà” (daddy’s kids) who were connected to old, elite political circles.”13 Gentile was not alone in his antistudent views and Sandro Medici a former police officer from Rome also recalled that the student activists “all of whom were figli di papà” called his fellow officers “assassins” and threw coins in their faces.14

Although Gentile and Medici’s opinions may have represented an extreme form of antistudent sentiment, other members of the Turin police also pointed out that the leaders of the student movement, such as Luigi Bobbio and Laura DeRossi, came from the upper echelons of society and seemed to be nothing more than lazy, spoiled children.15 In terms of policing protest however, class may have been less important than the police officers’ sense of duty as they had shown themselves to be just as resolute in maintaining order against the workers during the labor riots of 1962.16

On the other hand, there were some police who had left-leaning views and even sympathized with the students. According to Benevenuto Revelli, the father of student leader Marco, there were a significant number of young police officers from the province of Piedmont who supported the students. One had warned Marco to wear a motorcycle helmet to the demonstrations,17 and some even alerted the activists of impending police raids.18 Several former policemen acknowledged that they supported the students initially because the universities needed reform. However, they later lost sympathy for the activists because the students had offered no specific reform proposals.19

Many former Turin policemen claimed that they were neutral in their views toward the students and had simply followed the orders of their superiors. An ex-captain of the municipal police, Armando Altomare remembered, “My duty was to keep public order and preserve civil liber-ties. We only entered the Palazzo Campana at the request of Rector Allara, and the majority of the students left peacefully—only a few had to be carried out.” Such an account challenges La Stampa’s misleading photo-graphs of students dragged from the Palazzo Campana by the police.20



Thirty years later, the memory that stands out among some police officers is the vandalism that occurred during demonstrations and occupations. Altomare recalled his initial reaction upon entering the Palazzo Campana: “The halls were filled with broken chairs and litter, and the restrooms were covered with filth and used prophylactics.”21 These words indicate that despite this policeman’s attempt to be even-handed, he was appalled by the students’ disregard for public property and their sexual license. Like Professor Gullini and some of the readers of the popular press, this former police captain appeared to be more alarmed by the filth (“sporcizia”) and immorality of the activists than their physical threats to public order.22

After the first evacuation of the Palazzo Campana in December, there was a steady increase in police intervention in the university. Initially the police were used to protect the faculty at the University of Turin. For example, on January 17, Questor Catenacci received a report that Professor of Literature Giovanni Getto had entered the Palazzo Camapana to give a lecture on Italian literature and found his lectern occupied by two student activists, Luigi Bobbio and Fazio Silvana. Getto then called in the police to remove Bobbio and Silvana. When the activists refused to leave voluntarily, the police officers attempted to physically remove them and, according to the Questore’s report, Bobbio punched one of the police officers and was charged with resistance to arrest and battery. Police later released Bobbio and Silvana without charging them.23 In another case the Questore received news from his officers that on the evening of February 28, as many as 350 students had occupied the Palazzo Campana and were evacuated the following morning without incident by police who arrested 21 activists.24

Along with reporting the movements of the demonstrators, the police also spied on adults who sought to open a dialogue with the activists. On January 9, the Questore reported to Prefetto Cafo that some professors, including Norberto Bobbio, professor of law and Senatore of the Republic, and Mathematics Professor Tullio Viola met with students at the head-quarters of the Catholic student association (FUCI). A report from April 19 mentioned that Communist Deputy Giorgina Levi, who had been a known supporter of the student reformers, had joined occupants in the Aula Magna of the Palazzo Campana to discuss university reforms.25

From the police officers’ standpoint, the incidents within the uni-versity were relatively mild compared to the increasing violence asso-ciated with street demonstrations in February and March when larger numbers of police were deployed. In February, police reports noted that the students had widened their zone of activity to include most of the


64 Italy and 1968

city center. There was a demonstration in front of La Stampa’s editorial offices on February 2 and a protest against the Vietnam War outside the US Consulate on February 18. Another manifestation of student power and organization was observed by police officers on March 8 when 5000 demonstrators gathered at the Polytechnic to protest the arrest of Federico Avanzini (one of the signatories of the students’ Carta Rivendicativa), marched to the Judicial Prison, paraded up town to the headquarters of the Questura, turned back toward the centro passing by the Caserma dell’ Arma (the barracks of the carabinieri) and were finally dispersed by police in the centro.26

These demonstrations also became scenes of student violence as activ-ists at an anti-Vietnam rally vented their anger by throwing stones, coins, eggs, and bags of red paint at police.27 Niccola Seminara, a retired policeman, recalled with disgust that the student protesters often threw coins in their faces because they believed that the police had been hired by Agnelli to put down left-wing protests.28 Police officers often suffered minor cuts and bruises and some had to be hospitalized after battling with student protesters.29 However, the Prefect’s reports to Rome and the dispatches of the Questore omitted any specific references to police violence against the students except that on four separate occasions, the police were dispatched to control student demonstrations against “alleged violence of the police against the students of the various universities.”30 The authorities understandably tended to ignore or discredit charges of police violence, just as the students may have exaggerated their charges of police brutality.31 Moreover, the police records also indicate that the students were not passive actors in the upheavals of 1967–68. Despite former Turin activist Guido Viale’s insistence that the student activists were passive victims who “neither invented nor discovered violence, but received violence,” the student rebels proved capable of violence against people and things.32

As the student manifestations became larger and more threatening in the late spring, the police paid closer attention to the student actions. Police recorded one particularly violent episode on April 28, when 400 activists marched from the Chamber of Labor to the headquarters of La Stampa and burned copies of the newspaper in front of the building. The students then threw stones at the offices of La Stampa and invaded a nearby department store, STANDA, tipping over displays and causing havoc. After leaving STANDA, the students then stormed a nearby expo-sition room of FIAT motors. Ultimately, the remaining 300 protesters reunited back in the Chamber of Labor where Pietro Nenni, the leader of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU),33 was addressing workers and students.



For the activists, this march had been filled with symbolic acts of protest. They had first sought revenge against the newspaper that had so often vilified them, took vengeance on the automobile manufacturer that had enslaved their class allies, the workers of Turin, and finally struck out at a political leader who was seen by many activists as a “sell-out” to the government. However, for the police, the students were simply an angry mob, the lambs that Angelo Gentile claimed turned to lions when they gathered in crowds. In his report, the Questore claimed that the major-ity of the demonstrators were members of the extreme left-wing Party of Socialist and Proletarian Unity (PSIUP) and the filocinesi.34

The police presence at student demonstrations reached its highest level on June 1 when 670 municipal police and carabinieri were deployed for a protest march that was sponsored by the PSIUP to demonstrate their solidarity with French students and workers.35 This demonstration, which also included many workers, provoked a major police response. Typically, the Prefect would add an extra 100 municipal police or carabinieri to the existing force at the University to control student demonstrations. In June, 300 police and carabinieri were dispatched to the Teatro Alfieri during a rally held by Communist Deputy Giancarlo Pajetta to stop any disorders caused by “elements of the extremist filocinesi and members of the student movement.”36 As far as the Turin police were concerned, the filocinesi represented a more subversive element within the larger student movement.

Although the number of officers sent to police student demonstra-tions steadily increased through the spring of 1968, they did not reflect an unusual threat to public order. In order to place these figures in perspective, it should be noted that even larger numbers of police and carabinieri were sent to control crowds at soccer matches. Turin’s soccer team, Juventus, was one of the top teams in Italy and Europe, drawing thousands of fans to its matches. For example, on February 26, just three days before the students’ “occupation of the barricades,” the Prefect dispatched 420 mobile police officers and carabinieri to control crowds at a soccer match pitting Juventus against Eintracht, a “former world cup champion.”37 The “occupation of the barricades” on the other hand, elicited no comment from Prefect Cafo to his superiors in Rome. In another example, on May 13, as many as 500 carabinieri and munici-pal police were sent to control crowds at a game between Juventus and Benfica Lisbona (also a world champion).38 Thus, based on the Prefect’s statistical reports, the student demonstrations posed no greater threat to public order than that of a soccer match. However, in the broad span of university–police relations since the Second World War, the number


66 Italy and 1968

of police deployed to the University of Turin did represent a drastic change from the more tranquil 1950s and early 1960s; also the students represented a less predictable threat to civic order than the periodic crowds of rowdy soccer fans.

From the perspective of Turin’s judges, the students posed little threat to public safety as indicated by the types of charges and judgments handed down against those arrested during the period of student protest. In general, student crimes almost never led to conviction in the courts. The former defense attorney for many of the Turin activists, Bianca Guidetti-Serra39 remembered that most of the students she defended were charged with only minor offenses. The crimes most often attributed to student rebels were the occupation of university buildings which car-ried a maximum penalty of two years in prison, disturbing lessons with a maximum punishment of five years in prison, conducting unauthorized demonstrations, and writing slanderous articles against the professors. Among the judges, the socialists were sympathetic to student defendants and the conservatives sided with the police and professors.40 The courts granted amnesty to nearly all the activists shortly after their arrests and most of the protesters stayed in jail only a few hours. In the mid-1970s, all the members of the student movement received a general amnesty by the Republic.41

As the nature of public unrest changed from student and workers demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s to soccer hooliganism in the 1980s and 1990s, the police developed better ways of dealing with public disorder. A major reform of all the police forces occurred in 1981 and police sought to contain rather than confront public unrest. As one policeman interviewed in 1994 by Donatella della Porta reflected:

As far as I’m concerned, from the point of view of social relations, for certain, the 1960s with all the battles in the streets and the kill-ing of people, of demonstrators, we arrived at the low point of relations between the people and the forces of order, who were seen in a negative way, as if they were operating with an iron fist.42

The workers: A separate path to revolution

The student activists turned to the working class in the late 1960s as both a source of inspiration and as partners in their struggle against the establishment. As historian Marica Tolomelli has demonstrated, the stu-dents believed that they were establishing “organic ties” with the working class after their joint cooperation with striking workers in the spring of



1968.43 The workers, on the other hand, received the students’ approach with mixed emotions. In Turin, some workers joined the students’ strug-gle against the establishment and participated in groups such as the Lega Studenti e Operai (League of Students and Workers), Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power), and Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle). A few hundred workers even attended meetings of the General Assembly in the Palazzo Campana. However, the majority of the workers viewed the student movement as a kind of “auxiliary” to their battle for higher wages and better contracts. In some cases, the workers angrily regarded the student activists as tools of management.44

The relationship between Turin’s workers and its university students had never been congenial, particularly because many older workers remembered when students had flocked to the Fascist Party. Andrea Liberatori, a former journalist for l’Unità in Turin remarked, “The work-ers of Turin did not forget that nearly all the university students in Italy had been thoroughly on the side of the Fascist regime and against the position of labor.”45 A few of the workers undoubtedly remembered that Mussolini had once given speeches from the Palazzo Campana, the headquarters of Turin’s Fascist Party.46 However, the postwar years brought significant changes to both the working class and the univer-sity as both workers and left-wing students moved closer together in ideological terms. Bruno Manghi, historian of the Turin workers, has argued that the workers and students were brought together in 1968–69 by the “union past” and the “student present.” Manghi interpreted the worker–student relationship as one in which the student activ-ists of the late 1960s had been inspired by the heroic struggle of the Turin workers against fascism and the factory occupations of the early twentieth century.

The students, in turn, helped mobilize many workers who were dissat-isfied with the stagnant position adopted by the traditional labor unions by encouraging them to set up workers’ assemblies at the shop-floor level in defiance of the usual, more hierarchical, union procedures.47 This challenge to the big unions may have prodded labor leaders to adopt more extreme measures and helped ignite the explosion of unrest dur-ing the “Hot Autumn” of 1969. The labor movement eventually won a tremendous victory over management with the accord on pensions in 1975.48 Manghi’s hypothesis must be tempered by the fact that many workers also rejected student efforts to mobilize them and, in the case of the southerners in Turin, came to express their discontent toward management in more traditional peasant forms which they had brought with them from the Mezzogiorno.49


68 Italy and 1968

The students themselves disagreed on the ways in which they could mobilize the workers. Unlike the West German students who believed the working class was hopelessly integrated into the capitalist system, the Italian students, like their French counterparts, did seek an alliance.50 Marica Tolomelli has discerned three different student factions who sought to mobilize the Italian working class: the antiauthoritarian, the Marxist-Leninist, and the operaisti.51 Though they differed in their theo-retical understandings of the relationship between students and workers, they did converge in a common goal of uniting with workers in the spring of 1968. Although the May 1968 events in France that culminated with the Grenelle Accords are the most often cited and most dramatic of the European labor upheavals of the late 1960s, the Italian case was nearly as large but far more prolonged than the French case. Historian Gerd-Rainer Horn characterizes Italian labor unrest as a “creeping May” with Italy’s General Strike occurring on November 19, 1968 and later culminating in a wave of strikes that hit Italy in the famous “Hot Autumn” of 1969.52 Ultimately, nearly five million workers downed their tools in 1969 making the Hot Autumn the third largest wave of strikes in history.53

Just as Parisian students had reached out to workers at Renault, the students of Turin attempted to mobilize the workers at FIAT. At the outset, the Turin students formed a large Commissione Operaia (Workers’ Commission) within the General Assembly to coordinate their movement with the workers’ struggles at FIAT. By late spring 1968, however, the continued dissension over their stance towards the workers along with growing hostility from the labor unions led to the dissolution of the commission.54 By the summer of 1968, the student movement of Turin no longer sought to ally with the work-ers in an official way, opting instead to allow affiliated associations such as the Lega Studenti e Operai and Lotta Continua to organize small groups of militant workers.55

The official representatives of Italian labor, the unions and the Communist Party, gave lip service to an alliance with the students while at the same time working to maintain their control over the workers. A Communist Party Central Committee member, Maurizio Ferrara, called the student movement an “avante-garde” and pledged his party’s support in an editorial to l’Unità in February 1968.56 Two days later, amid rising police retaliation against the student protesters, the Direction of the PCI urged its readers to support and join the students in their struggle. “The working class can and must intervene … because everyone should be allowed to study.”57 The smaller and more militant Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP) argued that despite the students’ membership



in the bourgeoisie, they could be an “auxiliary” force to the wider social struggle of the working class.58

Privately, the Communist Party members and veteran labor lead-ers condemned the student movement as “infantile” or “anarchist” and rejected its attempts to join in the social struggles of the working class.59 A former journalist for l’Unità, Andrea Liberatori, noted that the student movement’s attack on Italian democracy offended many older Communist leaders because their Party had briefly joined the government after the war and had helped draft the Constitution of the Republic. After the Sino-Soviet split and the death of Togliatti in 1964, the Italian Communist Party had sought an autonomous, Italian road to socialism relying on an alliance between the workers and the lower middle class. Thus when the workers heard about the Battle of the Valle Giulia in March 1968, many sided with Pasolini in favor of the police over the “figli di papà” in the student movement.60 A former PCI Deputy and supporter of the students, Giorgina Levi recalled that some mem-bers of her party including its leader Luigi Longo, expressed indifference and even outright hostility to the student movement. In particular, Levi remembered a prominent party member Giorgio Amendola telling her contemptuously that “those students, with their red flags—they are the flags of the anarchists.”61

The major unions also spurned collaboration with the students, fear-ing a direct challenge to their right to speak for Italian labor. The former Secretary of the Turin Chamber of Labor, Giovanni Alasia, who had contact with leaders of both organized labor and the student groups during the late 1960s and early 1970s, characterized the labor–student relationship as one of both collaboration and conflict. Unlike the unions which had built a longstanding and systematic relationship with the workers, the students’ support for labor was sporadic and inconsistent. According to Alasia, the erratic position of the students stemmed from their own disunity. He remembered that “in the late 1960s, when I was at the Chamber of Labor, I had contact with thirteen different student groups—there were three different Chinese groups alone!”62

Despite the unions’ hostility, a few militant activists continued to meet with workers at FIAT. Liliana Lanzardo, a sociologist and a former member of the Lega Studenti e Operai, recounted numerous incidents of union animosity. During the early months of the student revolt from December 1967 to March 1968, labor leaders responded to the students with “evasive and abstract” answers and promoted attitudes of restraint among union members vis-à-vis the student protesters. Lanzardo has argued that the unions resented the students’ challenge


70 Italy and 1968

to their positions as spokesmen for the workers and questioned the activists’ “legitimacy to join in a general political opposition.”63

Although the unions’ position toward the Turin student movement remained diffident through the spring months, the workers had a chance to meet the activists in March when large numbers of students joined FIAT workers in their strike for better pensions. The activists distributed copies of the journal Voce Operaia (“Worker’s Voice”) that contained an article entitled, “The students also say Enough!”64 According to a former student rebel, Peppino Ortoleva, the workers cared little about the ideology of the students, but did appreciate their will to fight. Ortoleva recalled, “I think they [the workers] liked to see good-looking, well dressed girls who would scream dirty words and wanted to fight.”65

The unions never officially recognized the student movement as an ally in the labor struggles, despite their shared rebellion against authority in the late 1960s.66 Lanzardo recalled that after March 1968, the Turin stu-dent movement gave up any major efforts to collaborate with the unions and chose instead to reach out to the workers and apprentices at the FIAT schools directly through the “gruppi di porta” (groups at the gate). Despite union hostility, the student activists were allowed to march with workers from the communist CGIL trade union during the May Day parades of 1968.67 Conversely, apprentices from the FIAT school turned out in large numbers to join with university protesters in a demonstration on June 1. The historian Giovanni De Luna has interpreted the June 1 demonstra-tion as the students’ symbolic recognition of the importance of the work-ers because the participants gathered and initiated their demonstration in the heart of Turin’s working class neighborhoods, the Barriera di Milano, and marched into the city center.68

Although the major trade unions remained tepid in their enthusiasm for university allies, the workers, like the popular press, developed a kind of love–hate relationship with the student activists. The workers appreci-ated what Ortoleva has called the students’ venire alle mani (willingness to fight) on the one hand, but rejected student activists as overly pedantic, figli di papà, on the other. The testimony of workers from Turin provides an excellent window into their views during the period of student and labor unrest spanning the years 1967 to 1969. One of the key elements that first united workers and university activists in a single cause in the late 1960s was the protest against the West’s involvement in Vietnam. Bruno Manghi has argued that the Vietnam War provided a common ground whereby the workers and students could meet despite the huge social and economic divisions that divided them.69 The recollections of Luciano Parlanti, a FIAT worker since 1959 and former member of



Lotta Continua, support Manghi’s assumption. Parlanti recalled that like the student activists, “Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam became a symbol to us (workers), an element of identification.” He further remembered that he and his workmates had borrowed slogans from the students such as, “HO-HO-HO CHI MINH” and “AGNELLI YOU HAVE A WORKSHOP IN INDOCHINA” during the FIAT strikes of 1968 and 1969.70

In another case, Giampiero Carpo, a young skilled worker who came from a Partisan family in Turin and attended the FIAT school, remembered being drawn to the student demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Like many of the workers who joined with the activists in 1968, Carpo had hoped that the worker–student uprisings in France would provoke a similar unity and revolt among Italian students and workers.71 However, Carpo discovered that the majority of the workers did not feel that the students and workers shared the same political and social goals and no equivalent of the tumultuous French May occurred in Italy in 1968. The French students and workers were united in their hatred toward de Gaulle and his government, whereas the Italian workers who struck in the Hot Autumn of 1969 did so because they despised their bosses.

Although the workers and students never achieved the level of unity reached during the French May, many workers did take an interest in the students beginning in March 1968. The Battle of the Valle Giulia, accord-ing to Tolomelli, proved to be a crucial turning point from the students’ perspective because it convinced many activists that their struggle was much larger than that of university reform but was really a movement to overturn all the repressive organs of society. The students realized that they could not win this struggle without the much broader and decisive help of the working class. Thus, the left-wing Italian students, regardless of their ideological camp, felt a new impetus to ally with the workers after March 1.72 Less than a week after the Battle of the Valle Giulia, Turin students found an opportunity to ally with the workers. On March 7, students turned out in large numbers to protest for the release of a detained student and issuing of arrest warrants for twelve others. The planned student demonstration coincided with a FIAT workers’ demonstration for higher wages. After meeting with workers early on the morning of March 7, the students decided to end their march by meet-ing up with the demonstrating workers in the afternoon. The student march ran from the city jail, Carceri Nuove to the offices of La Stampa and then joined with the workers’ demonstration.73 After March 7workers began to attend activist student meetings at the university, and one worker from Olivetti even proposed forming a worker–student group in provincial Ivrea to organize workers at his factory.74


72 Italy and 1968

The students again contributed heavily to the FIAT strike of March 30 that called for a forty-four hour week and a slowdown in the pace of work. Naturally, the owners’ La Stampa sought to minimize worker involvement in the strike and subsequently attributed all acts of violence and provocation to the student activists. Moreover, the unions distrib-uted flyers among the workers condemning all “foreign elements” that had participated in the strike.75 In a “Letter from a group of workers to the students of Turin,” the authors expressed their gratitude for the students’ recent support in the strikes and expressed the view that “the students would be of great use if they would collaborate together with us workers in search of ways to make the combativeness of the workers permanent and official.”76 It should be noted however, that the workers wanted the students to help them, expressing again Ortoleva’s view that the workers appreciated the students “will to fight” but did not consider the students as coequals in their struggle.

Through the month of April, more workers attended meetings in the Palazzo Campana despite continued union warnings against collabora-tion with the students. Dino Antonioni, an unskilled, non-unionized worker remembered the unions and members of the PCI insulting him for attending meetings of the Lega Studenti e Operai.77 However, the warnings of the unions did not stop over 300 workers from meeting with student activists in the Palazzo Campana on April 12. Some work-ers proposed the publication of an autonomous newspaper written by workers and students, and one after another, they described conditions at FIAT to the students. Liliana Lanzardo recalled the meeting and wrote that “for the first time, they [workers] made clear the sterility of the students’ rhetoric.”78

Lanzardo’s words laid bare one of the underlying problems of student–worker collaboration in the late 1960s, that of incongruent discourses. Not that the two discourses were at cross-purposes, but that they revealed the tremendous cultural differences between the workers and the uni-versity students. From the students’ perspective, many only knew about the working class from the writings of Marx, Engels, and Gramsci. Thus, their rhetoric was often pedantic with a highly theoretical and ideologi-cal vocabulary that obscured their discussions with the workers of FIAT. From the workers’ perspective, class-consciousness meant rising at 3 a.m. to catch the train to FIAT, the 6½ day work weeks, the lack of work breaks that necessitated keeping a loaf of bread in one’s coat to eat on the line, and restricted lavatory visits which forced them to urinate in old wine bottles during their shifts.79 Thus, the majority of workers and students could simply not find a common language on which to build solidarity



of interests. Aside from the small student–worker initiatives like the Lega Studenti e Operai and Lotta Continua, the bulk of the university activists and workers remained divided by life experiences that, although parallel, would not intersect.

Another example of these non-intersecting discourses can be found in a flyer distributed by student activists outside the gates of FIAT claiming that since the students were essentially the “proletariat” of the univer-sity, they ought to be the natural allies of the working class.80 Such an argument found few supporters among the workers and served only to underscore the students’ lack of understanding of conditions in the factories. Another flyer distributed by engineering students from the Polytechnic claimed that

[w]hoever commands is always the boss. Whoever works as an engi-neer according to the will of the boss is only a slave better paid but always a slave.81

Such well-intentioned rhetoric could not change the obvious fact that despite their shared subservience to the owners of FIAT, the workers knew that the engineers of FIAT belonged to a vastly different social class and, at the factory level, these engineers would have been viewed as part of management. Or in the words of one worker, Luciano Parlanti, “The world of the students was a whole different world from the world of the workers.”82

In words similar to the language of the popular press, some of the workers ridiculed and criticized the dogmatic rhetoric of the activists. In a letter written by a group of FIAT workers who had attended a joint student–worker meeting in the Palazzo Campana on May 2, the workers expressed the hope that the students’ interest in the labor movement was not “solely an intellectual mania” concocted by the students who “come from the world of culture.” The workers went on to say that they despised the so-called people of culture because their bosses were part of the “world of culture.” The workers further rebuked the students who could spend all night talking about revolution knowing that “the whole morning they can sleep as long as they want and that it is the mama’s little purse that finances the revolution.” The workers resented the student revolutionaries who threw stones at police and scabs and then drove away in an Alfa Romeo Spider. 83

In a meeting of the Lega Studenti e Operai on May 12, the problem of language reappeared in discussions between workers and students. In particular, the workers resented the patronizing political rhetoric of the


74 Italy and 1968

students. A worker from the Mirafiori plant rejected the students’ view that the workers did not have a political consciousness, exclaiming that “the workers of FIAT are not babies—even though they treat us like that.”84 The workers especially detested the students’ self-proclaimed right to serve as helmsmen for the social revolution. Vito, another worker from Mirafiori, warned, “If ten students carry this thing forward, they will have the support of the workers. But a hundred students who want to guide us, they will never have it.”85 To the workers, it seemed as if the student leaders had adopted the same didactic and patronizing discourse that they despised in their professors. Thus one could say that despite their rejection of the traditional university, the students had still “learned” a great deal from their professors!

The former Secretary of the Turin Chamber of Labor, Giovanni Alasia also believed that the students failed to win over the workers on a large scale because of their dogmatic proselytizing. Citing an often-repeated legend about the students’ attempts to organize the workers in 1968, Alasia offered an anecdote about one young activist who went to organize the FIAT workers at Mirafiori:

Student: “You have never read Marx?”Worker: “Well no, not really.”Student: “You have not studied Marx?”Worker: “Not exactly.”Student: “You don’t know Marx?”Worker: “He doesn’t work in my section!”86

Aside from the pedantic and patronizing quality of the student’s ques-tions, the entire discourse resembled the same interrogative method used by many professors during class exams. Ironically, this student appeared to have retained the “style” if not the actual words of a typical dialogue between him and his hated “professori—baroni.”

Although the student groups had managed to reconcile some of their own ideological differences, as evident in the collaboration between the Catholic student organization, Intesa, and the Communists’ FGCI, the workers tended to view all the student activists as radical left-wingers. An unidentified FIAT worker told Lanzardo that even though the student movement did not claim to be connected to any political party, his impression, along with most of his fellow workers, was that the student movement was connected to the radical Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP). He further added that he did not want eve-rybody, including students, to join the PSIUP.87 Another worker, named



Dino Antonioni, also noted that many rural immigrants at FIAT feared the communists. Anotonioni recalled that although he had an uncle who had been a communist, there were those back in his village who had told stories about communists eating babies.88

Ironically, these same southerners that shunned both the PCI and the unions, became the explosive force behind the great labor unrest of 1969. Antonioni recognized this irony in his own workshop at FIAT, noting that the managers called his section, l’officina filocinesi (the Maoist workshop) when in fact, it was the immigrant workers, who had protest experience as rural laborers, who were the most radical.89 According to Giovanni Alasia and Paul Ginsborg, the great labor unrest of the Autunno Caldo had arisen from the severe demographic change in the working class caused by the massive influx of southern, unskilled Italian workers to the north during the 1960s. Alasia has said that “In 1945, Turin had about 600,000 citizens, by the mid-1960s, we had 1.2 million, and this caused a major rethinking of politics and labor relations.” He further noted that “the old unionized workers of Turin learned new tactics from the southern immigrants, they [southerners] brought with them the ideas of the jacquerie—the revolt of the contadini [peasants].”90 In his book on civil unrest, States of Emergency, historian Robert Lumley recounts an incident during which a southern worker at FIAT led his workmates through the factory yard during a protest march with the head of a rabbit stuck on a pole which was an old peasant form of rebellion against the landlord. In this context, the impaled rabbit head served as a warning to scabs and represented the adaptation of a peasant form of social protest to industrial conditions.91

Although the southern immigrant workers infused the Turin working class with a greater militancy than the student movement ever could, the radical challenge posed to the traditional unions by the student activists in 1968 also revived Italian labor. According to Bruno Manghi, the stu-dents challenged the unions to return to their broader mission. As proof, Manghi noted the almost Marcusian sound of the Italian Confederation of Unionized Workers (CISL)’s 1968 Congress slogan, “Power against power.”92 Although the students may have begun to mobilize the mass of southern laborers in northern Italy in 1968, the labor unions regained control of the workers by the following year and led them in their most successful strikes of the postwar period, the “Hot Autumn” of 1969.93

In the popular memory of the late 1960s the student unrest from the late autumn of 1967 to the end of 1968 has been separated from the labor strikes of 1969. This schism is implicit in the testimonies of two pensioners from FIAT. Luigi Addari, a non-union, foundry worker at FIAT


76 Italy and 1968

from 1943 to 1975, recalled many incidents of labor unrest in 1962 and 1969 but had only this to say about the students: “was it 1968 … that was the time with the episodes of the students.”94 Another worker who had been at FIAT’s Mirafiori plant remembered,“ 1968—ahh, that was also a good year … they broke everything the students, at that time.”95 Significantly, these workers did not associate the students with their own struggles at FIAT and both identify the year 1968 with student unrest. In more explicit words, a former member of the student–worker organiza-tion, Lotta Continua, Luciano Parlanti declared, “1968 affected us workers very little … the workers had the struggle of the workers and the students’ struggle was the student movement.” Parlanti believed that the students did not really interact with the workers until the autonomous groups like Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio met with workers in 1969.96

The student movement in the large industrial cities of northern Italy did affect the workers in the late 1960s, but there is debate over the extent and ways that this interaction influenced the workers. Certainly the students’ assault on the authoritarian structures of the universities undoubtedly emboldened industrial workers to question the authority of their bosses.97 In Turin, the students did collaborate with striking workers during the 1968–69 period of labor militancy.98 However, the broad mass of the student protesters never became an integral part of the great wave of strikes that swept northern Italy in 1969. Mostly, the students were viewed as an auxiliary and were respected for their “will to fight.”99 Perhaps the relegation of the student activists to that of auxiliaries can be explained by Marica Tolomelli’s observation that just as significant student–worker interaction had begun to occur in the late spring of 1968, the student movement had already peaked. With the onset of summer holidays, the student movement never regained its former momentum in the autumn of 1968, just as the worker unrest was beginning to take off. Thus, striking workers in the later half of 1968 and in 1969 might have noticed the presence of a handful of radical students among their ranks but did not recognize the student movement as an independent and allied actor in their labor struggles as they had in the spring of 1968.100

Some scholars have claimed that the workers utilized protest tactics they had learned from the students in their battles with management.101 Such assumptions ignore the fact that the workers of Turin had, for exam-ple, used the tactic of the occupation against the Fascists more than two decades before.102 Furthermore, as the former student activist Vittorio Rieser admitted, the workers had already begun moving in a militant direction as early as 1962 with the strikes and riots in the Piazza Statuto.103



According to Giovanni Alasia, the former head of the Turin Chamber of Labor, it was the students who learned the ideas of the occupation and the general assembly from the workers.104

The church: Caught between obedience and understanding

From the perspective of the leftist students, the Church seemed an archaic institution, clouded in superstition and monolithic in its rejec-tion of new social or cultural movements. Daniela Torresini, a former activist at the University of Trent, remembered staging “anti-masses” (contro-messa) outside the Cathedral of Trent on Sundays, mocking the clergy and parishioners.105 However, there also existed a large contingent of student activists who had been members of Catholic student organiza-tions and still remained faithful to their beliefs. In fact, one of the first and most rebellious student movements began at the private Catholic University of Milan (La Cattolica) where student leader Mario Capanna rose to prominence. Capanna had been inspired by the “opening” of the Second Vatican Council and his expulsion from the Cattolica for his stu-dent activism in 1967 drove him toward the ideas of the Nuova Sinistra.106 For many like Capanna, John XXIII’s “opening” of the Church to left-leaning views enabled Catholic students to explore and adopt ideas from the New Left ideology in the 1960s.

The story of Turin is different due to the region’s unique history of secular rule and religious tolerance. Unlike Rome or central Italy, the Church had never exercised strong control over Piedmont and the region had even contained a small Protestant community. Therefore, the Church never played as large a role in the Turin events of 1967 and 1968, as it did in the events in Milan where a major Catholic university was located. In Turin, the student movement had its own parallel movement within the Church led by younger priests who questioned the authority of the Bishops and Archbishops. Don Giuseppe Tuninetti, an ecclesiasti-cal librarian and former student at the University of Turin in the late 1960s, remembered that a group of young priests had banded together to form the Communità del Vandolino (Community of Vandolino) under the leadership of the city’s Cardinal Pellegrino, who was also a professor of Christian literature at the University of Turin. Appointed Bishop in 1965 and later Archbishop of Turin, Don Pellegrino came to be one of the leading supporters of conscientious objectors to military service in Italy, and he encouraged discussion of reform among his students and the younger priests. Some of Pellegrino’s followers demonstrated their solidarity with conscientious objectors. Their banners, announcing,


78 Italy and 1968

“Obedience is no longer a virtue,” defied Pope Paul VI’s pronounce-ments on the need for greater obedience in the late 1960s.107 Seeking an accord between the Church and rising student and worker activism in the 1960s, Pellegrino also became one of the most vigorous advocates of a dialogue with the left known as cattocomunismo.108 According to Don Tuninetti, the generational split between student activists and their parents and teachers in the 1960s had also divided the Church between the younger priests who sought a renewed sense of spirituality and faith and the older clergy who resisted change.109

Cardinal Pellegrino’s antiwar stance and attempt at dialogue with Turin activists, as well as the Community of Vandolino’s questioning of their ecclesiastical elders belied the student left’s retrograde image of the Church. Such examples, at least in the case of Turin, provided important corrections to the stereotypical view of the Church in the late 1960s. By the spring of 1968, Pope Paul VI cautiously began to encourage a dialogue with youth and recognized the changing role of young people in society when in a communication, delivered by Cardinal Cicognani, to a clergy meeting in Valladolid in April 1968 he wrote that

[t]he future is already present in the young people; in them one can read as in a microcosm, the signs of the times.… In contemporary society, the youth exercise a force (vim exercent) of great importance. Their life circumstances and mentalities and relations with their fami-lies are greatly changed.… The young people have an awareness of real power, accelerating no small transformations and demanding their participation, not as passive subjects of a well-intentioned pedagogy, but as those who create true cultural, social and political change.110

However, Paul VI also cautioned the younger generation, warning them to heed their elders to avoid making the mistakes of the past.

Youth posses a potential of the greatest value that the adults must rec-ognize and utilize; but, the young people, on their part, can not dismiss from history and from necessity the acquisition of a preparation that, without rejecting the counsel of fathers and teachers, enables them to avoid repeating the same errors of those whom they criticize.111

During the papacy of John XXIII from 1958 to 1963, the Church had encouraged reform and renewal initiatives among young Catholics dur-ing the Second Vatican Council. Born in 1881, John XXIII was well into his 70s when he became Pope and from a generational perspective, his



affect on younger priests was not unlike the former antifascist Partigiani who inspired activism in their leftist children. However, in the late 1960s, these same clergymen faced a serious dilemma when the Catholic youth of Intesa joined hands with the Young Communists (UGI) and advocated radical political and social change. Church officials, like other Italians, often offered qualified support to the students, but drew a sharp line between what they considered good activism based on reform and cooperation and bad activism that appeared to be anti-democratic and violent. According to Tuninetti, the Catholic Church in Turin had supported the students’ demands for change and had only reversed its attitude “when the students turned to violence.”112 Such ambivalence echoed the line taken by the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano which alter-nated between diatribes against the student counterculture and positive descriptions of student–Church initiatives.113

Based on this survey of the police, workers, and clergy of Turin, we can see that response to student protest was neither wholly negative nor consistent among those who came into contact with the student activists. Contrary to Della Porta’s claim that the police were polarized between those on the Left who sympathized with the students and those on the Right who detested them, class differences made the student–police rela-tionship much less clear cut.114 Left-leaning police tended to be more sympathetic to the activists, but like many of the workers, they gener-ally dismissed the student actions as the antics of the children of the rich, the so-called figli di papà. Workers also reacted to student activism with mixed responses. For some, like Andrea Liberatori, the students did become an important catalyst for the wave of labor unrest that swept the peninsula in 1969, but for many others, the students were simply bored rich kids seeking to spread Maoist rhetoric in a patronizing way. The Church of Turin was divided between some like Cardinal Pellegrino and the Community of Vandolino which supported student pacifism, the protests against Vietnam, and a dialogue with Communists, and those who preached continued obedience to one’s elders and to the traditional positions of the Church.

In comparison with the preceding chapter, the positions of clergymen and professors in Turin appeared to have developed along similar lines with some priests and professors actively encouraging and assisting student activists through personal initiatives and others hoping to wait out the wave of youthful rebellion. On the other hand, the less affluent workers and police, who ostensibly should have been more receptive to the students’ message of change, proved much less willing to engage the activists in a dialogue or support their efforts.


80

5The National Dimension I: Constructing an Image of Protest

The student uprisings that swept the world in the late 1960s quickly achieved widespread notoriety due in large part to the power of the media to disseminate words and create images that kindled strong emo-tions among the general population. Perhaps at no time in modern history had scattered protest groups received the attention of so many forms of media, so quickly, and with such widespread circulation. Media theorist Kathrin Fahlenbrach has noted the importance of this media attention in the development and promulgation of the student move-ments’ goals: “The student and youth movement of the 1960s is the first protest movement that staged its forms of public protest theoreti-cally and practically for the conditions of the mass media.”1 Such stag-ing of demonstrations is epitomized by the violent encounters between protesters and police at Rome’s Valle Giulia, Paris’s Latin Quarter, and Chicago’s Grant Park where the activists knew that their encounters with the forces of order would make for dramatic viewing. Not only were these spectacles broadcast on television but the most provocative images were captured by photojournalists and appeared in newsstands the following morning.

Unlike live television broadcasts that transmitted both negative and positive images of police and protesters, news reporters and photojournalists had the time and editorial selectivity to frame stu-dent actions in accordance with their editors’ views. Tangled in a love–hate relationship, the student activists decried the press’ typi-cally negative representations of their goals and actions but also rec-ognized the importance of the press in publicizing the movement. In Italy, the majority of the newspapers with national circulations took a tough antistudent line constructing an image of the Sessantotto that was almost wholly negative. From liberal-conservative dailies such


The National Dimension I 81

as La Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera, and La Nazione to the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano, student protesters were portrayed as either figures of ridicule or dangerous threats to public order and morality. Only the Communist Party’s l’Unita sought to depict student activists as thoughtful young people peacefully struggling for university reform and political change. The fact that the Italian press offered its read-ers two vastly different images of the Italian student movement sug-gests that the Sessantotto was very much a construct of the media. These images, positive or negative, have become the visual artifacts that are inevitably recalled when one mentions the student revolts of the 1960s.2

In order to better understand the Italian press’ relationship with the student movement of the late 1960s, it will be useful to draw from media theorists who have studied the role of the press in shaping social movements. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and a semiotic approach to the media, Kathrin Fahlenbrach’s recent study of the West German student movement’s interaction with the mass media provides excellent insights into the ways that the students modified their lifestyles and protest strategies in order to capture the attention of West Germany’s television and print media.3 Using a dif-ferent approach that focuses more upon the media’s changing strate-gies in covering the student activists, American scholar Todd Gitlin draws some similar conclusions to those of Fahlenbrach. His innova-tive study of the press and television’s coverage of the Students for a Democratic Society, The Whole World is Watching, asserts that the mass media not only conveyed the student movement’s message to the American public, but also conferred “celebrity” status upon movement leaders and ultimately altered the movement’s goals and timetables.4 Gitlin further made use of sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on frame analysis to show how the press sought to marginalize and delegitimize the student movement by forcing the students’ actions into what he and other media theorists have called a “protest paradigm.”5 This chapter will make use of the “protest paradigm” in analyzing the Italian stu-dent movement’s interaction with the press. One important difference between the Italian daily newspapers and those in the United States is that Italy had a significant party press that enabled the pro-student voice of the Communist Party to be read by a portion of the Italian populace. In the United States, such a left-wing media perspective was nearly non-existent.

Gitlin’s work on the “protest paradigm” for media framing of the student actions identified eleven framing devices used by the media to


82 Italy and 1968

construct student protest. For the purposes of our study, we shall make use of six of these devices.

(i) Trivialization: making light of the movement’s language, dress, style, goals;

(ii) Polarization: emphasizing counter demonstrations and balanc-ing the New Left student movement against neofascist groups as equivalent “extremists”;

(iii) Marginalization: showing protesters to be deviant or unrepre-sentative, emphasizing the student Left’s Maoist or other non-PCI elements;

(iv) Disparagement: by numbers or undercounting, by emphasizing internal dissension within the movement, and by questioning the effectiveness of student actions;

(v) Delegitimizing: through the use of quotation marks around terms like “peace march”;

(vi) Considerable attention to those opposed to the student movement, especially from persons of authority and government officials6

By applying the concept of media framing to an analysis of centrist and conservative newspapers published in Italy in the late 1960s, it becomes clear that the presses used framing strategies to construct an “Italian” protest paradigm. In particular the “Italian” protest paradigm empha-sized the alleged similarities between the New Left student movement and the Fascist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, class tensions between student activists and the industrial workers, and the theoretically dangerous brand of Terzmondismo or Third World revolutionary Marxism extolled by the student movement. The notable counterpoint to this generally hostile Italian protest paradigm was pro-vided by the Communist Party’s l’Unita which essentially inverted the framing strategies of the conservative dailies and portrayed students as serious, nonviolent, democratically committed young people who were committed to antifascism and university reform. The communist press, however, controlled a meager 8–10 percent of the total press circulation.7 Italian television, although becoming more diffuse, was still owned and heavily regulated by the government so that very little coverage of the student movement made its way into viewers’ homes.8 For most Italians in the 1960s, television offered entertainment rather than news.9 Thus, the interested public would see and read about the student movement through the words of Italy’s journalists and lenses of its newspaper photographers.



The Sessantotto according to the conservativeand centrist press

The nonparty press, for their part, had little interest in providing an objective description of student activities and sought primarily to sell copy and defend the interests of their owners. Much like its counterpart in the United States, the Italian press fit within Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s analytical framework that has shown the media to be a reflection of elite consensus, far from being objective and unbiased.10 The conservative press espoused the views of the businessmen that held the controlling interests in their companies and the center-left politicians who felt threatened by the students’ criticisms of Italian government.11 Thus, the centrist and conservative Italian newspapers of the late 1960s focused on those elements of the New Left student move-ment that were deemed scary, sexy, illicit, or action-packed. Repeatedly, these newspapers sought to attack both the student left and by implica-tion the Italian Communist Party. The PCI’s l’ Unità, on the other hand, showed sympathy for student goals and often highlighted the positive aspects of student activism.

During the years 1967–68, newspapers that opposed the student actions held a major percentage of the daily circulation throughout the country with Turin’s La Stampa and Milan’s Corriere della Sera com-manding over a quarter of all daily sales in the 1960s. Although there was no press concentration in Italy comparable to Axel Springer’s media monopoly in West Germany, FIAT’s President Giovanni Agnelli did con-trol La Stampa directly and owned a large share of the Corriere della Sera.12 Agnelli would become the president of La Stampa in December 1967 and held that position until 1976.13 It is estimated that by owning major por-tions of La Stampa and the Corriere, Agnelli controlled about 23 percent of the Italian daily press.14 As the president and patriarch of the largest automobile company in Italy, Agnelli undoubtedly took a dim view of left-wing students who sought to stir up the revolutionary impulses of FIAT workers.

The largest shareholders and head of the Corriere della Sera, the Crespi family had owned the paper since the late nineteenth century and had sought directors and editors who had distinguished intellectual back-grounds. Many famous Italian intellectuals had written for the Corriere and the paper had a reputation for being liberal in the nineteenth-century sense favoring business and civil liberties. In February 1968, Giovanni Spadolini, a professor of history from Florence was made director of the paper.15 Spadolini was a liberal member of Italy’s tiny


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Republican Party which drew its main support from intellectuals and business leaders. Spadolini remained aloof from the protests and even his own journalists, preferring to remain shut in his office most of the day. Enzo Bettiza, a former journalist for the Corriere, remembered that Spadolini failed to recognize the protesters hurling stones at the offices of the Corriere in the Via Solferino while he was busy calling his politi-cal contacts in Rome asking about the student movement.16 Eventually Spadolini did voice his opinion of the student movement after he was nearly struck in the head by a stone hurled through the windows of the editorial office of the Corriere in 1972. He launched a strong reproach back at the protesters in an article entitled, “Offense.” Spadolini blamed the “hooliganistic” actions of the crowd on both those “in service of the MSI” and the “anarchists and Maoists and left-wing extremists” who had attacked the liberty of the press over the last four years. Like his journalists, Spadolini made reference to the Fascist period compar-ing the attacks on his press offices to those of “Farinacci’s squadristi” in 1925.17 Whether one can attribute the Corriere’s antistudent line to its conservative ownership or to Spadolini’s incomprehension of the student movement, many Milanese students viewed the Corriere as a “symbol of conservativism,” “organ of the padroni,” and “prop to the government.”18 While working for the daily in the 1960s, Enzo Bettiza traveled to West Germany on several occasions and later wrote that the Corriere had become the Italian equivalent to West Berlin’s Springer press, arousing the same ire and attacks to its editorial offices.19

Although slightly more populist and accessible in style than the Corriere, Turin’s La Stampa has a story similar to that of its Milanese coun-terpart. The long-time director of La Stampa, Giulio De Benedetti, had taken over the newspaper in 1948 with the goal of increasing the paper’s circulation by winning back the workers of FIAT and modernizing the daily’s format and style. De Benedetti was a committed antifascist liberal who ardently supported the postwar republic and sought to carve out an independent line for his newspaper that many viewed as a mouthpiece for the FIAT corporation. Known for his hard work and imperious leader-ship, De Benedetti demanded obedience from his editors.20 The pages of La Stampa reflected De Benedetti’s views in their efforts to portray the stu-dent New Left as a dangerous attack upon the government in contrast to the more respectable Old Left of the workers with whom the newspaper sought to curry favor. In the 1960s, both La Stampa and Il Corriere della Sera shared editorial policies that favored big business and the center-left coalition, and were opposed to labor militancy, the communists, and the radical students.



In Italy as a whole, corporate and clerical interests controlled about 74 percent of the Italian press, groups that had no interest in present-ing the actions of radical left-wing students in a positive or unbiased manner.21 Although more than three quarters of all Italian dailies iden-tified themselves as politically centrist, it should be noted that the their editorial policies supported the status quo, the government that was controlled by the Christian Democratic Party, and the forces of order, thus placing their interests at odds with the bulk of the student protest movement. Ultimately, the data indicates that the average reader of the Italian mainstream press would most likely purchase a nonparty affiliated daily published by a large corporation whose interests opposed those of the student movement.22

This notion of an antistudent editorial policy is confirmed by the testimony of one of the mainstream media’s key reporters during the Sessantotto. The editors of Turin’s La Stampa had assigned a rookie jour-nalist named Maria Valabrega, to cover the student activities exclusively. Chosen because of her youth and journalistic abilities, La Stampa’s editors felt Valabrega would connect with the student activists and obtain more information than an older reporter. Former activist Peppino Ortoleva remembered, “Maria was given a very difficult job because she was our age and met with us nearly every day, but she worked for them [La Stampa]!”23 Thirty years later, she claimed that she had tried to report on the activities and developments within the Turin student movement judiciously and accurately. However, like most newspapers, it was com-mon practice at La Stampa for senior editors to write headlines for articles submitted by field reporters. According to Valabrega, the editors’ head-lines and bylines were often too harsh (troppo duro) or even erroneous (sbagliato) in relation to her articles.

La Stampa, according to Valabrega, had at first taken an overly harsh line toward the students because, like the rest of society, its editors did not understand the movimento studentesco. Similar to the paradox noted by Gitlin, Valabrega also observed that her newspaper became the main publicist for the activists.24 Valabrega’s testimony indicated that similar to the workers at FIAT or some members of the Turin police, the staff at La Stampa was divided between young workers who felt sympathy for the students, the parents who worried for their children’s safety, and the older workers who feared them.25 Despite the varying opinions held by the staff of the newspaper, the editorial line remained consistently antistudent throughout the 1960s.

The practice of employing editors to craft headlines for articles that they did not write was not unique to La Stampa and was common practice


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among many newspapers. This policy was particularly notorious among the articles published by the Springer Press in West Germany where the owners enforced a strict antistudent, anticommunist line.26 But the media’s tendency toward editorial bias lies much deeper than the disconti-nuity between the journalist on the scene and the writer of the headlines. Social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the popular presses’ propensity for distortion lies within the very nature of the journalistic process.

Journalists … show us the world as a series of unrelated flash pho-tos. Given the lack of time, and especially the lack of interest and information, they cannot do what would be necessary to make events really understandable, that is, they cannot reinsert them in a network of relevant relationships … . This vision is at once dehistori-cized and dehistoricizing, fragmented and fragmenting.27

As we shall see, the conservative press not only took the student protests and activities out of their actual historical contexts but created new ahis-torical contexts for the student demonstrations that anachronistically fused them with Italy’s Fascist past and Cold War present.

But was it possible to link the generally peaceful sit-ins, marches, and civil disobedience of the Italian university movement with the violence and lawlessness of the Fascist era? Could readers of the daily newspapers be convinced that the activists represented an insidious “fifth column” in the struggle against world communism? The answer is yes, chiefly due to the abilities of the conservative and centrist press to frame stu-dent actions within the “protest paradigm” offering a distorted image of the student movement that touched upon emotional rather than intellectual chords within the reader. The scores of readers’ letters and pronouncements of politicians show that the press had succeeded in conflating contemporary Cold War angst and troubled memories of the Fascist past with the university upheavals of the Sessantotto.

The students themselves sought to oppose the protest paradigm of the conservative press. Former Turin activist Peppino Ortoleva recalled stealing copies of La Stampa when they were first delivered to news-stands at three or four o’clock in the morning and writing “corrected” articles in the activists’ mimeographed newspaper, l’Anti-Stampa.28 In an interview with oral historian Luisa Passerini, Ortoleva noted that the press and television became chief targets of student criticism because of their “fake objectivity” and “conformism.”29 The activists reacted to the fake objectivity of La Stampa by placing the newspaper’s version of



certain events side by side with, “The Facts” (I fatti).30 La Stampa, on the other hand, never bothered to acknowledge the existence of an alterna-tive student-run publication.

The image of the student activists found in the conservative press often diverged sharply from the more mundane reality of their non-violent demonstrations, marches, and university occupations. A fine example of the framing strategy of marginalization can be read in La Stampa’s description of the first university occupation in Turin. In its depiction of the occupation which lasted from November 27 through the end of December 1967, the newspaper reported that the occupa-tion was an act perpetrated by “30 youths who want to oppose the school’s authority” against the wishes of most students who wanted to continue with their studies.31 After the activists were forcibly evacuated in January, they continued to reoccupy university buildings. In fact, between November 1967 and February 1968, the rector of Turin called the police five times to evacuate student occupants.32

The students attempted to counter the press marginalization and undercounting of their movement in the pages of Anti-Stampa distrib-uted in early December 1967. In the article the students noted that rather than a mere “30 youths opposed to the school’s authority,” the students counted 815 out of 1254 voting to continue the occupation of the Palazzo Campana on November 30. Furthermore, the students attempted to counter the marginalizing tactics of La Stampa by noting that the student occupants were not destructive rebels but those who attended lectures regularly and sincerely sought university reforms.33 Though Anti-Stampa was issued regularly, it is likely that its articles were read by only a handful of those outside the student movement.

Like Turin’s La Stampa, Milan’s daily Il Corriere della Sera also sought to frame student actions using tactics from the protest paradigm. The occupation of the State University of Milan in the spring of 1968 was characterized as a battle between polarized elements of the radical student right and left. Under the dramatic heading, “BATTLE AT THE UNIVERSITY,” Figure 5.1, printed in the Corriere della Sera, shows right-wing student activists attempting to remove left-wing occupants from the university. The caption noted that “The Bramantesco Gate turned into a place of battle: in vain the invaders attempt to beat the resistance of the besieged.” The article further claimed that the right-wing students were trying to “liberate” the building so students could return to their lessons.34 Despite the theatrical headlines, caption, and poses, the libera-tors are few in number and one has even found a moment to stop and smoke a cigarette. As the above examples show, the conservative press


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emphasized the danger of the radical activists and though it portrayed both right and left wing groups as extremists, it did note that the right sought to end the occupation for the benefit of students anxious to return to classes. Furthermore, the “Bramantesco Gate” was the old, stately entrance to the university thus the Corriere della Sera framed a scene in which the students are attacking both the physical and meta-phorical integrity of the university.

The popular press also employed other metaphorical and rhetorical frames including a medieval motif in covering university unrest. Articles and photographs seemed to suggest that the occupants had invaded the university “fortress.” The police were depicted as “liberators.” An excel-lent example can be found in an article from the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano covering an evacuation at the University of Rome in June 1968. The article described how Dr Provenza, one of the main chiefs at Rome’s police headquarters, raised a megaphone to his lips and shouted, “In the name of the law, open the gates!” When the occupants refused, the police had used wire-cutters to open the gates surrounding the university. The article invokes nationalist sentiments by specifically mentioning that Provenza and the one hundred police officers were all

Figure 5.1 “The Bramantesco Gate turned into a place of battle” (Corriere della Sera, March 12, 1968, p. 8).



wearing tricolor sashes. The students shouted for the police to go away, crying “Viva Ho Chi Minh,” thus indicating their dangerous adherence to Third World Marxist revolutionaries. On a signal from Provenza and in a subtle editorial reference to heroic battles of the past, the police officers “sounded the ritual three blasts of the trumpet” and charged the occupied buildings meeting no resistance.35

The Corriere della Sera’s coverage of the battle at the Bramantesco Gate and the Osservatore Romano’s depiction of a police evacuation as the lifting of a siege make use of what Fahlenbrach has called the “psychophysical semantic” of student–press interactions in the late 1960s. Fahlenbrach argues that as the students came to adopt direct action tactics reminiscent of the Situationists in an effort to draw attention to their movement, the media quickly adapted its framing or staging of the protesters through the publication of dynamic and action filled images.36 As noted earlier, the press focus clearly shifted the reader’s attention away from the details found in the text of the article and toward the more emotional and visually stimulating headlines and photographs emphasizing dramatic action.

The conservative and centrist presses’ coverage of the Battle of the Valle Giulia in Rome turned the event into a national spectacle. Framing the demonstration as a violent threat to public order, the antistudent press contrasted frightening depictions of the activists with those of the police who were portrayed either as victims of student vio-lence or saviors of public order. Following the protest paradigm model, the conservative press quoted the testimonies of police and politicians who condemned the students’ actions but offered no voices from the students who bore the brunt of the injuries. Figure 5.2, showing the police battling students outside the Valle Giulia, appeared on the front pages of both the Corriere della Sera and La Stampa. This photograph evokes an image of peasant rebellion with the students brandishing makeshift clubs, the disorderly mob, and the trees in the background. The picture was cropped to make it appear that the students greatly outnumbered the police thus heightening the perceived threat to pub-lic order. La Stampa’s headline read, “Violent battle in the center of Rome between students and the police: hundreds injured.”37 And the Corriere’s masthead claimed, “Serious new disorders in Rome with two hundred among the bruised and injured.”38 The article in the Corriere also carried pictures of overturned cars that had been ostensibly set on fire by the protesters.

The student press also published a record of the events that occurred at the Valle Giulia but offered their explanation of the causes. An


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edition of the Turin students’ Anti-Stampa dated March 2 indignantly noted that

All of these things are not a gratuitous explosion of violence. The violence that is manifested in them is something much more pro-found: the students are fed up with being inserted in to a system of study of which seems to make no sense, which serves in turn to insert them into a mechanism of work and in a social order which they refuse. All of this is expressed for now in the elemental bat-tle, ever more harsh, with all of the repressive structures that the students find themselves confronting; it is expressed in the need to destroy modes of thinking, living, deciding considered “normal,” which instead negate every liberty.39

Resisting the presses’ attempts to frame their actions as senseless violence, the students countered the psychophysical semantics of the antistudent dailies with an ideological justification of their position that borrowed heavily from Marcuse’s theories about repression in capitalist societies.

Later in March, the Corriere della Sera ran a series of articles describ-ing student violence at the Catholic University of Milan. Offering vivid

Figure 5.2 “The Battle of the Valle Giulia” (Corriere della Sera, March 2, 1968, p. 1).



details of students stoning police agents and vehicles, the forces of order were, in fact, better armed than the students, but cast as victims.40 In April, the Corriere even captured the pain of a policeman who had been hit in the head by a stone after a demonstration of the filocinesi. Although wounded on the head, the policeman in the photograph was shown raising his hand to his chest making the press image even more dramatic.41

The support that Turin’s La Stampa offered to the police was nothing new. The daily had already showed its willingness to support police actions against labor strikes in 1962 when carabinieri had attacked the under-paid, mostly southern workers of FIAT during the Piazza Statuto riots.42 For the Agnelli family that owned both FIAT and La Stampa, the press was a powerful weapon in its efforts to bolster the image of the organs of law and order against the actions of the student left that sought to mobilize the workers of Turin.

Using selective bits of evidence, the articles in La Stampa and the Corriere della Sera gave minimal attention to the actual causes of the students’ demonstration. As the oral historian Alessandro Portelli has noted in his study of the Valle Giulia demonstrations, this image of the police as dutiful public servants has been completely contradicted by student experiences of brutality at the hands of the police. Nevertheless, the conservative dailies did help to swing public opinion to the side of the agents of law and order.43

Students throughout Italy took revenge upon the press for its cover-age of the events at the Valle Giulia and the presses’ silence on the subject of police brutality. On March 7, students in Turin gathered to demonstrate for the release of a student named Avanzini who had been arrested for the occupation and vandalism in the Palazzo Campana. When some workers joined the students, the crowd reportedly reached 5000 participants. Carrying signs entitled “Italia=Spagna,” the crowd made its way through the center of the city with some participants smashing the windows of La Stampa’s editorial office. Although they claimed that they were attacking a symbol of “neocapitalism,” the pro-testers were also enraged by the newspaper’s steady stream of criticism and ridicule. La Stampa accused the students of breaking their earlier pledge of nonviolence and provided descriptions of the pitched battles between the students and the police. Using photographs to portray the students as dangerous threats to civil society, the newspaper ran Figure 5.3 on the second page with the caption, “Corso Vittorio: In the pouring rain, a parade of students reaches the jail for the protest demonstration.” However, the protesters look absurd apparently fleeing


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rather than fighting police. The large number who managed to hold on to their umbrellas adds a note of incredulity to the descriptions of “brawls and bottle-throwing.”44

The students’ Anti-Stampa quickly corrected La Stampa’s depiction of events by noting how the press organ of FIAT attempted to undercount the 5000 protesters by reducing them to three hundred of the “most agitated,” who Anti-Stampa mockingly characterized as “sans-culottes making use of deadly catapults.” The student newspaper further rejected La Stampa’s attempt to separate the radical students from the workers by noting that whether one chose to shout “Ho Chi Minh” and “Mao-Mao” or go on strike for higher wages, the logic of protest was still the same.45 Clearly, by the spring of 1968, the student activists had come to take issue not only with the so-called facts published by the press but the manipula-tive style of its presentation of student acts. In short, the activists realized that they were being framed and sought vainly to draw attention to this fact in their student newspapers.

Other student protesters in Florence assaulted the offices of the con-servative daily, La Nazione, which had a major circulation in central Italy.46 The largest and most antistudent newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, also did not escape unpunished. Demonstrators from the University of Milan made its press offices a frequent target of attack in the spring of 1968. Throughout Western Europe the battle with the conservative press became

Figure 5.3 Protesters in Turin’s Corso Vittorio (La Stampa, March 8, 1968, p. 2).



a common feature of student demonstrations. In West Berlin, students attacked Axel Springer’s editorial offices and in Paris they struck the offices of Le Figaro. The conservative and centrist presses, which had become the voice of a consumer society and the so-called Establishment, were the stu-dents’ chief antagonist and readily available targets for their anger.47

The conservative press, for its part, found that marginalizing the students as violent infidels marauding through Italy’s universities and public parks very effective in spawning newer disorders and such attacks against press offices served as affirmation of previous news articles describing student “hooliganism.”48 To heighten public fears even more, the press employed words and images drawn from the Fascist period to distort the generally non-threatening student activities into crises. The Corriere della Sera and La Stampa deliberately compared the events of the Valle Giulia in Rome and the June protests in Turin with the early days of fascism despite the obvious historical and political differences.49

Added to this misleading historical analogy, the press used the lan-guage of the Cold War to increase the public’s fear that communist subversion led by deviationists of the New Left was imminent. Since the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was the second largest political party in Italy, had historic ties to the antifascist Resistance, and had made a com-mitment to democratic processes in the late 1940s, the antistudent dai-lies made sure to differentiate the New Left students from the respectable PCI by framing the students as dangerous Marxists inspired by violent Third World revolutionaries. Or as one student newspaper article suc-cinctly quipped, “I see student—I see red.”50 As in English the idiomatic expression of “to see red” also means to become angry in Italian.

Furthermore, the conservative press fused two contradictory streams of thought, fascism and New-Left communism, into a model of “left-wing fascism.” It was the German social philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, who first mentioned the concept of Linksfaschismus or “left-wing fascism,” to criticize the radical activists of the 1960s whom he claimed had emu-lated Fascist tactics of the 1930s. Although he regretted his remarks and apologized shortly thereafter, the popular media in West Germany and Italy made frequent use of the idea.51 In Italy, this charge of “left-wing fascism” was directed against the supporters of Mao and other Third World revolutionaries. The media dubbed them, filocinesi a title that for anticommunist Italians “conjured up the red menace and the yellow peril all in one.”52

Before examining the image of the students as “Left-wing fascists” that was framed by the press during the 1960s, we must briefly consider how the Italian public viewed the legacy of fascism. One of the trademarks of


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postwar Italian politics was that all the major parties competed in adver-tising their antifascist credentials. Mainstream political opinion stressed the ephemeral nature of the twenty-one-year Mussolini dictatorship. Liberals, following the view of Neapolitan historian Benedetto Croce, called fascism a “parenthesis” in Italian history. The Church regarded it as simply another episode of dictatorship since the Risorgimento. Even the Marxists argued that fascism had been a distorted, if inevitable, form of the capitalist state during a frenzied era of mass mobilization.53

Scholars agree that Mussolini’s brand of fascism never transformed Italy’s politics, culture, and society as fully as did the Nazi dictatorship. However, political scientist Samuel Barnes’ study of public opinion in the 1960s showed that lingering vestiges of fascism still permeated Italian life.54 Having sided with the Allies in 1943, Italy was never forced to submit to the occupation and de-Nazification imposed on the Germans or the épuration that took place in France. Many Fascist laws remained on the books, and a small neofascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI) was allowed to exist and even held a few seats in the parliament.

Like the other political parties, the MSI had its own university affili-ate that mobilized a small but vocal contingent of ultra right-wing stu-dents, the so-called Missini.55 Following the framing ideas of the “protest paradigm,” the antistudent press often polarized student actions by implying that the student left was just as extreme as the neofascist Missini who frequently came to try to break up peaceful occupations and dem-onstrations. Again, by not offering a full explanation of the New Left stu-dents’ demands and goals, the conservative press successfully presented a fragmented and decontextualized image of the Italian New Left whose adherents were just as violent and marginal as their neofascist rivals.

During the university upheavals of the late 1960s, both sides took advantage of unexamined assumptions and self-serving versions of the past, using images from the Mussolini era to manipulate suppressed memories and emotions. The conservative press sought to delegitimize the antifascist credentials of the student left by printing statements crit-ical of the movement from former Resistance fighters. Articles in these dailies employed terms such as “fascists,” “squadristi,” and “March on Rome,” in their attacks on the students. The students, for their part, linked the occupations of university buildings and their overtures to the workers with the antifascist Resistance.56 Each side contested the other’s claim to speak for the past. What one left-wing scholar depicted as a violent confrontation in Turin between left- and right-wing student radicals, the conservative press reported as a battle between “Left-wing fascists” and the local police.57



A good example of the antistudent press invoking the credentials of a former Resistance fighter can be found in an editorial from La Stampa. The father of a student at the university wrote an angry letter to the edi-tors recalling the years of fascism and connected the left-wing occupants of the Palazzo Campana to Mussolini’s squadristi. Identifying himself as “an indignant ex-partisan,” he explained that he had worked long hours to send his son to the university and demanded the rector call in the authorities to evacuate the occupants. He characterized the student protesters as participants in an “antidemocratic spectacle” and ended his letter with direct references to the Fascist era. “I do not, in fact, believe that there is a big difference between the March on Rome and the occu-pation of the University. The weapons remain the same: intimidation and contempt for democratic laws.”58

In an article from the students’ Anti-Stampa written about the same time as the above reader’s letter to La Stampa, the student activists compared themselves to the Fascist regime’s “intellectual targets of criticism” who struggled to speak out for liberty during the interwar period. Where the reader of La Stampa compared the students to Fascist squadristi, the students invoked the names of heroic Resistance figures: Piero Gobetti, Antonio Gramsci and Turin’s renowned Catholic martyr against the Fascists, Pier Giorgio Frassati.59 The frequent and dichoto-mous use of analogies to the Fascist period made by the students and the establishment suggests that the student unrest of the 1960s had provoked a new dialogue about Italy’s troubled past. Historian Nicola Tranfaglia has speculated that the Italian people had become submerged in a long period of “elaborated mourning” after 1945 where they simply refused to deal with their painful memories of fascism and the student activists were the first to break through this silence.60

After the initial occupation of the University of Turin’s Palazzo Campana in late November 1967, a group of about thirty neofascist students attempted to disperse the peaceful student occupants but were repulsed.61 Seeking to disparage the effectiveness of the occupation, La Stampa reported that only a handful of radicals had occupied the Palazzo Campana. Once more alluding to the early years of fascism, a letter from a female student claimed that only 500 of the 19,000 students enrolled at the University had participated in the occupation. The writer condemned both the right and left-wing groups and warned that democracy was once more menaced by a lack of civic engagement.62 Former activist Marco Revelli refuted the press’ disparaging claim that a “radical minority” pressed its extremist agenda upon an unwilling majority of “sane” students by noting that 815 out of a total of 1254 students voted to continue the occupation of the Palazzo


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Campana in November 1967. Ironically, the occupants’ “unauthorized” referendum saw a larger voter turn out than the official student elections of the past.63

Following a bomb scare in the Palazzo Campana in February 1968, La Stampa targeted the left-wing students for its heaviest reproaches, portraying them as deviant filocinesi who employed violence much as the Fascists had done forty years earlier. An unidentified reader wrote to the editor on February 21, asking if the “kicks and punches given without restraint by the cinesi were part of the ‘Charter of Demands.’” The reader declared that such acts were “pure hooliganism.”64 La Stampa also publicized several clashes between left- and right-wing students in which the “cinesi” responded to Roman salutes from neofascist students with shouts of “Mao—Mao—Mao.”65

For readers glancing through the pages of La Stampa in the winter of 1968, the photographs of students raising their hands in Fascist salutes undoubtedly provoked scorn or fear among older citizens. For the left-wing students, opposed to fascism but too young to have remembered the regime, the Fascist salute could be given to opponents in a spirit of ridicule and derision. The vague caption for Figure 5.4 provides no con-text for these Roman salutes made in jest and one would need to read most of the article to understand the politics and motivations behind the gesture.66 In this figure, the students are depicted as rowdy, but not necessarily violent individuals. They even appear to be having a good time, almost as if they are at a soccer match, not plotting to topple the state and one student on the left side of the photo offers a “horns of the bull” gesture that carries its own unique meaning.67 The caption did not explain that the left-wing students had offered the Fascist salute to mock their right-wing rivals nor did it mention the violence perpetrated by the neofascist Missini.

The press sought to trivialize and delegitimize the students’ New Left ideology as a confusing hodge-podge of radical ideas that ultimately seemed to be a justification for violent behavior. In an article published on February 9, journalist Carlo Casalegno described the students’ beliefs as “Ma-ma-maismo: a little bit of Marx, a little bit of Mao, a little bit of the Marcuse’s sociology. This useful word game underlines well the rebellious confusion (of the students.)” The students responded in kind in their Anti-Stampa with an article entitled, “Mama, the Club, Bad Faith: The Ma-Ma-Maismo of the Defenders of the System.”68 The students thus attempted to point out that the establishment also used its own rhetoric to disguise violent repressive measures used against student activism.



La Stampa’s provocative mixing of the students’ ideological rhetoric with symbols from Italy’s past undoubtedly convinced some read-ers that troubled times had returned. One wrote, “I have the clear impression of living in a period of the affirmation of fascism. It is not important if it is called ma-ma-maismo or something similar … .” He accused the students of being an extremist minority who preyed on the weakness of the state as had happened when fascism took con-trol of Italy. Their hero, Mao was as ruthless a dictator as Hitler and Mussolini.69 This reader evidently accepted the pressess’ portrayal of the students as “Left-wing Fascists” conflating the filocinesi with the Black Shirts of 1922.70

La Stampa was not the only major newspaper to promote the image of left-wing fascism, Milan’s conservative Corriere della Sera also adopted a similar tactic in describing student demonstrations at the State University of Milan. In Figure 5.5, we see students dressed in full bat-tle gear with helmets, clubs, and bandanas to protect them from tear gas. As indicated by the student on the right, the filocinesi appear to be marching and intent on violence. The students were protesting against Socialist Party leader Pietro Nenni’s decision to collaborate with the

Figure 5.4 “A group of students shout during a demonstration in the Piazza Solferino” (La Stampa, March 3, 1968, p. 2).


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governing majority and the two students on the left were carrying plac-ards for a portion of their slogan branding Nenni a “traditore” (traitor). Coupled with the headlines and captions, the article blends the imagery of the past with contemporary Cold War fears. The article explains that the “Chinese” students were dispersed by a group of ex-Partisans thus invoking the antifascist credentials of the oppositional forces and merg-ing recollections of the past struggle against fascism with the current fear of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.71

In March 1968, following the events of the Valle Giulia in Rome, the popular press paid considerable attention to prominent political figures who condemned the students and praised the police. Turin’s La Stampa, Milan’s Corriere della Sera, and the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano all headlined the Minister of the Interior, Paolo Taviani’s declaration that “The police do not defend the position of the government, they defend

Figure 5.5 “The failed march of the filocinesi” (Corriere della Sera, May 18, 1968, p. 8).



the legal state. They defend democracy.”72 Although the more conserva-tive Osservatore gave less coverage to the remarks by communist and socialist politicians than did La Stampa, both newspapers reproduced Taviani’s remarks almost entirely, particularly his laudatory depiction of the police and his warning that the weakness of the state had been one of the causes of fascism.73

The student press was quick to respond to Taviani’s remarks by pointing out that the Corriere della Sera in Milan had published articles in the past revealing the benevolent and even collaborative attitude that police officers had shown to the neofascists. The students cor-rectly noted that it was not the “weakness” of the police response to fascism that hastened the collapse of the Italian state but rather the fact that the police were one of the most secure arms of the Fascist state and the ones who were quick to carry out orders by the Fascists.74 Despite the historical accuracy of the students’ position, the tiny circu-lation of their mimeographed Anti-Stampa could never compete with the mainstream press.

As these examples show, the selective reporting of the mainstream press created a distorted image for many Italians. For northerners, the main source of news came from the antistudent Corriere della Sera and La Stampa.75 Readers saw the student demonstrators depicted as violent extremists. Provocative words, such as “disorder, confusion, and hooliganism,” were used to describe university unrest. Added to these glimpses of chaos in the Italian universities were the references to the early fascist period. By their strategic use of framing to construct an “Italian protest paradigm,” the conservative and centrist press had created a simple formula:

student unrest = filocinest = fascist methods.

Another and a quite different tactic was the trivialization of student activists as figures of ridicule. The conservative press alternated frightening images of left-wing fascists with caricatures of naïve mid-dle class kids who had been bamboozled by a romanticized view of Marxist revolution. To be sure, university students had eagerly bought thousands of cheap paperbacks about the lives of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro from the self-styled Marxist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.76 But the critics of the New Left cynically depicted the student activists as a group of young, bourgeois malcontents who claimed to represent the working class, but in reality, they were a privileged people in search of excitement, a view adopted by many of the workers of Turin.77


100 Italy and 1968

The editors of the centrist and conservative press were not alone in viewing the students as spoiled kids out for a lark. Prominent mem-bers of the Communist Party would also heap scorn on the students and even sympathize with the police. One of the leading politicians within the PCI, Giorgio Amendola, characterized the New Left stu-dents’ version of Marxism, “extremist infantilism,” and scoffed at the students’ “revolutionary dilettantism.”78 This patronizing characteriza-tion underscored the conflict of generations between young people who had experienced the affluence of the postwar years and their par-ents and grandparents who had lived through the Depression and the Second World War. In some respects the characterization of protesters as naughty children served two purposes: it reproached an ungrateful youth for not respecting the sacrifices of their elders, and reassured par-ents that the New Left radicalism was little more than a passing fad.

The public ridicule of the students highlighted the activists’ dilemma of wanting to both have fun and to have their politics taken seriously. In her observations of student protesters, political scientist Barbara Myerhoff noted that they were caught in a paradoxical situation because their political goals demanded hard work and asceticism, but their cul-tural goals of hedonism, “grooving and turning-on,” contradicted the seriousness required of their political goals. However, the students’ outrageous clothes, Marxist slogans, and partying did make a political statement by simply outraging the administration and surrounding community.79 Luisa Passerini has acknowledged that the students often used mockery and ridicule to subvert authority.80

The conservative press’ characterization of the student activists as misguided followers of Mao sought to disparage the effectiveness of the New Left in Italy. The official Italian communist and socialist parties, similar to their comrades in France, continued to support the traditional organs of the Left, the trade unions. To Italian communists like Amendola, the New Left, inspired by Third World revolutionaries and the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse, represented a bourgeois deviation from their party. Ultimately, many of these supporters of the traditional Left bolstered the view of the professors, politicians, and the popular press that the leftist students were dupes to the “infantilism” of the New Left.81 The students, on the other hand, opposed the Communists’ and Socialists’ relative complacency and apparent willingness to collaborate with the Christian Democrats after the war. The problem for the students was that they did not have the authority to challenge the legitimacy of the PCI or its antifascist cre-dentials. As the workers’ unrest of 1969 demonstrated, (and the strikes



in France in 1968), the revolutionary proletariat, though perhaps inspired by the students, chose to remain firmly within the established organizations of the Italian left.

In a notorious incident at the University of Rome in May 1968, one professor turned his examination in Latin literature into an attack on the ideology of the New Left. Professor Ettore Paratore, in an attempt to trivialize the students’ commitment to revolutionary Marxism, asked his students to translate the “Thoughts of Mao” into Latin. According to the Corriere della Sera, the young activists initially declared the examina-tion, “too difficult” and, “useless and superfluous,” and forced Professor Paratore to reschedule the examination for a later date. One reader in Milan asked why the student Maoists would object to translating the thoughts of their leader into Latin.82 The following day, the Corriere ran a larger article describing how the fanatical Roman activists had burned a copy of the Latin examination and called for Paratore’s head.83

Prominent intellectuals also questioned the earnestness of the students’ commitment to communist revolution and the conservative press was eager to reproduce their remarks in Italy’s dailies. The poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was a member of the Communist Party, lam-pooned the student rebels who had fought with police during the Battle of the Valle Giulia in a poem that was published in the weekly news-magazine L’Espresso. In his piece, “The Communist Party to the Young!” Pasolini lambasted the New Left as nothing more than spoiled children of the bourgeoisie who had adopted Marxism out of boredom. He wrote,

It’s sad. The polemic against the PCI should have been made during the first half of the past decade. You are late children.And it doesn’t matter at all if then you weren’t born …Now the journalists of all the world (includingthose of television)kiss (as I believe one still says in the language of the Universities) your ass. Not me, friends.You have the faces of spoiled children.Good blood doesn’t lie.You have the same bad eye.You are scared, uncertain, desperate(very good!) but you also know how to bebullies, blackmailers, and sure of yourselves;petit-bourgeois prerogatives, friends.When yesterday at Valle Giulia you fought


102 Italy and 1968

with policemen,I sympathized with the policemen!Because policemen are children of the poor.84

In a sort of “plague on both your houses,” Pasolini’s poem not only mocked the students for believing they could represent the working class but also acknowledged his regret for the Communist Party’s lack of a vigorous political opposition to Christian Democracy in the 1950s.

Pasolini’s view was echoed by the French philosopher Raymond Aron. In June 1968, at a conference held in Paris that included the pro-student figure Jean Paul Sartre, Aron caustically characterized the university demonstrations as a crisis of utopist delirium. Seizing upon the authorita-tive voice of a prominent liberal intellectual, the Corriere printed Aron’s scathing criticism of Paris “dilettantes” and Rome’s “Mussolini-Marxists,” branding the student ideology as a type of “anarchofascism.”85 Aron’s liberal and Pasolini’s leftist criticism insisted that the students did not understand their own Marxist rhetoric, did not represent the lower class that they wanted to “liberate,” and were playing a dangerous game that had led to real violence both in Rome and Paris.

Although it is impossible to gauge the students’ true attachment to the New Left, Raymond Aron’s contention that the rebels were performing a poorly rehearsed revival of the Revolutions of 1848 and had turned campuses into carnivals had an element of truth.86 As Fahlenbrach points out, the student protesters of the late 1960s had drawn much of their inspiration for public demonstrations and direct action from the Situationists of the earlier half of the decade.87 Like the Situationists, the students consciously understood that the revolu-tion should be “fun” and contain elements of the ludicrous. Political scientist Barbara Myerhoff has argued that although the students’ final aims were serious, the methods to draw attention to their cause demanded that the protests be antic and spontaneous. One of these students told Myerhoff that the zaniness of the demonstrations was deliberate, to draw media attention to their demands; “If we don’t provide a good show, we won’t get on the air.”88 This image of the stu-dents “playing at revolution” stands in stark contrast to the portrayal of the students as dangerous left-wing fascists and further highlights the Italian press and public’s equivocal relationship with the protesters of the late 1960s.

In Italy, the transition from quiet protest to revolutionary carnival occurred at the beginning of 1968 with the “white strikes or slow-down strikes” (scioperi bianchi).89 Former activist Marco Revelli noted



that with the scioperi bianchi, the classrooms became “stages” and the movement became a “spectacle.”90 These white strikes did turn professors into objects of ridicule and helped undermine their author-ity. Peppino Ortoleva remembered one occasion when he and other activists went to a lecture carrying giant paper flowers that blocked everyone’s view of the professor and elicited giggles from the entire classroom.91 The absurdity of the giant flowers and the transformation of the classroom into a stage undoubtedly showed the influence of the Dutch Provos who had imitators throughout Europe in the 1960s.92

Similar to the press’ attempt to construct an image of student activ-ists as misguided followers of the New Left, the popular press succeeded in framing demonstrators as playing a game of revolution. Under the headline, “The student Viale released from jail,” a beaming Guido Viale is “carried in triumph by a group of female students,” in Figure 5.6.93 Dressed informally, these “flower children” seem more like players or groupies carrying their hero off the soccer field than dangerous revo-lutionaries. Such playful imagery suggested that the youth revolt was

Figure 5.6 Italian flower children: Rebels or pranksters? (La Stampa, May 10, 1968, p. 2).


104 Italy and 1968

not serious and the photo may have sought to reassure readers these incidents would eventually subside.

The Corriere and La Stampa continued to trivialize the students as disorganized, lethargic rebels pretending to lead a revolution under an assortment of banners, flags, and slogans that originated from their heroes of the Third World. La Stampa declared on July 9, that “The stu-dent ‘rebels’ will promote actions in the piazza after summer vacation,” mocking those activists who put the revolution on hold until after they returned from the beach.94

Linked to this image of bourgeois students playing at revolution was the related image that portrayed student demonstrators as simply ill-mannered children. Some members of the general public, politicians, and the popular press played upon class rivalries to foster the image that the most radical student activists were the spoiled offspring of wealthy parents. A reader from Perugia complained about the “unbelievable” act of 100 high school students who had occupied their liceo in Milan. Another reader, Enzo Bagnolini expressed shock that these “young kamikazes of occupation” would disturb authority and “trample demo-cratic freedom under foot in the schools.” Chastising the ungrateful stu-dents, he suggested that they should go down to Sicily to help victims of a recent earthquake. Like Aron and Pasolini, this writer reproached the ungrateful students who he felt should drop their fantasies of proletarian revolution and become more involved in the immediate problems of Italian society.95

One of the most striking visual examples of press ridicule directed against student activists appeared in La Stampa on March 26, 1968. Figure 5.7 shows Turin student leaders Laura DeRossi and, her fian-cée, Luigi Bobbio meeting with DeRossi’s parents after their release from jail.96 The DeRossis were portrayed as concerned, bourgeois parents, and Laura is depicted as a “daddy’s girl” rather than an “extremist” stu-dent leader. The students’ dedication to their cause is further undercut by the accompanying article that focuses upon the celebrations for the newly released students held in the occupied classrooms. In this picture, La Stampa hinted that many of the activists like Laura DeRossi were sim-ply bored, wealthy kids who had been swept up by the demonstrations. Laura’s father, a wealthy building contractor and owner of a metalwork-ing business in Turin, was clearly a member of the upper middle class and had provided his daughter with a classical high school education and money for the university. His social standing was indicated in the photograph by his overcoat and dress shirt and patronizing attitude by the gentle expression of patting Laura. The photograph suggested that



Senor DeRossi was more concerned than angry that his daughter had been detained in jail for a day.97

La Stampa’s depiction of students as spoiled rich kids stirring up trou-ble elicited an emphatic response from its readers. As seen in Figures 5.6 and 5.7, the clothing of nearly all of the student activists indicated that they came from bourgeois families and were not the children of the work-ers. These apparent differences prompted some Italians to echo Pasolini in comparing students with the workers. A reader of the Corriere della Sera in Milan, Adele Vittoria De Vecchi, wrote that the students could express their views without resorting to “absurd acts of vandalism” and the “stu-dent ‘signori’ [lords] ought to learn from the workers who protest … but always behave properly.”98 The text of the letter conveyed two messages: the students were destroyers of university property, and the students should follow the example of the workers who not only behaved decently but also, by implication, compromise the membership of the legitimate Italian left. The reader’s letter contained a note of semantic irony as she labeled the students “signori,” an epithet frequently used by the student activists to describe the aristocratic and authoritarian bearing of their professors.

The activists quickly recognized the mocking tone of the press and countered with their own form of journalistic ridicule. In an issue of

Figure 5.7 “Daddy’s Girl” Laura DeRossi after her release from jail (La Stampa March 26, 1968, p. 2).


106 Italy and 1968

Anti-Stampa, a satirical letter to the editor written by a “mother of a university student,” asks why parents continue to pay professors their large salaries if they cannot teach? “She” further asks what it serves the students when their professors act more like police commissioners and captains of the carabinieri. The letter further addresses the presses’ depiction of students as spoiled rich kids by noting that there are those wealthy parents who only care that their child finishes their degree so that they can obtain an office job with a secretary who calls them “dottore.” But there are many other parents who instead, would like their children to have a decent education.99

We have seen how the centrist and conservative presses adopted an Italian protest paradigm to construct a dual image of university demon-strators. One image depicted the activists as dangerous left-wing fascists resorting to tactics reminiscent of the early years of the dictatorship. Such an image provoked fear in the viewers and magnified the tensions between the student protesters and the larger society in the late 1960s. In many ways, the vilification of the Italian left fit the editorial pattern of the conservative and centrist press that had supported the Christian Democrats since the beginning of the republic. Rekindling old and per-sonal memories among many Italians, the characterization of student demonstrations as a new version of squadrismo, did much to delegiti-mize and disparage student calls for genuine university reform.

The other image portrayed student activists as figures of ridicule. In stark contrast to the left-wing fascist image of the Filocinesi; the student “Maoisti” became humorous caricatures of middle-class kids playing a game of revolution. These faux-revolutionaries waved the Vietcong flag and carried posters of Chairman Mao similar to the tifosi100 at a soc-cer match. The press also represented the activists as spoiled children of the bourgeoisie in order to play upon class tensions within Italian society. From the student left’s perspective, the workers would eventu-ally reap benefits from the initial uprisings in the universities, but from the perspective of the press and the Old Left, the student New Left was no more than a brief period of disobedience among the children of the bourgeoisie.

The student activists were well aware of the presses’ tactics in framing their beliefs and actions in a negative protest paradigm. In fact, one article from l’Anti-Stampa entitled, “The Two Pincers of the Claw” compared La Stampa’s editorial techniques to the US strategy in Vietnam of “pacification” and “search and destroy.” The student news-paper clearly shows that the press alternated between a soft, pseudo-understanding approach to their movement and a harsh, repressive



tone that varied from article to article.101 Unfortunately for the stu-dents, with a circulation of a few thousand mimeographed copies, their press could not compete with the large dailies in Italy.102 Their position would be defended by the Communist Party’s small, but influential daily, l’Unita.

The Sessantotto according to l’Unità

The students’ key voice of support came from the communist press. In the late 1960s, the Italian Communist Party’s official news organ, l’Unità, was second only to Milan’s Corriere della Sera in daily circulation.103 l’Unità consistently depicted student protests as democratic and orderly struggles for university reform. As we shall see, the pro-student coverage of l’Unità essentially inverted the negative framing techniques adopted by the conservative newspapers. Where the right-wing press marginal-ized student activists as “left-wing Fascists,” l’Unità sought to legitimize the New Left’s continuities with the antifascist Resistance. Where the right-wing press trivialized student demonstrators as ridiculous actors in a farcical revolution, l’Unità offered an encouraging image of student protesters as serious agents of university reform.

The PCI’s press organ made their pro-student line explicit on February 28, 1968 when l’Unità published an article on page two entitled, “A Communication from the Direction of the PCI—The Communists support a renewed and democratic University.” Relying on the authority of the PCI’s leadership, the article declared the party’s support for the students and denounced the recent police brutality toward peaceful activists along with the “press organs of the grand bourgeoisie” that had irresponsibly tried to discredit and slander the students. The article closed with its firm commitment to the student reform movement:

The direction of the PCI pledges all of its organizations in active soli-darity with the battles to renew the Italian university, and denounces the serious repressive action that has taken place during the police intervention in the universities, the punitive measures of the aca-demic authorities, and the rapidly growing number of student arrests by the police.104

l’Unità’s defense of the students was an exception among the vast amount of daily criticism in the Italian press. Like Gitlin’s “limelight effect” that the press bestowed on the American SDS (Students for


108 Italy and 1968

a Democratic Society) leaders, l’Unità’s pro-student line may have emboldened the activists to continue their struggles.

Despite the criticisms of some Communist Party officials, l’Unità, remained consistent in its defense of student actions, often evoking the heroic legacy of the Resistenza. The left-wing press therefore, offered a completely different historical analogy of the student movement to that of the conservative and centrist press. Rather than a new form of “left-wing fascism,” the student activists were transformed into the second generation of antifascist resistance fighters. Resolutely marching under red banners and carrying placards of communist heroes (even if it was Mao rather than Gramsci), the student demonstrators became l’Unita’s new face of the continuing struggle against Italian fascism. On January 21, 1968, the PCI’s daily ran a full-page pictorial article entitled, “From the Resistance to today.” By placing a photo of student anti-Vietnam demonstrations next to pictures of the famed antifascist protests in Genoa in 1960, and the marches for land reform in southern Italy during the late 1940s, l’Unità implied that the student demonstra-tions fell within the continuum of the communists’ historic and con-tinual struggle against fascism.105

L’Unità’s positive depiction of student activism helped to foster the protesters’ self-image as contemporary members of a new Resistance to the remaining elements of fascism in Italy and the rest of the Western world.106 However, not all Italians made the connection between the New Left and the Resistance. One former partisan and labor organizer noted, “the student movement praised the anti-fascist Resistance too much, they [the activists] were embarrassing to us.”107

Rather than ridiculous or spoiled rich kids out for a lark, the com-munist press continued to affirm the legitimacy of the students’ commitment to Marxism. Contrary to Pasolini and Aron’s claims that the students were playing a game of revolution, l’Unità championed the activists as significant leaders in an important political move-ment. Similar to the conservative presses’ use of authority figures to criticize the students, l’Unità published an editorial by Maurizio Ferrara, one of the PCI’s Central Committee members, applauding the students as allies of the Communist Party’s struggle for real univer-sity reform. Ferrara, while admitting that some of the student leaders had used extremist and outdated material, contended that they had learned from Lenin the importance of the battle for freedom, auton-omy, and social openness. Ferrara also criticized the “anti-student montage” found on the pages of the Corriere della Sera and Rome’sIl Messagero.108



In sharp contrast to La Stampa’s image of the university activists as rowdy and anarchic revolutionaries, l’Unità consistently depicted the students as orderly and alert members of a democratic movement. Nestled in the middle pages of the newspaper in the “Culture” section above an article on the dangers of smog, Figure 5.8 shows a peaceful, well-organized demonstration of students held at the University of Trent in November 1967. The students appeared well-dressed, attentive, disciplined, and committed to reform. The boxed heading above the photograph announces, “An Important Moment of Democratic Action in the University,” and reported that the sociology students wanted a profound reform of the methods and contents of their courses and that they comprised a new “avanguardia.”109 Such a description also reflected the self-image of the PCI, which had always considered itself a “civil” opposition to the Italian government since the inception of the republic.

The communist press chose a much different photograph for its article on the release of jailed Turin activists Luigi Bobbio and Laura DeRossi. Unlike the repentant Laura and sheepish Luigi in La Stampa’s Figure 5.7,

Figure 5.8 “An Important Moment of Democratic Action in the University” (l’Unità November 29, 1967, p. 8).


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l’Unità captured the two activists in a loving embrace as seen in Figure 5.9.110 Their experience in the city jail seemed to have not only strengthened their cause but also their love. Furthermore, the picture emphasizes the support of their student companions, rather than DeRossi’s parents, indicating the solidarity of the students rather than La Stampa’s reproach for the misbehavior of “daddy’s little girl.” Ironically, La Stampa would run the same photo shown above eight days later to announce Laura and Luigi’s wedding in the “City Chronicle” section, dubbing the newlyweds the “fidanzati terribili” of the Palazzo Campana.111

L’Unità was also the only major newspaper to denounce police vio-lence against the students. In an article from January 1968, entitled, “Savage police aggression against struggling Pisan students,” the PCI’s press organ wrote that

Hatred, ferocity, brutality: these are the only ways to define the sav-age duty carried out by a nucleus of special forces and carabinieri against the hundreds and hundreds of students who have been dem-onstrating in solidarity with the university students hunted down yesterday by police at the occupied Institute of Physics.112

The article used terms such as “bestial” to describe the police and stressed the students’ nonviolent response.113 In a clear inversion of the

Figure 5.9 Laura DeRossi and Luigi Bobbio reunited after her release from jail.



framing techniques used by the antistudent press, l’Unità used terms like “ferocity,” and “brutality” to describe the police rather than student protesters. Notably absent from l’Unità’s articles were words such as “hooligans,” “filocinesi,” and “Left-wing fascism.”

Another example of l’Unità’s critique of the forces of order appears in Figure 5.10 illustrating a protest in late February at the University of Rome. The photograph on the left showing the vulnerability and anguish of two female students contrasted sharply with the mas-sive, martial show of police force outside the rector’s building on the right. The photographs were sandwiched between the headline, “IN PROCESSION ROMAN STUDENTS BROKE THROUGH POLICE CORDONS” and an article entitled, “They returned to their university” suggesting that the student movement was powerful and sought only to retain control of their school.114 This diptych bombards the viewer with a skillful use of space and imagery to evoke sympathy for the stu-dents and a simultaneous fear of the forces of order. The photograph on the left reveals the emotion of two victims of a police evacuation; both are female and presumably more vulnerable to violence than male victims. The prone student is in physical pain and clearly needs medi-cal attention. The photo on the left is smaller and cropped vertically, emphasizing the closeness of the two students. On the other hand, the photograph of police on the right is larger and horizontal in orienta-tion, emphasizing the vastness of police powers. The jeeps in the fore-ground and the line of police standing at attention clearly display the impersonal and potentially bellicose attitude of the forces of order. Even

Figure 5.10 The Left’s view of the police (l’Unità [Turin edition] February 24, 1968, p. 2).


112 Italy and 1968

without words, this diptych clearly revealed l’Unità’s sympathy with the defenseless students.115

L’Unità’s front page coverage of the Battle of the Valle Giulia stands in stark contrast to that of La Stampa and Il Corriere della Sera and offers forceful examples of the left-wing media’s use of an inverted “Italian pro-test paradigm.” The PCI’s daily prefaced its headline with, “The irrespon-sible attitude of the government and the rector provoked savage police aggression against the youth.” Below this admonishment, in large block letters, the headline read, “THE POLICE WERE UNLEASHED AGAINST THE ROMAN STUDENTS.” Rather than photos of burning cars or stu-dents wielding clubs, l’Unità’s photographs show a peaceful gathering of students outside the Faculty of Architecture next to a photograph of police in jeeps moving into some sort of combat formation. Rather than a quotation from the Minister of the Interior congratulating the police, the newspaper quotes Communist deputies demanding the removal of police from the university and calling for the dismissal of the Rector of the University of Rome, Pietro D’Avack and the Minister of Education, Luigi Gui.116 Clearly the readers of l’Unità viewed an image of the Valle Giulia protest through frames far different from their counterparts who had picked up a copy of La Stampa or Il Corriere that same day.

As we have seen in this chapter, the popular press in Italy offered a variety of images and texts to frame the university protests of the late 1960s. Generally, the photographs and headlines that were printed in the Italian press offered characterizations of the student demonstrators that fit within the newspaper’s political and editorial inclinations. The vast majority of Italians read newspapers that had centrist or conservative lean-ings due to the fact that these publishers dominated the media industry. Thus, for those who received their information on the student movement from the daily newspapers in the late 1960s, the image was overwhelm-ingly negative. The conservative press depicted the student activists as dangerous “left-wing fascists” by printing a disturbing blend of headlines, articles, photographs, and readers’ letters that associated the university reform movement with Italy’s Fascist past and the Cold War present. The conservative press also preyed upon class antagonisms by characterizing students as spoiled rich kids playing a game of revolution.

Conversely, the left-wing press constructed an image of the student movement that opposed the negative one of the centrist and conserva-tive press by simply inverting the negative frames of protest used by the antistudent press. The most widely circulating of the leftist presses, l’Unità, created an image of the student movement that connected the protesters with the antifascist Resistance and showed its readers scenes



of thoughtful, orderly, young people struggling for necessary reforms. Readers of l’Unità and several communist politicians voiced their sup-port and gratitude to student leaders in the pages of the newspaper. The press also published scathing photographs and testimonials of police violence toward peaceful protesters.

Ultimately, however, the pro-student media voice was drowned by the voices of the right and center because l’Unità and the student-published newspapers could not compete with the conservative and centrist presses’ circulation. Public figures like communist playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini openly criticized the student protesters, further undercutting the left-wing presses’ faint image of the students as seri-ous antifascists working hard for university and political reform. This negative construction of the student movement not only shaped pub-lic attitudes toward the students, as we shall see, but also altered the views of Italy’s political leaders at the highest levels.


114

6The National Dimension II: Italy’s Politicians Confrontthe Issue of University Reform

While Italy’s youth marched in the city streets demanding an end to the old university, carrying the banners of Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara, the politicians in Rome arose from their legislative torpor to deal with educational reform. In their speeches before the Italian Parliament, many of these politicians echoed the rhetoric of the popular press that we observed in the previous chapter. Despite their use of dramatic ora-tory, Italy’s government leaders had neither the unity nor the sense of urgency to overhaul the nation’s antiquated university system and the legislative movement to reform the universities proved to be ponder-ous and spasmodic. Similar to the professors in Turin, the politicians in Italy’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, paid serious attention to the students only when they took over city streets in the spring of 1968. In his study of the students’ impact on politics, Guido Quazza, a profes-sor of education and supporter of the student reforms in Turin, believed that Italy’s political leaders, including the communists, had been taken completely by surprise by the events of 1967–68. In the end, however, the protracted battle for university reform yielded limited results.1

The historian Giuseppe Ricuperati has argued that the failure of edu-cational reform in Italy during the 1960s stemmed chiefly from the weaknesses of Aldo Moro’s center-left government. The Socialists’ deci-sion to join with the Christian Democrats created an untenable politi-cal constellation that ended the previous corporatist political process of Italian governments, but ultimately led to political gridlock. In what may be a quarrel over cause and effect, Ricuperati disagrees with student activists who claimed that capitalist conservative forces fought to retain the antiquated university system for the nation’s wealthy elite, arguing instead that the factiousness of the center-left majority ultimately stalled all attempts at university reform. He blames the Unified Socialist Party


The National Dimension II 115

for breaking with its Christian Democratic partners, because Minister of Education Luigi Gui’s reform bill did not go far enough.2 Paul Ginsborg further points out that the student movement itself could not act as a real force for university reform because “The very nature of their critique and of their organization—radical, decentralized, Utopian—militated against them becoming an effective pressure group for reform.”3 Four other factors also help to explain the lackluster record of university reform in the late 1960s: the inherent weaknesses of Gui’s education reform bill number 2314, the strength of the political opposition on both the Left and Right, the vested interests of politicians who also held university posts, and the actions of the students themselves.4

In the immediate postwar period, many left-wing members of the Resis-tance had called for a radical reconstruction of the educational system to match the rebuilding of the Italian economy. However, the concentration of political power in the hands of the conservative Christian Democratic Party ensured that no radical experiments would take place. The DC’s first Minister of Public Instruction, a professor of law at the Vatican’s Università di Laterano, Guido Gonella, resisted any expansion of the role of the state in Italian education, fearing that this would strengthen the forces of atheism and communism. He also tried to maintain the power of the parochial schools at the expense of public institutions.5 The DC’s opposition to state intervention in public education inhibited the growth of public schooling during the late 1940s. A survey from 1951 revealed that 12.8 percent of Italians were illiterate and a staggering 46 percent had only an elementary education.6 Pope John XXIII’s drastic departure from the Church’s earlier political support of the DC, along with the growing power of the Left, forced the Christian Democrats to take a new look at education in the early 1960s.7

In 1961, the national government opened access to all the university science faculties to the graduates of technical high schools. The follow-ing year, compulsory public education was extended to fourteen years of age, a reform that the Left had advocated since the founding of the Republic, and in 1965, the university entrance examinations were abol-ished opening access to all graduates of the liceo. The government also created a non-partisan “Committee of Inquiry” to work on the reform of higher education.8

By July 1963, the committee submitted its findings to the Minister for Public Instruction, Luigi Gui, recommending many far reaching reforms and a massive expansion in the number of teachers and schools at all levels. The universities, in particular, required a massive overhaul with the reorganization of the old labyrinthine bureaucracy into departments


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along the lines of the English model. The Committee also envisioned a semester system, a reduction in the number of examinations, greater coordination of graduate training with the needs of industry, a mas-sive increase in the number of professors, and the construction of new universities in the underrepresented South.9 The Committee of Inquiry’s recommendations, if implemented, would have eliminated overcrowd-ing, cleared obstacles to graduation, and opened university admissions to working-class Italians.

From the beginning, Minister Gui obstructed the Committee of Inquiry’s bold visions of a renovated Italian university. Before join-ing the Parliament in 1946 as a member of the Catholic Action Party, Gui had taught history and philosophy at a liceo in Padua.10 A devout Catholic, he has been described as a conservative, neo-Thomist, who had been educated in Catholic schools and maintained close relations with professors at the Catholic University of Milan.11 Like his predecessor Guido Gonella, Gui held a negative view of secular education, writing in the journal Civitas in 1956, that the young Republic should continue to support parochial schools.12 He manifested his anticommunism openly, publishing a book entitled Il sole non spunta ancora in Russia (The Sun still does not Rise in Russia) in 1948.13 Thus, any educational reform penned by Gui would be conservative in scope and carry his party’s bias against extensive state involvement.

In March 1964, Minister Gui appointed his own Commission for Scholastic Programming to devise a university reform bill.14 The Commission was chaired by Maria Badaloni, a former school teacher from Rome, and president of the “Association of Catholic Teachers.”15 Like Gui, Badaloni was a Christian Democrat who strongly supported parochial schools. At this early stage of the legislative process we can see how the extensive reform proposals originally formulated by the multiparty Committee of Inquiry came to be filtered through a con-servative lens by Gui and Badaloni. The commission’s work was also hindered by a budgetary impasse. The result was the Pieraccini Plan that proposed a numerus clausus or limitation on the number of university enrollments similar to that in West Germany and France.16 According to Communist Deputy Rossana Rossanda, the plan would have limited the university system to granting only 40,000 diplomas a year.17 Such a restriction would have created a significant bottleneck, because 44,163 students had enrolled in Italian universities between 1960 and 1963 with an annual average increase in enrollments of over 20,000 new students per year.18 Nevertheless Gui’s plan, like that of the West German and French governments, came to include a numerus clausus.



On May 4, 1965, Minister Gui presented his university reform bill to the Chamber of Deputies. Reform bill number 2314 or the “Gui Bill” was to be shepherded through Parliament by Gui and the powerful Giuseppe Ermini, who had been a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1945.19 Gui, who planned to defend his bill at all costs, mistakenly expected an easy victory based on the combined votes of the coalition Socialists and Christian Democrats. Along with the restriction on enroll-ments, the bill proposed a three-tiered structure of degrees, from a one-year diploma to the traditional university laurea.20 The plan would also have preserved the traditional powers of the professors, allowing them to continue to hold positions outside the university. Overall, the plan’s conservative measures fell far short of the Committee of Inquiry’s bold vision for reconstructing the Italian university.21

Both the Left and the Right criticized Gui’s plan. To the Communists and many of the Socialists, Bill 2314 was an inadequate solution. To Catholics and Liberals, it went too far, threatening the traditional freedoms of the professors. Ironically, in light of Gui’s efforts to preserve the independence of Italy’s parochial universities, the plan was sharply criticized by a Committee of Catholic Professors as a state intrusion into academic life.22

The issue of university reform moved through the Italian Parliament in fits and starts from 1965 to 1968. The Christian Democrats along with the majority of their coalition partners, the Socialists (PSU), initially defended the Gui plan as the most practical solution to the problems of the university. However, Aldo Moro’s center-left coalition grew increas-ingly fragile. The news of police repression against student demonstrators in February 1968 and the public outcry following the Battle of the Valle Giulia in March drove a wedge between the two disparate partners. The Socialists denounced the police brutality in Rome, while the Christian Democrats, including Gui, attempted to use the student explosion at the Valle Giulia to call for immediate passage of the reform bill. Gui’s main opponent within the government was an ex-Partisan and historian named Tristano Codignola.23

Along with these fissures within the governing majority, the Communists and the Liberals voiced steady and acerbic criticism of the Gui Plan. As the second most powerful party in the government, the Communists viewed the plan as nothing more than an attempt by the DC to maintain the old university with its hierarchical structures and restricted access. A young Communist deputy from Sardinia, Luigi Berlinguer, proposed a much more radical reform bill that resembled the Committee of Inquiry’s pro-posals. His plan called for greater access to the university for the children


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of the working class, democratization and reorganization of university structures, a closer relationship between the university and industry, and a massive increase in the number of professors and universities in the neglected regions of Italy. The Communists concurred with the students’ view that the traditional university served only to perpetuate Italy’s social inequities.24 A group of female Communist deputies—Rossana Rossanda, Giorgina Levi, and Angiola Massucco Costa—became the spokeswomen for the students, denouncing police brutality and championing student ideas for reform. These women challenged the negative image of the stu-dents printed in the conservative press and voiced by right-wing members of Parliament.

The Liberals also challenged the Gui Bill throughout the course of the sixth legislature. The leader of the Liberal opposition was a pugna-cious, sixty-year-old southerner named Salvatore Valitutti who had once been the chancellor of the University for Foreigners in Perugia and rivaled the Communists as one of Gui’s bitterest foes.25 The Liberals opposed both the Communist and the Christian Democratic proposals, arguing that the Marxists wanted to demolish the old university and make all institutions state-run and laic, while the DC wanted to allow the state universities to decay at the expense of the free (parochial) universities.26 The Gui Bill, claimed Valitutti, lacked the drastic meas-ures required to reform the universities while the Communists’ vision of a mass university would destroy the quality of public education. Sharing Max Weber’s conviction that the university had to be shielded from politics, he emphasized the relationship between democracy and higher education, asserting that “Democratic society is both egalitarian and competitive. If it is forced only to be egalitarian and not competi-tive it will stagnate and disintegrate. In the long run, it must always becompetitive.”27 Although the Liberals opposed the proliferation of Catholic “free” universities and the Marxian mass university, they offered no distinct alternative of their own.

Having outlined the parties’ views on university reform, we now turn to the parliamentary debates in Italy’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies. Although Minister Gui put his reform plan before the Chamber in May 1965, very little debate occurred until one year later after the death of Paolo Rossi at the University of Rome.28 Seventy thousand people, including Pietro Nenni, the leader of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) attended Rossi’s funeral, and the student and public outcry forced the Deputies to call for the dismissal of the aged Rector Giuseppe Papi and dust off neglected plans for university reform.29



The parliamentary debate over Rossi’s death, running intermittently from April 27 through June 1, 1966, pitted politicians of all political stripes against each other. Although the speakers debated the legacy of fascism and its threat to the postwar democracy, they paid little attention to the need for significant university reforms. The debate also showed a generational rift within Italy’s governing class, as older politicians from the Right and Left sought to display their antifascist credentials while younger deputies focused on other issues. The Socialist Deputy Francesco Cacciatore, who had been a member of the PSI since 1923, along with his colleagues, blamed the violence at the University of Rome on “fascist hooligans,” emphasized that Rossi was a member of a democratic student organization, and demanded an investigation.30 Liberal Deputy Aldo Bozzi, who was only five years younger than Cacciatore, connected the events directly with the menace of fascism when he shouted, “It is truly unthinkable that in 1966, after such experience with democracy … there can be manifestations of this type, which exalt Nazism and the uncivil manifestations of fascism.” Bozzi also denounced the communists whom he claimed had likewise used violence to force political change, andhe declared his party’s opposition to all forms of totalitarianism and dictatorship.31

The culmination of the Rossi debate occurred on May 18, when the Chamber spent the entire day debating the incidents at the University of Rome. Minister Gui blamed the violence on overcrowding, noting that 16.2 percent of all university students in Italy were enrolled at the University of Rome and claimed that his Ministry planned to build a second university in the capital.32 Gui’s DC colleague, the Minister of the Interior and former member of the antifascist resistance in Genoa, Paolo Emilio Taviani presented the government’s official version of the events surrounding Rossi’s death. Taviani upheld the Rector’s decision to call the police and declared that “the state must preserve democratic order.” He also reminded his colleagues of the Law of December 3, 1947 and the Scelba Law of 1952 which formally outlawed the Fascist party and Fascist demonstrations.33

Deputy Carlo Sanna of the breakaway socialists’ Italian Party of Proletarian Socialist Unity (PSIUP) criticized the government’s char-acterization of the left-wing students as “undemocratic” and blamed the Right for the violence it had imposed throughout most of Italian history.34 Sanna’s remarks immediately provoked an angry reply from 35-year-old MSI Deputy Raffaele Delfino who claimed that the police had protected the left-wing students, blamed the Communists for threatening democracy, and pledged that the MSI would “help the


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government in this moment of general crisis of the state.” Another young MSI deputy, Angelo Nicosia, who dismissed the protests at the University of Rome as internecine battles among leftist groups, was the first parliamentarian to use the term filocinesi (“Maoist”) in a political debate.35

Liberal Deputy Valitutti accepted the government’s report on the events surrounding Rossi’s death but urged his colleagues to take immediate steps to reform and expand the universities.36 His colleague Giovanni Palazzolo voiced the Liberal call for an educational system shielded from politics, arguing that the Italian word for university, ateneo, derived from the Greek word “atheneum” which had been temples of science and culture, “Today,” he explained, “the atenei had been transformed into places of battle.”37 A group of Christian Democrats and Socialists led by Giuseppe Ermini and a former member of the Florentine antifascist Resistance, Tristano Codignola, submitted a written statement affirming their support of the government’s interpretation of the Rossi incident and calling for speedy passage of the Gui Bill.38 The Ermini/Codignola statement’s emphasis on the values of the Resistance struck a chord with a member of the parliamentary opposition, Communist Deputy Pietro Ingrao. A former member of the Roman antifascist resistance, Ingrao offered his support for the Ermini/Codignola statement and appealed to his fellow deputies to democratize the universities, compar-ing his plea for reform to the partisans’ heroic struggle during the Second World War.39

In its official report on Rossi’s death, the coalition government evoked the values of the Resistance, reaffirmed the autonomy of the universi-ties, but also upheld the right of university administrators to take action if constitutional rights were in danger. The report blamed “fascist vio-lence” for the tragedy that had occurred at the University of Rome and included only a cursory mention of the need to pass Bill 2314.40 The government’s statement thus proposed two possibly competing aims: to do battle against the remaining vestiges of fascism in public life, including in Italy’s universities; and to uphold the semi-independent nature of the universities. Before Rossi’s death, university autonomy had meant that campuses had been relatively free of any intrusion by outside authorities. As we learned in the chapter on the professors at the University of Turin, the period 1966–68 witnessed an increasing number of police interventions. Torn between their desire to maintain a peace-ful environment for learning and a sense of university space as sacred ground free from outside distractions, the faculty in Turin also held two divergent aspirations for the university.



The battle between left- and right-wing students in Rome pushed the student demonstrations into the foreground of Italian political life. Although the Rossi debates had skirted the problem of university reform, they revealed a consensus among all the deputies that some-thing had to be done.41 As indicated by the Liberal and Communists’ acceptance of the government’s position, the bitter divisions between the Left and Right had not yet manifested themselves in 1966.

After May 1966, the issue of reform lay dormant for nearly another year. In April 1967, the state visit of US Vice President Hubert Humphrey touched off a round of student-led anti-Vietnam demonstrations through-out Western Europe followed by a wave of police repression. These dem-onstrations exposed a division within the center-left coalition as well as a growing level of political opposition. Most Liberals and Christian Democrats supported US policy, while the Communists and Socialists repudiated America’s war in Indochina.42 Except for the pleas for univer-sity reform by the Communists Rossana Rossanda and Giorgina Levi that followed a police assault on a night school student in Milan, this issue remained conspicuously absent from the April discussions.43

The parliamentary minutes of April 1967 revealed a few key charac-teristics about the government’s response to the students and to the issue of university reform. During the debate, the government, like the professors in Turin, remained passive, reacting to calls for reform but preferring to ignore the issue when the streets were quiet. Second, the Ministries of the Interior and Public Instruction frequently blamed student radicals or the political opposition for failings in educational policy. Third, the violence both at home in Italian universities and abroad in Vietnam became divisive issues between the Christian Democrats and, their partners, the Socialists. During this time of tension, the Christian Democrats (often seconded by the neofascist MSI) usually sided with the forces of law and order and supported the US. The Socialists, on the other hand, found themselves on the side of the opposition Communists denouncing police brutality in the universities and the American intervention in Southeast Asia. The Socialists’ break with their coalition partners over the issue of police violence corrects Donatella Della Porta’s claim that the minority part-ners in the center-left governments of the late 1960s consistently sided with the conservatives’ “law and order” position. Della Porta’s view of coalition unanimity is more valid for the Grand Coalition in West Germany than for the Moro government in Italy.44

The new wave of university protest that struck Italy in the autumn of 1967 again forced educational reform to the top of the Parliament’s


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agenda. Taking their typically reactive stance, the deputies reopened the debate in the wake of the occupations of November 1967. One day after the occupation of the Palazzo Campana, a Communist deputy from Turin, Giorgina Levi, implored her colleagues to take up the issue of school reform, noting that students were striking in the licei as well as the universities. Evoking the Resistance’s dreams of social reform, she declared that “Democracy in the schools is still an abstract con-cept that has not been translated into the legal codes!”45 Levi was well justified in her criticism of the government’s inaction, even the mild reforms of the Gui Bill had languished for two and a half years due to parliamentary inertia.

The handful of Communist voices within the Chamber of Deputies that had called for serious university reform were unable to move the center-left coalition to action, but the students’ seizure of university buildings in Milan, Turin, Pisa, Florence, and Trieste prompted the government to respond. On December 5, 1967, the first major debates on bill number 2314 began in the Chamber of Deputies. Now, however, Gui’s bill had to compete with three other reform plans: a communist bill proposed by Luigi Berlinguer, a liberal reform authored by the Republican Party Deputy Antonio Montanti, and even a plan from the neofascist Deputy Achille Cruciani.46

In the debates over these various proposals, two visions of the university emerged. The conservative Christian Democrats, many Socialists, and a few neofascists favored the traditional, elitist university that allowed the professors to maintain their leading roles as educators and public figures. These deputies felt that increased access to the universities for students who had not received a classical education at one of Italy’s licei would lower the quality of higher education. They also believed that Italian scholars should be allowed to remain in political life without relinquish-ing their university posts as did professors in the rest of Europe.47 The Communists, PSIUP, some Liberals and a handful of Socialists, called for a modern and democratic university that opened its doors to all classes and allowed the graduates of non-classical licei to enroll. Communist Deputy Luigi Berlinguer argued that the question of whether professors should be allowed to work as politicians and continue teaching was a minor issue. What was needed, Berlinguer exclaimed, was a massive increasein the number of teachers and buildings.48 Angiola Massucco Costa echoed the students’ charges that the archaic Italian university was “notional-istic,” offering little room for creative thought and innovation. Similarto the West German students’ concept of the Fachidiot or “subject-idiot,” a scholar who had been narrowly overeducated in an obscure discipline,



Massucco Costa implored her colleagues to listen to the protesters and recreate the Italian universities in partnership with the emerging techno-logical society. “They [the students] do not want to remain closed in an ivory tower connected to conservative and abstract ideas, they want to utilize the methods and techniques of research to ends relating directly to the social, cultural and economic reality of the country.”49

Returning to the more bombastic rhetoric typical of earlier debates, con-servative deputy and Law professor, Giuseppe Bettiol (DC) characterized the students as misguided communist revolutionaries, claiming that “com-pared to the un-free universities in Eastern Europe, the Italian universitieswere not that bad,” and further adding that those who “struggle againstthe university barons” were attacking Italy’s cultural leaders. Bettiol agreed that the universities needed reform, but his rhetoric clearly sought to reproach student activists and served as an opportunity for him to denounce communism.50

The Chamber’s debate over university reform continued into January 1968 while an increasing number of university buildings came to be occupied by a growing student movement. The factious nature of the Italian political system became evident in the cacophony of divergent voices and the pompous pronouncements of its leaders. Minister Gui’s conservatives sought to push Bill 2314 forward, while the Communists and Socialists demanded explanations for the increasing acts of police violence against the university demonstrators51 and the Liberals sought to derail the Gui Bill before the May elections.52 By January 11, the term “university crisis” could be found in the discourse used by deputies on the left and right.53 Added to this parliamentary rancor, a devastat-ing earthquake struck northwestern Sicily in the first week of January, forcing the government to turn its attention to the refugees. The Moro government proved as incapable of helping the Sicilians rebuild their shattered villages as it was of reforming the Italian university.54

On January 17, 1968, the Liberal Salvatore Valitutti called for a vote that would block the Gui Bill from passing to the amendment phase of the Chamber’s debates hoping to keep alive further discussion of com-peting reform plans. However, this attempt to force the vote backfired, because the governing majority easily defeated the minority Liberals and their unlikely allies the Communists.55 The defeat of the Liberal motion ended the discussion of any alternative reform plans and opened the debates on various amendments to the Gui Bill.

During the last two weeks of January, the deputies debated the first eight amendments to the Gui Bill and eventually accepted the plan to restructure the universities into departments along English lines.56


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However, much of the deputies’ time was spent discussing the wave of police violence associated with the first university evacuations in Turin, Milan, Padua, Florence, Genoa, and Naples. Members of all political parties questioned the government on police violence including a group of Christian Democrats who denounced the violation of university autonomy and the incursions on the students’ civil liberties.57

This concern for the students would not last long. When the stu-dents adopted more aggressive tactics and invaded the city streets in February, the DC returned to its previously negative position. Minister Gui maintained a hard-line approach to the students, commenting in the journal Politica at the end of January that “the occupations of uni-versity offices … can not be accepted, as any forms of violence can not be accepted.”58

The Communists, on the other hand, praised the students’ actions. Rossana Rossanda, one of the leaders of the PCI’s cultural section and later founder of the radical newspaper Il Manifesto described the student demonstrations in positive terms. Writing in l’Unità in late January 1968, she predicted:

Today the relationship of power is characterized by a spontaneous movement in the universities. The universities are zones of civil bat-tles at the highest level of tension. Not a legal, but a cultural and social battle is liquidating the old university.59

Later that year, Rossana Rossanda would publish a book on the student movement similar to her counterpart in France, Alain Touraine. Both the Communist deputy and French sociologist interpreted the wave of student protests as a new social movement capable of restructuring their respective nation’s politics and society.60 Despite Rossanda and Touraine’s initial hopes and exaltation of the student movements, the immobility of the Italian Parliament and the authoritarian presence of Charles de Gaulle stood squarely across the students’ path to a new society.

During the month of February, the deputies again brushed aside the issue of university reform in favor of budgetary matters and a debate over the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Despite the Parliament’s disregard for university reform, the Turinese Communist Giorgina Levi continued to argue the students’ position, calling for an amendment to the Gui Bill that would allow the students a role in course planning.61 The Minister of Education, on the other hand, voiced his frustration at continued student demonstrations and stalled reform plans and denigrated the



student activists at a public speech in Verona on February 12. Gui char-acterized the protests as “nonspecific political demands,” and repeated Pasolini’s view of the student activists as spoiled “figli di papà.” Gui claimed that the student leaders, who often came from wealthy families, “[had] disrupted less well-to-do students who needed to finish their stud-ies quickly.” Evidently, the minister sought to use the widespread agita-tion to reignite the debate on university reform before the final meeting of the Chamber in March and the impending legislative elections.62

The decisive moments in the Moro government’s long and spasmodic struggle for university reform took place in March 1968. The Valle Giulia disorders at the University of Rome and the impending adjourn-ment of the sixth legislature at the end of March caused the deputies to scramble for some type of reform before the national elections. The Battle of the Valle Giulia had brought the street fighting of the 1960s to the doorstep of the politicians and focused their attention on the civil unrest in the universities. Hoping to use this incident as the impetus for immediate legislative action, Gui rushed to pass an interim version of his reform bill.63 However, the Christian Democrats’ unconditional sup-port for the police caused a break with their Socialist partners at a time when coalition solidarity was required to pass any kind of bill.

On March 1, as news of street fighting in the Valle Giulia spread through the capital, Minister of the Interior, Paolo Emilio Taviani opened the debate on university reform in a dramatic fashion. According to Taviani, about 1500 students who had been evacuated by the police had marched down one of Rome’s busiest streets, the Via Nazionale, disrupt-ing traffic. The following day, about 2000 students had gathered in the Piazza di Spagna and thrown bottles and stones at the police provoking a pitched battle between students and police. Taviani concluded, not unex-pectedly, that Rector D’Avack had the legal right to evacuate the students, and that the police had “defended the liberty of the democratic state.” He finished this slanted official government report of the events with the warning that “Honorable colleagues the weakness and uncertainty of the forces of order were one of the causes of the sunset of democracy and the advent of fascism.”64 With Taviani having raised the specter of Italy’s young democracy besieged by radical students, Minister Gui took the podium and urged his colleagues to pass his reform bill without delay.65

The Communists attacked the government’s position, accusing Gui of encouraging Rector D’Avack to call in the police and forcing the depu-ties to accept a reform bill “known to be rejected by most students.”66 Communist Deputy and former prisoner of the Fascist regime, Aldo Natoli angrily criticized Taviani’s version of events calling him the


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“Minister of a Police State” and informing his fellow legislators that the day before the evacuation, many students and professors had been involved in an “open occupation” which included new types of exams and seminars. “The students,” Natoli shouted, “have made mistakes, but only because they have tried to do in three months what the gov-ernment has not done in more than twenty.”67 Accusing the police of being repressive and willing to employ methods similar to the Fascists, he dated the beginning of the student unrest to Paolo Rossi’s violent death twenty-three months earlier.

Many Socialists broke ranks with their coalition partners and joined the Communists in denouncing the government’s role in the Valle Giulia episode, agreeing that there had been successful, if unauthor-ized, experiments with new teaching and examination methods. PSIUP Deputy Carlo Sanna seconded the Communist charge of a premeditated crackdown against the Roman students and urged his colleagues to support the Left’s version of university reform over the conservative Gui Bill.68 Another Socialist, the former Partisan Tristano Codignola, denounced the government’s response to the student protests as reac-tionary and repressive but also blamed the Communists for politicizing the issue of university reform to such a degree that no reform would be possible.69

Codignola’s plea that the bloodshed at the Valle Giulia should bring the politicians together in a unified search for honest and far-reaching reforms was in vain. Instead, the Battle of the Valle Giulia became the Waterloo for university reform, causing the conservatives deputies to harden their views against the student movement. Christian Democratic Deputy Domenico Magri, stung by the criticism of the left, vigorously defended the Rector of Rome’s actions and attacked the left’s attempts to belittle Gui’s reform bill, claiming it was “the best possible plan under the circumstances.”70

Seeking a middle position, the Liberal leader, Salvatore Valitutti argued that Gui’s reform bill would not effect any major changes but also criticized the extremism of the Communists and Socialists. Valitutti applauded the Rector’s decision to call in the police reminding his col-leagues that in the period 1919–23, “no one would defend the state and a dictatorship arose.”71 Deputies Valitutti, Sanna, and Minister Taviani’s words, all tried to merge the events of 1968 with those of the early 1920s. After living through at least part of the Fascist dictatorship, they had developed, with the help of the mass media, an image of demo-cratic collapse that included masses of young people, demonstrations in city streets, and battles between police and political groups. Like the



conservative presses’ attempts to link fascism with the student protests in order to sell newspapers, these politicians used their versions of history to sway the national debate over the future direction of Italian politics.

In the wake of the Valle Giulia, the government was forced to listen to the students’ demands. On March 9, hundreds of Italian university and liceo students gathered in Rome’s Palazzetto dello Sport and called for a national rally on March 15 to protest the Gui Bill. Faced with massive student rejection of his university bill and the defection of his Socialist coalition partners, Gui formulated an interim reform plan. This included the establishment of university departments, reform of examinations, creation of “structural spaces for the students,” and gave students a consultative role in the faculty councils.72 Although Gui’s emergency plan would not have satisfied the Communists or the most radical students, the Socialists probably would have supported it. However, time had run out for the sixth legislature. Gui circulated his emergency plan to all the rectors of the Italian universities in the hope that it would serve as the basis of an official reform that would be passed after the center-left government was returned to power.

The Moro government was not re-elected in May 1968, and the coali-tion gave way to a short-lived conservative government dominated by the Christian Democrats under Giovanni Leone. Many students left the protest movement when the hated center-left combination was replaced by even more conservative leadership. The Leone government offered to make peace with the students and gave lip service to some more daring reforms, but a vote of no confidence brought the govern-ment down within six months.73 The first of three of Mariano Rumor’s governments took power in December 1968 with an unsteady coalition of Christian Democrats, Socialists who had left the ill-fated PSU, and the tiny Radical Party, but quickly fell victim to political instability along with Gui’s university reform bill.

By the end of 1968, the politicians had already turned their atten-tion away from the universities and toward the growing labor unrest and university reform plans were once again put on hold. Finally on December 9, 1969, during Rumor’s second government, the Parliament voted to accept Social Democrat Tristano Codignola’s university reform plan which became Law 910. This law formally removed all barri-ers to university admission and offered a wider range of curriculum choices.74 Codignola’s bill represented at least a partial victory for the student movement’s goal of opening universities to the working classes. However, the law fell far short of changing teaching methods, and in


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practice, the numbers of students entering the universities from techni-cal high schools remained low.75

In his reflections on the Moro government’s halting progress toward university reform, Giorgio Canestri has argued that the battle for scho-lastic reform was a microcosm of Italian politics in 1967–68. It revealed the weakness of the center-left government, in which the junior part-ner, the Socialists, suppressed their social and cultural goals in order to remain in the coalition.76 On the other hand, Guido Quazza believed that the coalition might have succeeded; but that the final deathblow came after the May elections with a new government whose attitude toward reform was “fragmentary, reticent, ambiguous, and substantially elusive.”77 Paul Ginsborg wrote that the history of university reform showed that the “minimalist” vision of reform had triumphed and that political factiousness led to emergency half measures that were never followed by substantial reform.78

Such assessments interpret the tortuous path of university reform through the Italian Parliament but leave out the role of the activists. It is clear from Minister Gui’s hostile attitude to the university occupa-tions of the winter months 1967–68 and from Taviani’s denunciation of the students after the events of the Valle Giulia,79 that the students’ increasing militancy in the spring of 1968 played a decisive role in hardening the positions of the conservatives as it had done with many professors at the University of Turin. Furthermore, the students’ polit-ical allies, the Communists, never completely supported the students, despite their statements in the press and in the Parliament. Some like Deputy Giorgio Amendola castigated the students as “irrational and infantile” and even called on the PCI to widen its struggle against capitalism to include a battle against student extremism.80 Aside from the efforts of female Communist deputies—Rossana Rossanda, Angiola Masucco Costa, and Giorgina Levi—the party only belatedly appreciated the political importance of the student movement. In the 1970s, a senior deputy of the PCI, Giorgio Napolitano reflected, “It was quite striking that at the time, we did not understand the significance and implications of the growing tumultuousness of the student population.”81

Throughout Italy the students, incited by their opponents, took extreme positions that excluded compromise with their professors and the forces of order. The activists’ challenge to civic order in the spring of 1968 provided the university authorities with a reason to suspend negotiations and disregard serious attempts at reform. At the national level, the increasing violence alienated the conservatives, a large segment



of the Old Left, and failed to convince the politicians of the urgency of meaningful legislation. Politicians on the right managed to sidestep the issue of university reform by characterizing student activism as a problem of civic order, not university restructuring.

From a distance, the story of Luigi Gui’s ill-fated university reform bill presents a drama typical of Italian politics in the postwar era. Such a drama was played out many times with the Communist heirs of the Resistance dreaming of a radically different, modern, secular university that promoted access to the children of the working class. Meanwhile, the leading political faction in the Parliament, the Christian Democrats, were torn between a desire to pull Italian education up to the level of their northern neighbors and their traditionalist beliefs in the Church and the family, as well as their fear of secular education.

Luigi Gui had tried to impose a conservative vision of reform designed to preserve parochial education and limit the government’s role in the universities. Vainly believing that the center-left coalition would hold and the Christian Democrats would be able to push his bill through Parliament as they had done so successfully in previous governments, Gui miscalculated the fragility of the DC–PSU alliance. The student activists and a small group of left-leaning politicians won the battle against the Gui Bill but failed to radically alter the structure or pedagogy of Italian higher education. Contrary to the students’ belief that the politicians did not listen, their protests had echoed in the halls of the Parliament, but each deputy had heard what he or she wanted to hear, twisting the students’ pleas into distorted shapes that fed old political feuds between the left, right, and center, producing very different visions of a modern Italian university.

Codignola’s reforms that became Law 910 did begin to change the nature of the Italian universities beginning in 1970. Nicola Tranfaglia, a professor of history at the University of Turin began his teaching career in 1969 and remembered, “The first students that I taught in 1969, they were the best because they were still part of the old group of bourgeois students, they were the most prepared.”82 He further recalled that “after the Sessantotto the didactics did change, I remember leading hundreds of these seminars—usually I would end up defending the university!”83 Tranfaglia’s colleague at the University of Turin, Law Professor Norberto Bobbio pinpointed the error within the university reforms enacted in 1969:

In the 1970s, the number of students exploded and the Italian uni-versity went from an elite institution to an institution of the masses


130 Italy and 1968

with thousands of students entering the university. This was bad for the universities and bad for a society with high unemployment. There were not enough rooms for the students—I had to teach law classes in the cinema!84

Bobbio’s words underscore the weaknesses of university reform that had been enacted at the end of the 1960s: the Italian universities had truly become open to all classes, but the government failed to provide funding to hire more professors and enlarge the existing educational facilities. Furthermore, Law 910 did not alter in any meaningful way the role of the professors within the university, many continued to act as baroni and nothing prevented professors from working outside the university to the detriment of the their teaching responsibilities. As noted in Tranfaglia’s comments, some younger professors did attempt to introduce new pedagogies and some of the former activists who later became professors adopted more student centered teaching styles.85

The Italian universities in the post 1968 years have remained over-crowded, underfunded, and paradoxically have achieved one of the highest levels of enrollment within the European Union and the lowest graduation rate. Writing in 2001, Paul Ginsborg noted that in the 1990s, new university reforms were introduced to align the Italian univer-sity curriculum more closely with the rest of Europe and improve the graduation rate. These reforms, like many other efforts promoted by the national government, were beset by problems of implementation and chronic lack of funding.86

Ultimately, the students’ efforts to reform the universities in the late 1960s did achieve one key goal: the removal of barriers to working class students and the creation of a mass university. However, the Italian gov-ernment had simply opened the gates to all without increasing funding for more professors and classrooms. The antiquated style of teaching and examination practices remained virtually untouched and any innova-tions in pedagogy were left to the initiative of individual instructors. Italy’s politicians, in striking contrast to their neighbors in West Germany and France, decided to increase access to the nation’s universities rather than implement a numerus clausus that would limit enrollments in cer-tain disciplines. Thus, the Italian solution to university reform proved to be noble in theory but weak in practice.


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7Conclusion: Revolutionor Rebellion?

The student protests that rocked the Italian peninsula in 1968 have provoked a lively, popular, and academic debate. Most studies of the Sessantotto have focused on the motives and goals of the activists pay-ing little attention to the targets of the students’ wrath. Many of these previous works stress the global quality of the 1968 unrest and focus upon the similarities that the Italian student movement had with other student movements in Western Europe and the United States. This study diverges from and enriches the previous work on the 1968 student rebellion by its unique focus and methodological approach. By concentrating first on the city of Turin, this work investigates the poten-tial allies and targets of the student activists from a local perspective. Moving to the national level, it then analyzes the response of Italy’s politicians and the effect of the popular press on both the students and their opponents. Thus, it differs from other inquiries by focusing on the objects of the student rebellion, the so-called establishment.1

This study offers four significant contributions to the literature of the student revolts of 1968. First, it reveals that the people whom the stu-dents dubbed the “establishment” were never united in their opposition and frequently reacted to the student protests in seemingly uncharacter-istic ways. Rather than a monolithic bloc focused on crushing the student rebellion, there are examples of police officers who aided student radicals and communist politicians who derisively rejected their youthful coun-terparts. This work demonstrates that the allegedly chasmic generational, political, and ideological divide that separated young activists from the establishment was actually much shallower than previous scholarly and popular accounts have suggested. Though often baffled and surprised by the students’ rebelliousness, this study shows that several members of the establishment, from all walks of life, did in fact, cross the barricades and


132 Italy and 1968

sought to understand and even aid the student revolutionaries. Rather than adhering to the notion of “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” we have seen that many of the Italian student activists drew inspiration from their parents’ resistance to fascism and the older workers’ tactics in confront-ing the factory owners.

Second, this study points out that for university activists, local and national concerns usually served as a detonator for initial unrest that later became fused with global issues. Similar to French students at suburban Nanterre who felt isolated from their counterparts in the Latin Quarter of central Paris,2 the University of Turin’s plan to relocate the Humanities Faculties to a distant suburban location became the spark that ignited unrest that challenged the university system and ultimately, the entire social order. By the spring of 1968, news photographs of students march-ing in city streets and chanting slogans inspired by the ideology of the New Left could be seen throughout the world. The synergy of this global imagery and the Italian students’ conscious self-identification with other youthful activists undoubtedly fanned the flames of what might have been a local protest into a nationwide movement. The global quality of the student revolt is well documented however a closer examination of the various regional instances of student activism reveals the powerful influence of local and national particularities. This work demonstrates that the events and course of the Sessantotto were shaped as much by global elements as by Italy’s unique experience with fascism, commu-nism, economic change, Catholicism, and labor unrest. Future studies of the 1968 student revolts ought to consider the interaction of both global and local forces. Nearly all books on the subject mention the powerful mobilizing effect of the US war in Vietnam but stop short of analyzing what Vietnam meant to non-American students. For student activists in Turin, the US military’s tactics in Vietnam reminded them of the Italian press’ strategy in disparaging their movement.3

Third, it illustrates how the Italian reaction to the student move-ment was often filtered through personal memories and popular myths about the legacy of fascism and antifascism. Both the activists and the establishment claimed ties to the heroic legacy of the Resistance and branded the other side as fascists. In either case both the protesters and establishment invoked historic examples from the early years of the dic-tatorship to the final years of armed resistance. This name-calling stands as an excellent example of the interplay between national and global forces because non-Italian activists in places like Berkeley and London also called members of the establishment, “fascists.” Though the term carried with it a universal sense of derision, the word did not carry the


Conclusion 133

same cultural meaning as it did in Italy. Having had personal experi-ence with Mussolini’s regime, many among the wartime generation did become anxious when they saw and heard about the youth marching in city streets and occupying university buildings. The students, for their part, had grown up in an Italy where a neofascist party still existed, where many Fascist laws still remained on the books and where the older generation seemed to have chosen to forget rather than examine its troubled past. The continuous resurrection of emotionally powerful words and images from the past is a common tendency in all societies. Psychologist N. N. Korzh studied the historical memories of post-Soviet Russians and found that

perception and evaluation of the present in many respects depend on knowledge of the past. We can say that the present exists in the context of the past. Factors of the past have a tendency to influence or distort the living experience of the present.4

For Italians in the late 1960s, these “factors of the past” were magnified and distorted by the popular press, political speeches, and placards car-ried by student demonstrators. At a time when many Italians felt that the past was safely behind them, the young activists placed questions about the past back on the national agenda.

Fourth, this study draws attention to the power that the press had in framing the student movement in a uniquely Italian protest paradigm. Using techniques similar to that of the American press, the conserva-tive and centrist presses not only vilified the radical students but also provided a mouthpiece for their protests. Similar to Todd Gitlin’s pio-neering study of the US media’s coverage of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Italian press adopted a variety of tactics in reporting on the movimento studentesco. The conservative and centrist presses adopted an Italian protest paradigm that essentially alternated depictions of student activists as dangerous “left-wing fascists,” who threatened Italy’s post-war democracy, with frames of protesters as spoiled rich kids playing a ridiculous game of revolution. Like Kathrin Fahlenbrach’s study of the media’s affect upon the West German student activists, this study also examines the ways that the Italian students altered their protest tactics and self-perceptions in response to the media’s coverage of their movement. Ultimately, the student–press interaction of the late 1960s resulted in not only a real verbal and physical conflict, but also in the construction of several versions of the Sessantotto that greatly altered and still alter the Italian perception of the student revolt. Any future


134 Italy and 1968

studies of the student revolts of the late 1960s will need to account for the media’s role in shaping the history and memory of the protests and sift through the many versions of 1968.

Examining the Italians’ response to their student movement in greater detail, we see that despite the conservative presses’ attempts to turn their readers against the students, the establishment and non-students never completely reacted to the students in the ways the student lead-ers anticipated. Looking at the case of Turin first, we see that far from a “university mafia” who ruled over their students with an iron fist, the faculty of the university became sharply divided by the activists’ chal-lenge for reform.5 Some like Guido Quazza of the Faculty of Education embraced the students’ reform proposals, while others like Giorgio Gullini and Athos Goidanich wanted to crush the student initiatives. The Rector Mario Allara and Giuseppe Grosso, a law professor and the Mayor of Turin, favored a moderate approach and eventually offered major concessions.6 The response in Turin contrasted sharply with the university administra-tion at the Catholic University of Milan (La Cattolica) where the professo-riate remained uniformly hostile to the student activists and called upon the nearby police barracks to disband occupations and eventually destroy the movement.7

The Catholic Church of Turin did not adhere to the typically hostile attitude toward left-wing students held by the authorities at the Cattolica or those expressed in the Vatican’s newspaper, the Osservatore Romano. In a city with a stronger secular tradition and a small but significant Protestant minority, the Catholic Church’s hold over the university students was never strong. Cardinal Michele Pellegrino, the former Bishop of Turin and a professor at the university, backed earlier student protests and was recognized as a leader in the Italian pacifist move-ment. Cardinal Pellegrino found supporters among a group of young priests in the city who favored reform within the church known as the Community of Vandolino.

The working class of Turin further reacted to the student movement in a variety of ways. In our survey of the police and FIAT workers’ interactions with student activists we saw that notions of class played a significant role in shaping attitudes and actions. The students perceived Italian society to be rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian, willing to employ its police force to destroy all challengers. They often derided the police as violent “agents of the bosses.” The police, on the other hand, reacted in seemingly unexpected ways. According to some former police officers, the students did pose a menace to public order, but certainly not on the scale of the Fascists at the beginning of the twentieth century.


Conclusion 135

The police, who usually came from very modest origins, saw the stu-dents as spoiled figli di papà, (daddy’s kids) who were merely wasting time when they should be studying. Rather than the dangerous threat to civic life that was portrayed in the local press, the student demonstra-tions and occupations were merely nuisances to the police who were more often shocked by the evidence of sexual immorality and vandalism than the possibility of major insurrection. The general lack of alarm on the part of the police and judiciary is supported by the fact that most of the protesters were released shortly after their arrests and very few received prison sentences.

From the left-wing students’ viewpoint, the FIAT workers of Turin should have been receptive to their message of social revolution and notions of direct democracy. Some workers like Luciano Parlanti heeded the students’ call and joined worker–student groups such as Lotta Continua. However, the broad mass of workers either rejected the stu-dents as figli di papà or regarded them as “auxiliaries” for strike actions. The workers appreciated the students’ will to fight but considered them unequal allies in their labor struggles in 1968 and 1969. Most workers, who felt that they lived in a world apart from the upper-class students, simply wanted better wages, shorter hours, and a slower work pace, not a revolution. They saw these children of the upper class as bored enfants ter-ribles who would eventually return to their studies and join their parents in the ranks of the social elite. Some workers resented the patronizing and pedantic rhetoric of students who met them at the factory gates. As the Turin case showed, some of the activists unconsciously adopted the overbearing tones and attitudes they had despised in their professors at the university. The testimony of former trade unionist, Gianna Alasia, indicated that the students had very little to teach the workers about strikes and protest, rather it were the students who had learned from the labor struggles of the workers during the first half of the century.

Despite the class differences that separated them, a handful of stu-dents and workers did unite within small activist associations like Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio and the student challenge to university and civic authorities undoubtedly provided inspiration for the workers’ explosive challenge to management in 1969. In Turin, as in Milan, the labor movement’s surge at the end of the 1960s was propelled by the massive influx of southern migrants who brought their own brand of radicalism that diverged from the traditional unionism of the northern workers and had little in common with the student protests.8 Further evidence for this separation of interests can be found in an opinion poll published by Guido Martinotti in 1969 indicating that among the


136 Italy and 1968

working class most people surveyed showed indifference to the student protests with 74 percent offering no opinion and only 9 percent who approved of the protests.9

At the national level, a review of the debates within the Chamber of Deputies also revealed the wide variety of political reactions to the student revolt. The students’ claim that the center-left coalition of the late 1960s represented a reactionary bloc of Christian Democrats and reformist Socialists, who had sold their Marxist souls for a taste of power, proved to be inaccurate. Although the Socialists showed their lack of commitment to major university reform by initially supporting Minister Gui’s moderate plan, they later broke ranks with their con-servative partners when the students became victims of police repres-sion in February and March 1968. If anything, the students helped sow further discord between the PSU and the CD thus hastening the fall of the coalition in June 1968. However, perceived acts of student violence, magnified and manufactured by the conservative press, also distorted attitudes toward the student movement and helped harden the conservatives’ antistudent stance as indicated by Minister Taviani’s condemnation of the students after the Battle of the Valle Giulia. Thus university reform failed in 1968 due to the divided nature of an uneasy coalition whose partners chose to interpret the student movement in very polarized ways.10 In France and West Germany, on the other hand, the student protests of 1968 led to significant university reforms.11

Commenting upon the interrelationship between international and national forces at work during the 1960s, Giovanni De Luna, a historian of the Italian ’68, remarked that Turin’s upheavals were similar to other rebel-lions around the globe, but there was also a strong stamp of localism.12 The students in Turin had voiced opposition to the proposed Gui reforms in 1965, but it was the decision to move the Science Faculties out to a suburban location, La Mandria, that mobilized the great numbers in 1966. Similarly, the demonstrators at the Catholic and State Universities of Milan came out in force the following year to protest a 50 percent increase in fees and the high examination failure rate, respectively. On the other hand, students in the faculties of medicine and science at the University of Turin had remained relatively quiet during the years 1967 and 1968, while the medical students at the State University of Milan were the first to occupy their faculty in 1967.13 Such a comparison suggests that although many activists in Italy were mobilized by the issue of university reform, each university had to respond to very particular protest demands. As in other countries, the causes for the students’ opening salvos and the speed with which the students took to the barricades varied from university to


Conclusion 137

university, but by the spring of 1968, the local causes for rebellion had become intertwined with a massive transnational rejection of academic, political, social, and parental authority.

The student movement in Turin was distinguished by its overwhelm-ingly secular and antifascist rhetoric during the Sessantotto. The protests at the Università di Torino were truly homegrown in the sense that several of its leaders were children of the Piedmontese antifascist Resistance: Luigi Bobbio, Marco Revelli, and Massimo Negarville. One of their action groups, Lotta Continua, originally had been called Nuova Resistenza. In other places where conservative forces were strong, such as the University of Perugia, neofascist students violently expelled and took over the occupation of their university.14 At the Catholic University of Milan, religious affiliation played a larger role as bitter infighting occurred between right-wing students who invoked Pius XII and left-leaning students inspired by John XXIII.15 Indeed, the Cattolica’s most celebrated activist, Mario Capanna, rose to prominence through the Catholic students’ association.16

The student movement in Turin revealed its northern Italian character by its attempt to connect with the workers of FIAT. Throughout the course of the movement, the Turin student activists formed numerous collectives such as Potere Operaio (Worker Power) and Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle) to mobilize the workers for whom the activists hoped to be the revolutionary vanguard. The students vented their anger against FIAT by attacking the company’s newspaper, La Stampa. In these respects, the Turin student protests mirrored those of Milan where activists attempted to mobilize the Pirelli workers and attacked the offices of the conservative Corriere della Sera.17

Turin was also marked by the exceptional leniency of its university administrators and police when dealing with student occupations and demonstrations. Protesters succeeded in occupying the Palazzo Campana for longer than any other university occupation in Italy, and Rector Allara never employed the harsh repressive measures like those utilized by Rector D’Avack at the University of Rome.18 Although violent acts were committed by police and students, the level of violence in Turin never reached that of Rome’s Battle of the Valle Giulia.19

This analysis of the local and national reception of student protest demonstrates that the people of Italy interpreted the events of 1967 and 1968 in ways that sought to place the student demonstrations within a unique historic context. For many Italians, this meant defining student actions within the frameworks of fascism and antifascism. For the critics of student actions, the demonstrators had simply revived the tactics, if not the ideology, of fascism. The disruptions in the universities, verbal attacks


138 Italy and 1968

against professors, crowds of young people in the streets, and attacks on property all seemed to mark the activists as promoters of a new kind of fascism. Even Norberto Bobbio, a former Resistance fighter and a Socialist Senator, was critical of the student actions. He noted that the students used open ballots in the assemblies at the Palazzo Campana and that only the elite spoke in the meetings. “They were against representative democracy,” he remembered, “they wanted democracy of the piazza.”20 In a similar way, the public reaction to student demonstrations in France can not be understood without historical knowledge of that nation’s role in the Second World War and the Algerian struggle for independence. In an unmistakable reference to French collaboration with the Germans during the Vichy period, thousands took to the streets declaring, “We are all German Jews” after President de Gaulle deported student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit.21 Future studies should similarly consider the historical context in which non-students would interpret the youth explosion of the late 1960s.

Furthermore, what Robert Lumley called the “moral panic” caused by students who followed Mao rather than the established Italian Comm-unist Party led to a fusion of fears producing the notion of “left-wingfascism.”22 According to the conservative press and politicians, the stu-dent filocinesi were the chief agents of this left-wing fascism.23 As one reader of La Stampa wrote, there seemed to be no difference between the fascists and those who followed “ma-ma-maismo.”24 Conservative newspapers such as La Stampa and the Corriere della Sera, promoted this image of left-wing fascism through their provocative headlines and pho-tographs which frequently focused on student attacks against property and the police. Student demonstrations were framed as chaotic events but also menacing ones, as shown by the pictures of New Left students giving Roman salutes.25 The presses’ blurring of boundaries between the extreme left and right in its coverage of the student movement led some scholars in the 1970s to reject these traditional ideological terms that seemed to have lost their meaning in popular practice.26

The left-leaning supporters of the students countered these views by arguing that the old enemies remained, and the cause was worth sacrificing for. The police brutality meted out upon unarmed protesters represented the true revival of Fascist tactics and attitudes. The Communist daily, l’Unità, praised the student activists as democrats and heirs to the antifascist Resistance legacy.27 Communist and socialist pol-iticians in Rome also praised the students for their political engagement and demanded that their colleagues work for major university reform.28 These diametrically opposed views expressed by the left and right not


Conclusion 139

only show the variety of interpretations of the student movement, but also reveal the heavily contested nature of the Italian peoples’ collective memories of fascism and the Resistance.

The anachronistic comparison of the student protesters to either Resistance fighters or Fascist thugs also suggests that members of the establishment used the student movement to further their own politi-cal goals. This study has highlighted several instances of the ways that the actions and rhetoric of the demonstrators was reconfigured to suit the politics of various non-student actors but other longitudinal studies may seek to analyze the ways that different segments of the establish-ment continued to use the rhetoric and memory of ’68 to further their agendas.

Finally, this study returns to the words of Paul Piccone who noted that the media transformed the unique local and national events of 1968 into a global youth revolution.29 As seen in the case of Turin, La Stampa and the other major press’ portrayals of the students as dangerous revolution-aries, hell-bent on the destruction of society hardly matched the personal perceptions of those who actually dealt with student activists on a daily basis, their professors, the police, and the workers of FIAT. Former jour-nalist for La Stampa, Maria Valabrega, noted that she often sympathized with the students and disagreed with her superiors who wrote caustic and catchy headlines for her articles. Although some members of the establishment like former police officer Angelo Gentile, Professor Athos Goidanich, and conservative politicians sincerely accepted the press designation of the protesters as “left-wing fascists” and filocinesi, most citizens did not feel as threatened by student activism. However, the con-servative and centrist press’ alternate tactic of mocking the demonstrators as spoiled, lazy kids proved to have a greater resonance among Turin’s working classes.

The group on which the press had the greatest impact was the stu-dents themselves. For Turin students as for the protesters throughout the industrialized world, the press became the object of a “love–hate” relationship throughout the years of peak activism.30 The activists loved the attention but hated the critical, mocking articles and photo-graphs in the conservative presses. In Turin, the students stole copies ofLa Stampa before they could be circulated and published their own Anti-Stampa. Furthermore, students in Turin, Florence, and Milan, like their counterparts in West Berlin and Paris often vented their rage against the offices of the local press. Maria Valabrega recalled that she made sure that La Stampa published the students’ Carta Rivendicativa (List of Demands), and yet they attacked her offices as well.31


140 Italy and 1968

Four decades later, the legacy of the student revolt continues to have its critics and defenders on both sides of the barricades. Most scholars agree that politically, the student revolt was a failure; however, the broad cultural transformation that flowed out of the revolt of 1968 changed attitudes about social tolerance, class, sexuality, the status of women, and the environment. This study shows that at the local level, the clear distinction between protesters and their alleged opponents in the older generation proved to be more myth than reality. By examin-ing the reaction to protest in provincial Turin, this study has shown that local and national issues had offered the initial casus belli for student protests and only later became fused with the oft-repeated transnational causes of student mobilization such as the war in Vietnam, the provoca-tive ideologies of the New Left, or rejection of the Cold War. In so doing, this work reemphasizes the importance of local and national concerns and offers a more nuanced reading of the global dimensions by placing them within a uniquely Italian context.32

On the other side of the barricades, the non-students in Italy wit-nessed the sudden explosion of the late 1960s through the lens of his-tory and memory. Their chief references were fascism, antifascism, and traditional notions of class. Thus, for members of the establishment, the Sessantotto was not wholly a foreign import, but a homegrown phenomenon that was loosely linked to global issues by the popular press and the student activists. Fortunately for Italy’s young republic, the conservative presses “left-wing fascists” of the late 1960s bore little resemblance to the actual Fascists of the 1920s and only a few Sessantottini turned to terrorism in the 1970s.33

The fortieth anniversary of the student revolt offers a chance for a more studied reflection upon the times that journalist Maria Valebrega remembered as “beautiful and terrible years.”34 Despite the establish-ment’s fears in the late 1960s, many of the activists entered careers in the very same fields they attacked in their youth. Some of the former Turin radicals became professors, and one former member of the stu-dent movement, Massimo D’Alema, became Italy’s Prime Minister in 1998.35 Though they might have scoffed at such bourgeois careers in their youth, the Sessantottini still carry with them many of the ideals of that magic year including a commitment to the European left, interna-tionalism, the environment, and policies that promote tolerance. As the old enmities between the activists and the establishment fade, the time has come to look across the piazza at those who the student rebels both reviled and emulated.


141

Notes

1 Introduction

1. I. Gilcher-Holtey makes the comparison of 1968 with 1789 implicit in her title, (1998) 1968—Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) which was inspired by F. Furet’s (1980) 1789—Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein).

2. A. Feenberg and J. Freedman (2001) When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (Albany: State University of New York Press), p. 150.

3. This work will designate the non-activists who interacted with the student movement in a variety of ways, the “establishment” rather than the typical “Establishment” that connotes those who were wholly opposed to the student New Left. The literature written on and by the activists is extensive. For exam-ple, L. S. Feuer (1969) The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (New York: Basic Books); G. Dietze (1970) Youth, University and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press); P. Knott (ed.) (1971) Student Activism (Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown); S. M. Lipset (1971) Rebellion in the University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); G. Statera (1975) Death of a Utopia: The Development and Decline of Student Movements in Europe (New York: Oxford University Press); M. Kolinsky and W. Patterson (eds)(1976) Social and Political Movements in Western Europe (London: Croom Helm); A. Touraine (1978) La voix et le regard: sociologie des mouvements sociaux (Paris: Nouvelle); P. Ortoleva (1988) Saggio sui movimenti del 1968 in Europa e in America: con un’ antologia di materiali e documenti (Rome: Editori Riuniti); W. Kraushaar (2000) 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition); I. Gilcher-Holtey (2001) Die 68er-Bewegung: Deutschland, Westeuropa, USA (Munich: Beck); A. Feenberg and J. Freedman (2001) When Poetry Ruled the Streets; and G. Horn (2007) The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

4. W. Mausbach (2002) “Historicising ‘1968’,” Contemporary European History, vol. XI, 182.

5. Historian of contemporary Italy, Nicola Tranfaglia has also remarked on the lack of interest that scholars of 1968 have shown toward the establishment, inparticular the deliberations of Italy’s politicians found in the Atti parlamentari. N. Tranfaglia interviewed in G. Santomassimo (ed.) (1989) “Il Sessantotto: una storia difficile,” Passato e Presente, vol. XIX, 19.

6. “… there is no doubt that the things most true about the Sessantotto were tied to oral communication. This renders the reconstruction of the Sessantotto only through written documents very difficult.” G. DeLuna interviewed in G. Santomassimo (ed.) (1989) “Il Sessantotto: una storia difficile,” Passato e Presente, vol. xix, 20.

7. For examples of the literature emphasizing the global aspects of 1968, see J. Califano (1970) The Student Revolution: A Global Confrontation (New York:

9780230_575684_09_not.indd 1419780230_575684_09_not.indd 141 9/22/2009 10:21:52 AM9/22/2009 10:21:52 AM

142 Notes

W. W. Norton); G. Katsiaficas (1987) The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press); D. Caute (1988) Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton); R. Fraser (1988) 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto and Windus); R. V. Daniels (1989) Year of the Heroic Guerilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968 (New York: Basic Books); C. Fink, P. Gassert, and D. Junker, (eds) (1998) 1968: The World Transformed (Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press); A. Marwick (1998) The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); J. Suri (2003) Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); and M. Kurlansky (2004) 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Random House).

8. M. Kurlansky (2004) 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, p. xvii. 9. On the role of the media in globally disseminating ideas and images of pro-

test, see the introduction of C. Fink, P. Gassert, and D. Junker (eds) (1998) 1968: The World Transformed, pp. 9–13.

10. M. Klimke and J. Scharloth (eds) (2008) 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 4.

11. A. Marwick (2004) “1968 and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties(c. 1958–1974),” in G. Horn and P. Kenney (eds) Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), p. 83.

12. E. J. Hobsbawm noted that by the end of the year 1968, over fifty-two books and articles had already appeared on the May events in Paris, see (1973) Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (New York: Meridian Books), p. 234.

13. For an excellent study of the ways that the media shaped the actions of pro-testers and the course of the US student movement see T. Gitlin (1980) The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press). For a comparative analysis of the students’ battles with the conservative press in West Germany and Italy see S. Hilwig (1998) “The Revolt Against the Establishment: Students Versus the Press in West Germany and Italy,” in C. Fink, P. Gassert, and D. Junker (eds) 1968: The World Transformed, pp. 321–49. K. Fahlenbrach takes an anthropological and sociological approach to examining the ways that the popular media changed the lifestyles and habits of protesters in the 1960s in (2002) Protest-Inszenierungen: visuelle Kommunikation und kollektive Identitaten in Protestbewegungen (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag). Media theorist M. Brasted uses frame theory to compare the ways that two different news-papers constructed the 1968 Democratic Convention protests in Chicago in (2005) “Framing Protest: The Chicago Tribune and the New York Times dur-ing the 1968 Democratic Convention,” Atlantic Journal of Communication, vol. XIII, 1–25.

14. “Sessantotto” the Italian word for sixty-eight has, like its French and German equivalents, come to mean the entire period of student activism stretching from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s with its apogee of student rebellion in the magic year, 1968.

15. P. Bourdieu (1988) On Television (trans. P. P. Ferguson) (New York: The New Press); E. S. Herman and N. Chomsky (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books); and M. McLuhan and Q. Fiore (1967) The Medium is the Massage (New York: Bantam Books).


Notes 143

16. R. Finnegan (2006) “Family Myths, Memories and Interviewing,” in R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds) The Oral History Reader, Second Edition (London: Routledge), p. 179.

17. H. Arendt (1969) On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World).18. In particular the priest Don Lorenzo Milani’s (1967) Lettera a una professoressa,

(Firenze: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina) detailed the sad state of education in a small rural town near Florence in a work that became standard reading for student activists. A. Marwick also notes the material disparities between the city and country in Italy in (1998) The Sixties.

19. G. Ricuperati (1991) “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla Contestazione Studentesca,” in A. Agosti, L. Passerini, and N. Tranfaglia (eds) La cultura e i luoghi del ’68 (eds) (Milan: Franco Angeli), p. 426.

20. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 340–44 and 351.

21. International War Crimes Tribunal, Bertrand Russell, and Jean Paul Sartre (1968) Das Vietnam-Tribunal (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt).

22. A. Touraine (1971) The May Movement: Revolt and Reform, May 1968—the Student Rebellion and Workers’ Strikes—the Birth of a Social Movement (trans.L. F. X. Mayhew) (New York: Random House), pp. 22–27.

23. R. Rossanda (1968) L’anno degli studenti (Bari: De Donato).24. R. Aron (1969) The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt (trans.

G. Clough) (New York: Praeger).25. In German, Linksfaschisten, see Jürgen Habermas (1969) “Kongress

‘Hochschule und Demokratie’,” in Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), pp. 137–49.

26. See, for example L. Labedz (1968) “Students and Revolutions,” Survey, vol. LXVIII, 3–28; E. Scheuch (1969) “The Liberation from Right Reason,” Encounter, vol. XXXII, 56–61; G. Dietze (1970) Youth, University and Democracy; W. Karl (1970) “Students and the Youth Movement in Germany: Attempt at a Structural Comparison,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. V, 113–27; S. M. Lipset (1971) Rebellion in the University; G. Statera (1975) Death of a Utopia; L. Feuer (1969) The Conflict of Generations; S. N. Eisenstadt (1971) “Generational Conflict and Intellectual Antinomianism,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. CCCXCV, 68–79.

27. For example sociologist C. Levitt continued to place much emphasis on generational conflict in his study of student movements in Canada, West Germany, and the United States in (1984) Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press).

28. See, for example R. Fraser (1988) 1968 and D. Caute (1988) Sixty-Eight.29. P. Piccone (1988) “Reinterpreting 1968: Mythology on the Make,” Telos,

vol. LXXVII, 7–43.30. I. Juchler’s (1996) Die Studentenbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten und der

Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechsziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot) explores the influence of the ideologies of Third World revolutionaries on student activists in the US and West Germany. W. Kraushaar (1998) (ed.) Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1945–1995 (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernard) documents the rela-tionship between student activists and the Frankfurt School.


144 Notes

31. M. Kimmel’s (1998) Studentenbewegungen der 60er Jahre. Frankreich, BRD, und USA im Vergleich (Vienna: WUV Universitätsverlag) uses social movement theories to balance an understanding of global and national causes of student unrest.

32. D. Della Porta (1995) Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 183–84.

33. See C. Fink, P. Gassert, and D. Junker (1998) 1968: The World Transformed and I. Gilcher-Holtey (1998) 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft.

34. See P. Ortoleva (1991) “Le Culture del ’68,” in A. Agosti, L. Passerini, and N. Tranfaglia (eds) La Cultura e i luoghi del ’68, pp. 38–61 and A. Marwick (1998) The Sixties.

35. A. Marwick’s (1998) The Sixties offers a few anecdotal examples of non-student reactions to the counterculture.

36. W. Kraushaar (2000) 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre, und Zäsur.37. Term from M. Kurlansky’s (2004) 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, the

author was an eyewitness to events of 1968. W. Mausbach has pointed to the continued influence of 68ers on the literature of the 1960s, in (2002) ‘Historicising 1968’ Contemporary European History, vol. XI, 177–78.

38. A. Feenberg and J. Freedman (2001) When Poetry Ruled the Streets; G. Koenen (2001) Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deustche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch); and M. Donnelly (2005) Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics (London: Pearson).

39. See, for example the chapters on “Terrorism,” “The Women’s Movement,” and “The Environmental Movement,” in M. Klimke and J. Scharloth (eds) (2008) 1968 in Europe.

40. G. Horn and P. Kenney (eds) (2004) Transnational Moments of Change: Europe, 1945, 1968, 1989 and M. Klimke (forthcoming) The “Other” Alliance: Global Protest and Student Unrest in West Germany and the US, 1962–1972 (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

41. S. Lipset (1971) Rebellion in the University, p. 495.42. S. G. Tarrow (1989) Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy,

1965–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 5–9.43. L. Falossi and F. Loreto (2007) Due bienni rossi del Novecento 19–20 e 68–69.

Studi e interpretazioni a confronto (Rome: Ediesse).44. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to

1978 (London: Verso). P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy. The sociologist G. Galli has argued that the demonstrations of the 1960s were merely a reaction to the stalemate among the general political structures in Italy in (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” (trans. P. E. Peacock), The Human Context, vol. II, 494–505.

45. J. Kurz and M. Tolomelli (2008) “Italy,” in M. Klimke and J. Scharloth, (eds) 1968 in Europe, pp. 83–84.

46. J. Kurz and M. Tolomelli, “Italy,” in M. Klimke and J. Scharloth (eds) 1968 in Europe, p. 92. Some examples of these autobiographies and memoirs are G. Viale (1978) Il Sessantotto: Tra rivoluzione e restaurazione (Milan: G. Mazzotta); M. Boato (1979) Il 68 è morto. Viva il 68!: prima del ’68, origini del movimento studentesco e della nuova sinistra: dopo il ’68, abbiamo sbagliato tutto…? (Verona: Bertani); M. Capanna (1988) Formidabili quegli anni (Milan:


Notes 145

Rizzoli); L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (trans. L. Erdberg) (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press), originally appeared as (1988) Autoritratto di Gruppo (Firenze: Giunti).

47. In English “La cultura e i luoghi del ’68” can be translated as “The culture and places of ’68.”

48. This Turin group includes media theorist Peppino Ortoleva, political scien-tist Marco Revelli, and historian Luisa Passerini.

49. L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968.50. L. Bobbio (1987) “Il movimento del 1968 nell’Università,” in L. Bobbio, F.

Ciafaloni, P. Ortoleva, R. Rossanda, and R. Solmi (eds) Cinque Lezioni sul ’68 (Torino: Dossier di RS), pp. 12–14.

51. Revelli mentions a feeling of “euphoria and power” experienced by the occupants of the Palazzo Campana during the first weeks of the occupation, in (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi: La Comunità Studentesca di Palazzo Campana,” in A. Agosti, L. Passerini, and N. Tranfaglia (eds) La cultura e i luoghi del ’68.

52. P. Ortoleva (1988) Saggio sui movimenti del 1968 in Europa e in America.53. For similar global explanations of the student revolts, see A. Schnapp and

P. Vidal-Naquet (1971) The French Student Uprising, November 1967–June 1968: An Analytical Record. (trans. M. Jolas) (Boston: Beacon Press); L. Feuer (1969) The Conflict of Generations; J. Califano (1970) The Student Revolution; D. Caute (1988) Sixty-eight; R. Fraser (1988) 1968; and C. Fink, P. Gassert, andD. Junker (eds) (1998) 1968 The World Transformed.

54. For a critical discussion of the “68ers” hold over the historiography and mar-ket of student protest literature, see P. Piccone (1988) “Reinterpreting 1968: Mythology on the Make,” 7–43.

55. M. Tolomelli compares student interactions with workers in West Germany with those in Italy, (2001) Repressiv getrennt oder organisch verbundet: Studenten und Arbeiter1968 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in Italien (Opladen: Leske & Budrich); D. Giachetti (2002) Anni Sessanta comincia la danza: giovani, capelloni, studenti ed estremisti negli anni della contestazione (Pisa: BFS); G. Horn analyzes student activists’ links with French and Italian workers in (2004) “The Working-Class Dimension of 1968,” in G. Horn and P. Kenney (eds) Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989, pp. 95–118.

56. L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studen-tesco torinese: dicembre 1967-maggio 1968 (Pistoia: Centro di documentazione Pistoia).

57. A recent collection of oral interviews offers a wide range of personal testi-mony by those who were involved with the student movement but were not leaders: F. Cerocchi and Circolo Gianni Bosio (eds) (2006) Un anno durato decenni: vite di persone comuni, prima, durante e dopo il ’68 (Rome: Odradek).

58. L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, p. 152.

2 The Italian Student Revolts, 1967–68

1. The Ministry of Public Instruction in Rome wanted to confer a degree in “political and social sciences with an emphasis in sociology,” see G. Horn (2007) The Spirit of ’68, pp. 74–77.


146 Notes

2. V. Spini (1972) “The New Left in Italy,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. VII, 52.

3. L. Lindlar, “1968 and the German Economy,” p. 13, Table 2. Unpublished paper presented at the German Historical Institute’s Conference “1968: The World transformed,” May 1996, Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin.

4. G. Mammarella (1964) Italy after Fascism: A Political History 1943–1963 (Montreal: Mario Casalini), pp. 344–52. As late as 1969, only 22 percent of Italy’s university students came from working-class homes; in G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 497. Also see P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

5. G. Galli quoted in F. P. Belloni (1971) “Dislocation in the Italian Political System: An Analysis of the 1968 Parliamentary Elections,” The Western Political Quarterly, vol. XXIV, 130.

6. For an explanation of the problems of the Italian left see A. De Grand (1989) The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century: A History of the Socialist and Communist Parties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) and T. Perlini (1971) “Left-Wing Culture in Italy since the Last War,” (trans. G. Nowell-Smith), 20th Century Studies, V, 6–17.

7. R. Boston (1969) “The Italian Chaos,” New Society, vol. CCCXLVII, 788. 8. D. Caute (1988) Sixty-Eight, p. 59. 9. The hesitancy of Italian politicians to enact university reforms is well

documented in G.Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 494–95. Minister Gui in Atti Parlamentari: Discussioni (Camera dei Deputati) vol. 40 (December 5, 1967), p. 41233. [Hereafter abbreviated as AP.]

10. The PSU was a short-lived union of the old Socialist Party (PSI) and the Social Democratic Party (PSDI).

11. G. Martinotti (1969) “The Positive Marginality: Notes on Italian Students in Periods of Political Mobilization,” in S. M. Lipset and P. Altbach (eds) Students in Revolt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), p. 186.

12. G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a Torino,” in A. Agosti, L. Passerini, and N. Tranfaglia (eds) La cultura e i luoghi del ’68 (Milan: Franco Angeli), pp.190–91.

13. Although the percentage of young people attending universities in Italy was comparable to the rest of Europe, only 44 percent ever received their degree. See R. Boston (1969) “The Italian Chaos,” 788 and G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 497–99.

14. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi: La Comunita’ Studentesca di Palazzo Campana,” p. 215.

15. See S. Hilwig (2001) “Are you calling me a fascist? A Contribution to the Oral History of the 1968 Italian Student Rebellion,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. XXXVI, 581–97.

16. F. P. Belloni (1971) “Dislocation in the Italian Political System,” 114–35. Also the doctrine of Catholic Action which appeared in works such as Don Lorenzo Milani (1967) Lettera a una professoressa stressed an active humanist Catholicism to solve the problems of poverty in rural Italy.

17. Catholic Church and W. J. Gibbons (1963) Pacem in Terris. Peace onEarth: Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Pope John XXIII (New York: Paulist Press).


Notes 147

18. L. Milani (1967) Lettera a una professoressa. Historian John Foot has noted that Milani’s work shows that the student revolt of the late 1960s was not entirely an urban phenomenon unconnected with rural Italy. Remarks at the University of Leeds Conference, “Memories of 1968: International Perspectives,” April 16–18, 2008.

19. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 82–84.20. G. Horn emphasizes the theories of Marcuse and Mills in the students’

manifestos see (2007) The Spirit of ’68, pp. 80–81. P. Ginsborg notes that along with Marcuse, Marx’s earlier works and Mao’s writings served to form the basis of the students’ critique, (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 306.

21. G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 496.22. For an excellent discussion of the role of Third World revolutionary ideology

in the formation of student ideology, see S. Dalmasso (2001) “Il quadro inter-nazionale” in S. Dalmasso (ed.) La stagione dei movimenti: [gli anni Sessanta e Settanta]: atti dei convegni, Cuneo, Palazzo della Provincia, 25 febbraio 2000, 23–24 febbraio 2001. (Cuneo: Istituto storico della Resistenza in Cuneo e provincial), 29–45.

23. R. Niccolai (2001) “Quando la Cina era vicina: l’influenza dle pensiero di Mao nella sinistra rivoluzionaria degli anni Sessanta e Settanta,” in S. Dalmasso (ed.) La stagione dei movimenti, 47–63.

24. G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 495–96. For the condition of southern immigrant workers in Turin see G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del’ 68 a Torino,” p. 198.

25. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” pp. 240–41. 26. Book sales statistic in R. Boston (1969) “The Italian Chaos,” 789. Herbert

Marcuse (1964) One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press). 27. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the Center-Left coalition and D. Caute

(1988) Sixty-Eight, p. 61.28. Leonard Weinberg (1995) The Transformation of Italian Communism (New

Bunswick and London: Transaction Publishers), pp. 34–35. 29. G. De Luna cites student leaders Guido Viale and Luigi Bobbio on the role

of Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” in (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a Torino,” p. 198. D. Caute notes the influence of the West Berlin SDS on the ideology of Italian activists in (1988) Sixty-Eight, p. 59.

30. S. Hellman, “The ‘New Left’ in Italy,” in M. Kolinsky and W. E. Paterson (eds) (1976) Social and Political Movements in Western Europe (London: Croom Helm), pp. 243–73. T. Perlini (1971) “Left-wing Culture in Italy Since the Last War,” 6–17.

31. V. Spini (1972) “The New Left in Italy,” 58. 32. For essays describing the conflict between the New and Old Left in Italy in

the 1960s and afterward, see G. Paolini and W. Vitali (eds) (1977) PCI, Classe Operaia e Movimento Studentesco (Florence: Guaraldi Editore).

33. For a very thorough account of the student movements throughout Italy in the 1960s, see J. Kurz (2001) Die Universität auf der Piazza. Entstehung und Zerfall der Studentenbewegung in Italien 1996–1968 (Cologne: SH-Verlag).

34. R. Boston (1969) “The Italian Chaos,” 789.35. Perhaps the students sought to ruffle Catholic consciences by calling their

list of demands “Theses,” similar to the work of Martin Luther. Sapienza was


148 Notes

an old name for the University of Pisa, see V. Spini (1972) “The New Left in Italy,” 60.

36. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” pp. 213, 250.37. G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 494.38. Ibid, 500.39. DeRossi, the daughter of a wealthy building contractor, admitted, “I

come from a bourgeois family, a wealthy family.” See L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation, pp. 24–25.

40. C. Levitt (1984) Children of Privilege, p. 4.41. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 224.42. S. M. Lipset (1969) “The Possible Effects of Student Activism on International

Politics,” in S. M. Lipset and P. Altbach (eds) Students in Revolt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), p. 512.

43. P. Vidal-Naquet, Esquisse d’une revolution, quoted in M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 241.

44. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 226.45. L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation, p. 69.46. Diego Marconi in L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation,

pp. 71–72.47. See M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” pp. 242–43. Luisa Passerini

argued that the scandal, laughter, and sarcasm of the rebels all helped to undermine authority, (1988) “Le mouvement de 1968 comme prise de parole et comme explosion de la subjectivité: le cas de Turin,” Le Mouvement social, vol. CXLIII, 50–55.

48. L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation, pp. 147–48.49. P. Ortoleva (1991) “Le culture del ’68,” in A. Agosti, L. Passerini, and

N. Tranfaglia (eds) La cultura e i luoghi del ’68, p. 46.50. Il Corriere della Sera, February 20, 1968, p. 1.51. La Stampa, May 24, 1968, p. 2.52. Il Corriere della Sera, February 20, 1968, p. 1.53. P. Ginsborg’s section, “Anni di Piombo (The Years of the Bullet)” (2003)

A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 379–87.54. L’Osservatore Romano, February 25, 1968, p. 4.55. J. Kurz and M. Tolomelli (2008) “Italy,” p. 89.56. For the Paris May and also the Chicago Democratic Convention civil

unrest, see I. Gilcher-Holtey (1998) “May 1968 in France: The Rise andFall of a New Social Movement,” and A. Brinkley (1998) “1968 and the Unraveling of Liberal America,” in C. Fink, P. Gassert, and D. Junker (eds) 1968: The World Transformed (Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press).

57. See G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 501; M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” pp. 240–41; and C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il Movimento Studentesco e le sue lotte (Milan: Feltrinelli), pp. 21–22.

58. See C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il Movimento Studentesco e le sue lotte, p. 28 and La Stampa, March 2, 1968, p. 1.

59. C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il Movimento Studentesco e le sue lotte, p. 28.60. D. Caute (1988) Sixty-eight, pp. 61–62. For an analysis of the West German

students’ conflict with Axel Springer’s press see S. Hilwig (1998) “The Revolt Against the Establishment: Students Versus the Press in West Germany and


Notes 149

Italy,” in C. Fink, P. Gassert, and D. Junker (eds) 1968: The World Transformed, pp. 321–49.

61. Il Corriere della Sera, April 28, 1968, p. 1.62. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino: Gli Esordi,” p. 246.63. C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il Movimento Studentesco, pp. 37–38.64. In the autumn of 1968, there was an increase in the number of protests among

high school students who demanded many of the same rights as their older siblings had done the previous spring. D. Caute (1988) Sixty-Eight, p. 350.

65. For a humorous and critical examination of the occupations of the 1990s that were led by a group called “La Pantera” or the “Panther,” see the film (1997) Tutti giù per terra.

66. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 308–09.67. A. Marwick (1998) The Sixties, p. 11.68. L. S. Feuer (1969) The Conflict of Generations.69. Psychoanalysts Morton Levitt and Ben Rubenstein have argued that the

student leaders came from generally wealthy backgrounds with permissive parents and that once in college they reverted back to an Oedipal phase and their attacks on “corporate liberals, etc.” is merely an attack on their fathers. See M. Levitt and B. Rubenstein (1971) “The Student Revolt: Totem and Taboo Revisited,” Psychiatry, vol. XXXIV, 156–67.

70. A. Marwick (1998) The Sixties, pp. 493–94.71. D. Giachetti (2001) “Capelloni, studenti, estremisti: i giovani degli anni

Sessanta,” in S. Dalmasso (ed.) La stagione dei movement, p. 65.72. La Stampa, November 29, 1967, p. 5.73. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 303.74. Paul Piccone argued that the counterculture of the 1960s distinguished

itself from past generational conflicts by its metamorphosis into a political movement. See P. Piccone (1988) “Reinterpreting ’68: Mythology on the Make,” 9.

75. P. Ortoleva (1991) “Le culture del ’68,” p. 52. 76. Guido Viale quoted in G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a

Torino,”, pp. 199–200.77. Fiorella Farinelli quoted in L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation,

p. 29. 78. J. La Palombara (1987) Democracy, Italian Style (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press).79. G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 495.80. Il Risveglio quoted in G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a

Torino”, pp. 201–202.81. L’Osservatore Romano, December 1, 1967, p. 5.82. P. Hebblethwaite (1995) “Pope Pius XII – Chaplain of the Atlantic Alliance?”

in C. Duggan and C. Wagstaff (eds) Italy and the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society, 1948–58 (Washington, DC: Berg), p. 68.

83. L’Osservatore Romano, February 2, 1968, p. 6.84. Although Pope John XXIII called for a political truce between Catholics

and Communists in the mid-1960s, the Church’s condemnation of spiritual atheism and immorality remained consistent. For the postwar Church’s views on Communist atheism and Western immorality see P. Hebblethwaite (1995) “Pope Pius XII,” pp. 67–69.


150 Notes

85. The Socialists had first proposed a referendum on divorce in 1965, in 1969 the PCI supported the referendum and in December 1970, divorce was made legal in Italy; see P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 328.

86. A. Marwick (1998) The Sixties, pp. 680–81.87. N. Z. Davis (1975) “Women on Top,” in N. Z. Davis (ed.) Society and Culture

in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press).88. D. Godineau (1993) “Daughters of Liberty and Revolutionary Citizens,” in

G. Duby and M. Perrot (eds) A History of Women, vol. 4, (trans.A. Goldhammer) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

89. La Stampa, April 25, 1968, p. 2.90. L. Passerini (1988) “Le mouvement de 1968 comme prise de parole et comme

explosion de la subjectivitè,” 59.91. K. Fahlenbrach (2002) Protest-Inszenierungen, pp. 32–37. 92. For a brief discussion of the Situationists’ role in the student movements,

see T. Hecken and A. Grzenia (2008) “Situationism,” in M. Klimke andJ. Scharloth (eds) 1968 in Europe, pp. 23–32.

93. Il Corriere della Sera, May 19, 1968, p. 15.94. See L. Passerini’s section, “The Gender Gap,” in (1996) Autobiography of a

Generation, pp. 95–100 and F. Haug (1986) “The Women’s Movement in West Germany,” New Left Review, vol. LV, 50–74.

95. Giorgina Levi interviewed by the author. Turin: April 14, 1997.96. See A. Marwick on youth movements as a cultural industry in (1998) The

Sixties, p. 18.97. Maria Valabrega interviewed by the author. Turin: June 6, 1997.

3 The Case of Turin I: Defending the Ivory Tower

1. For examples of the authoritarian and aloof bearing of the professors, seeR. Fraser (1988) 1968, pp. 57–59.

2. Nicola Tranfaglia interviewed by the author. Turin: June 20, 2002. 3. Guido Quazza (1970) Piani di Studio (Florence: La Nuova Italia), p. 9. 4. In her own work on civil unrest in Italy and Germany, Donatella Della Porta

has argued that official sources provide a kind of “thick description” of events that cannot be found in the discontinuous coverage of the media. SeeD. Della Porta (1995) Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State,p. 18.

5. Nicola Tranfaglia noted that Guido Quazza, professor of education; Norberto Bobbio, professor of law; Aldo Garoshi, Franco Venturi, and Passerin d’Entreves were all ex-partisans. Interview with the author. Turin: June 20, 2002.

6. Nicola Tranfaglia noted that the long silence among academics on the sub-ject of fascism was not really broken until 1975 and may have been due to a Freudian “elaboration of mourning.” Interview with the author. Turin: June 20, 2002.

7. Pasquali was a noted philologist and linguist. Quoted in Quazza (1970) Piani di Studio, n. 15, p. 62.

8. Quazza generally agreed with the student movement’s theory that the uni-versity system helped maintain the dominance of the elite, see (1970) Piani di Studio, pp. 10, 16.


Notes 151

9. Nicola Tranfaglia interviewed by the author. Turin: June 20, 2002.10. Anonymous author (1968) “Un rettore di stile franchista,” Resistenza:

Giustizia e Libertà, vol. XI, 1. 11. Other examples can be found in the actions of the Rectors of the Freie

Universität Berlin, Hans Joachim Lieber and Ewald Harndt as well as the Minister of Education Missoffe’s attempts to alleviate tensions at the University of Nanterre by building a new swimming pool shortly after the first protests at the suburban university in 1967. See J. Tent (1988) The Free University of Berlin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press) and G. Statera (1975) Death of a Utopia.

12. Guido Viale, one of the student leaders in Turin remembered, “Allara preferiva … scarabocchiare l’intera pagina del libretto” in A. Papuzzi,“E a Torino professori da zero in condotta,” La Stampa, April 29, 1998 in “Media ’68 Rassegna stampa” http://www.media68.net/ita/press/press47.htm (accessed August 12, 2008).

13. Guido Viale noted that Grosso was an “esperto lanciatore dei libretti univer-sitari degli studenti che bocciava,” ibid.

14. La Stampa, December, 3 1967, p. 9.15. Guido Viale, praised Bobbio noting that he, “impartiva impeccabili lezioni

di dizione,” in A. Papuzzi, “E a Torino professori da zero in condotta.”16. N. Bobbio and F. Pierandrei (1964) Introduzione alla Costituzione: testo di edu-

cazione civica per le scuole medie superiori (Bari: Laterza), for some of his essays see P. Calamandrei (1966) Scritti e discorsi politici. A cura di Norberto Bobbio (Florence: La Nuova Italia).

17. Norberto Bobbio interviewed by the author. Turin: April 23, 1997.18. G. Quazza (1968) “Nella protesta dei giovani lo spirito della resistenza,”

Resistenza: Giustizia e Libertà, vol. IX, 3.19. Verbali del Senato Accademico dal 13 Dicembre 1963 al 15 Dicembre 1969,

Università di Torino, pp. 250–51. [Hereafter abbreviated VSAUT ] Gribaudi’s words are filled with disease imagery similar to those of Mirella Mammano in chapter 3, see her letter to the Corriere della Sera, February 28, 1968, p. 5.

20. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, p. 87.21. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi”, pp. 219–20.22. Rector Allara quoted in VSAUT (February 10, 1967), p. 166.23. VSAUT (February 13, 1967), pp. 167–68.24. VSAUT (February 16, 1967), p. 172.25. VSAUT (February 23, 1967), pp. 175–76.26. Quazza (1970) Piani di Studio, p. 10.27. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” pp. 219–20.28. VSAUT (February 25, 1967), p. 178.29. For the Nanterre situation see R. Fraser (1988) 1968, pp. 146–50.30. VSAUT (November 27, 1967), p. 242.31. “… una minoranza di insoddisfatti, dato che la maggior parte degli studenti

ha partecipato numerosa alle lezioni che si sono svolte nel corso della mat-tinata.” Allara in VSAUT (November 27, 1967), p. 243.

32. Ibid., pp. 243–44.33. Ibid.34. Ibid.35. Ibid., p. 245.


152 Notes

36. Peppino Ortoleva interviewed by the author. Turin: April 18, 1997.37. VSAUT (November 30, 1967), p. 249.38. VSAUT (December 4, 1967), p. 252.39. VSAUT (December 23, 1967), pp. 257–58.40. Ibid., p. 257.41. Ibid., p. 259.42. Ibid.43. VSAUT (December 30, 1967), p. 260.44. Norberto Bobbio interviewed by the author. Turin: April 23, 1997.45. “Neppure contro i fascisti il rettore Calamandrei volle chiamare la polizia,”

Anonymous author (1968) Resistenza: Giustizia e Libertà, vol. III, 5.46. A. Feenberg and J. Freedman (2001) When Poetry Ruled the Streets, pp. 16–17.47. VSAUT (December 30, 1967), p. 261. At the time of his suspension from the

university, Vittorio Rieser was a young graduate assistant in the Department of Sociology who worked on the labor movement in northern Italy. Although he sympathized with the students of the Palazzo Campana, he also took an academic interest in the occupation. Rieser remembered the sense of com-munity in the Palazzo Campana and viewed the occupation as a “laboratory in which previously non-politicized students became politicized.” Contrary to the beliefs of the Senato, Rieser noted that many non-militant students did stop by the Palazzo Campana and voted to continue the occupation. Vittorio Rieser interviewed by the author. Turin: June 2, 1997.

48. Fondazione Vera Nocentini, personal papers of Luigi Bobbio, “Luigi Bobbio no. 106 (2), 1963–69.”

49. S. Woolf (1968) “Student Power in Italy,” New Society, vol. CCLXXXVIII, 487.50. C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il Movimento Studentesco e le sue lotte, pp.

23–24.51. Norberto Bobbio (1968) “Un dialogo difficile ma necessario,” Resistenza:

Giustizia e Libertà, vol. I, 7. 52. See Chapter II for a discussion of the public reaction to student attacks on

the crucifix. VSAUT (January 13, 1968), p. 267.53. Ibid.54. Ibid., p. 269.55. VSAUT (January 27, 1968), p. 274.56. VSAUT (February 19, 1968), p. 278.57. Ibid., p. 279.58. For more information on operaismo, see Chapter 2.59. VSAUT (February 19, 1968), pp. 279–80.60. VSAUT (February 21, 1968), p. 282.61. Athos Goidanich used this term in the Senato Accademico’s meeting of

November 27, 1967. See VSAUT (November 27, 1967), p. 243.62. VSAUT (February 27, 1968), p. 283.63. According to Rector Allara some students had broken into professors’ offices

looking for examination books, see VSAUT (February 27, 1968), p. 284. For the movement of the students into Turin’s streets see M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 248.

64. Guido Viale cited in G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a Torino,” p. 196.

65. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino: Gli Esordi,” pp. 244–45.


Notes 153

66. G. Martinotti (1969) “The Positive Marginality: Notes on Italian Students in Periods of Political Mobilization,” pp. 196–97.

67. Guido Viale cited in M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino: Gli Esordi,” p. 233.68. G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a Torino,” p. 199.69. VSAUT (February 29, 1968), p. 285.70. For a brief description of the “Battle of the Valle Giulia,” see A. Marwick (2004)

“1968 and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties (c.1958 – 1974),” inG. Horn and P. Kenney (eds) Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989, pp. 84–85.

71. Verbali del Consiglio della Facultà di Magistero dell’ Università di Torino (March 4, 1968), pp. 165–66.

72. G. Quazza (1970) Piani di Studio, p. 11.73. VSAUT (March 12, 1968), p. 293.74. C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il Movimento Studentesco e le sue lotte,

pp. 32–33.75. Professor Dellepiane, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in VSAUT (April 2,

1968), p. 299.76. VSAUT (April 2, 1968), pp. 299–301.77. VSAUT (April 8, 1968), pp. 310–11.78. Norberto Bobbio interviewed by the author. Turin: April 23, 1997.79. VSAUT (April 8, 1968), p. 309.80. VSAUT (April 19, 1968), p. 315.81. Ibid., pp. 317–18. The bold reforms planned by the Senato had, in part, been

encouraged by the Minister of Public Instruction in Rome, Luigi Gui, who authorized all university rectors in Italy to make autonomous reforms until the federal government passed a comprehensive national reform plan. See VSAUT (April 10, 1968), p. 313.

82. VSAUT (April 23, 1968), p. 319.83. Ibid., p. 320.84. La Stampa, April 24, 1968, pp. 1–2.85. VSAUT (3 May 1968), p. 323.86. Ibid., p. 326.87. For a detailed case study of one of the inter-disciplinary experimental

courses entitled “Il problema del potere nel Novecento,” see G. Quazza (1970) Piani di Studio, pp. 20–59.

88. VSAUT (May 13, 1968), pp. 328–29.89. VSAUT (May 17, 1968), p. 340. 90. Proposals 1–5 abolished attendance requirements, allowed students to

interpolate professors, and set aside up to 6 days a year for discussion of university problems; Proposals 6–7 offered more seminars in place of lec-tures; Proposals 8–12 regulated exam procedures, allowed for group exams (however each student would receive an individual grade), and allowed students to retake exams; Proposals 13–18 abolished the sottotesi (under-graduate thesis), stipulated that synthetic, non-primary source essays could submitted for the tesi di laurea, and set aside space within the uni-versity for student meetings; Proposals 19–21 established evening courses for working students and proposed the construction of satellite locations throughout Piedmont for students living outside of Turin; Proposal 22promised students that a joint commission of students and faculty would


154 Notes

be formed to “examine due contributions from the students”—a retreat from full parity requested by the radical students. VSAUT (May 27, 1968), pp. 346–49.

91. Known in Italian as the “Biennio Rosso,” for more information see Chapter 1. 92. VSAUT ( June 6, 1968), p. 350. 93. N. Bobbio (1968) “Arduo il dialogo con gli studenti,” Resistenza: Giustizia e

Libertà, vol. I, 5. 94. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 225. 95. Andrea Liberatori interviewed by the author. Turin: May 28, 1997. 96. VSAUT (November 27, 1967), p. 245. 97. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 246. 98. V. Spini (1972) “The New Left in Italy,” 60. 99. The University of Turin student movement’s Carta rivendicativa, section 9.

a and 9. b, cited in Il Nostro Tempo, anno XXIII (February 4, 1968), 6.100. Quote from the Turin student movement’s Giornalino (February 16, 1968)

cited in G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a Torino,” p. 191.

101. Translation by the author. L. Bobbio (1987) “Il movimento del 1968 nell’Università,” p. 18.

102. See Todd Gitlin’s chapter, “Certifying Leaders and Converting Leadership to Celebrity,” in (1980) The Whole World is Watching, pp. 146–79. For Mario Capanna’s memoirs see his (1988) Formidabili Quegli Anni.

103. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 303–04.104. Luigi Bobbio in R. Fraser (1988) 1968, p. 222.

4 The Case of Turin II: A City Reacts from Precinct to Parish

1. See R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 64–66; P. Ginsborg (2003)A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 303.

2. For an excellent collection of Turin workers’ views toward fascism, seeL. Passerini (1984) Torino operaia e Fascismo (Bari: Gius Laterza e Figli).

3. Giovanni Alasia, former head of the Turin Chamber of Labor, interviewed by the author. Turin: April 24, 1997.

4. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 250–53. 5. Marco Revelli’s father, Benevenuto, noted that his son’s protest organiza-

tion Lotta Continua had originally been called Nuova Resistenza. Benevenuto and Anna Revelli interviewed by the author. Cuneo: April 11, 1997.

6. Guido Viale, one of the leading activists in Italy, noted several incidents of police violence in 1968. See G. Viale (1978) Il Sessantotto: Tra rivoluzione e restaurazione, pp. 39, 44.

7. General DeLorenzo had been head of the Italian counter-espionage service agency (SIFAR) and had attempted to overthrow the government with the help of the Army and the carabinieri in 1964. The carabinieri did not par-ticipate and remained in their barracks. See M. Clark (1996) Modern Italy 1871–1995, Second Edition (London: Longman), pp. 51–54 and 341–43.

8. See P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 251–53. 9. Prefettura di Torino Gabinetto: Mazzo Categoria 9B/1 Busta no. 52: Personale

Questura 1966–68. [Hereafter abbreviated as PT: PQ no. 52]


10. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, p. 209.11. Angelo Gentile was born near Reggio Calabria in 1925 and eventually

became a telecommunications specialist in the Polizia di Stato in Turin. Interview by the author. Turin: June 11, 1997.

12. Angelo Gentile interviewed by the author. Turin: June 11, 1997. “Le mani-festazioni degli studenti hanno provocato una nostalgia del Fascismo e del passato politico perchè I cittadini si sentivano abbandonati dallo stato che non li difendiva dai facinorosi che bloccavano tutte le attività del centro delle città. Erano I padroni assoluti e nessuno poteva reagire per il pericolo di soccombere di fronte a quegli scalmanati che singolarmente erano conigli ma nella massa diventavano leoni capaci di distruggere e colpire ogni cosa.” Translation by the author.

13. Ibid.14. S. Medici (1979) Vite di poliziotti (Torino: Einaudi), pp. 96–97.15. In a conversation with Senore Patero at the Associazione 5 Corpi di Polizia,

Patero used the phrase “figli di papà” consistently in reference to the activ-ists. Interview by the author. Turin: June 3, 1997.

16. The Piazza Statuto demonstrations in Turin had been directed against the owners and managers at FIAT and prefigured the violent unrest of the Autunno Caldo strikes of 1969.

17. Benevenuto Revelli interviewed by the author. Cuneo: April 11, 1997.18. Vittorio Rieser interviewed by the author. Turin: June 2, 1997. 19. Ibid.20. Armando Altomare interviewed by the author. Turin: July 3, 1997. 21. Ibid.22. For the professors’ reactions to the student occupations, see Chapter 3.23. Prefettura di Torino: Gabinetto Mazzo Busta no. 184: Notiziario Sindacale,

January 17, 1968. [Hereafter abbreviated as PT: NS no. 184].24. PT: NS no. 184, March 1, 1968. 25. PT: NS no. 184, January 9–April 19, 1968. Levi, who had been a secondary

school instructor in Turin, entered Parliament in 1963 and became the Secretary for Public Instruction of the Communist Party. She had supported the activists from the very beginning and felt that the majority of the profes-soriate, both conservative and leftist, did not understand the students.

26. PT: NS no. 184, March 8, 1968, see pp. 42–43 for a discussion of the press coverage of the demonstration.

27. See PT: NS no. 184, February 18, 1968.28. Niccola Seminarra interviewed by the author. Turin: June 9, 1997.29. A report from March 6, 1968 noted that two officers received injuries

and one had to be hospitalized after a demonstration at the Politechnico. Another demonstration at La Stampa’s editorial offices led to the injury of several police officers. PT: NS no. 184, March 6 and 8, 1968.

30. PT: NS no. 184, February 1 and 2 and March 9, 1968; and PT: PQ no. 52, March 6, 1968.

31. Benevenuto Revelli, father of an activist recalled seeing a disheveled and bloodied student in the Turin train station after a police evacuation of the Palazzo Campana, interview with the author. Cuneo: April 11, 1997. For another example of former activists who recalled police violence see Laura DeRossi in L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation, p. 79.

Notes 155


156 Notes

32. G. Viale (1978) Il Sessantotto: Tra rivoluzione e restaurazione, pp. 43–44.33. The PSU was a union of the Social Democrats (PSDI) and the Socialists

(PSI) formed in 1966, however, it fared poorly in the elections of 1968 and split back into its component parties. See P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 280 and 326.

34. PT: NS no. 184, April 28, 1968.35. PT: PQ no. 52, May 30, 1968.36. PT: PQ no. 52, June 21, 1968.37. PT: PQ no. 52, February 26, 1968.38. PT: PQ no. 52, May 13, 1968.39. Bianca Guidetti-Serra became a communist while working as a social worker

in Turin during the war and joined the women’s arm of the Resistance, Gruppi nella Defensa di Donna. She received her law degree three weeks before the fall of fascism in 1943 and made her legal career defending workers at FIAT against unfair labor practices and fighting for the removal of old Fascist laws. Bianca Guidetti-Serra interviewed by the author. Turin: June 10, 1997.

40. Bianca Guidetti-Serra interviewed by the author. Turin: June 10, 1997.41. Riccardo DiDontao, the national vice-president of Intesa was charged in the

Florence Court of Appeals with “occupation of public buildings” under arti-cle 633 of the Penal Code which carried a penalty of 15 days to two years in prison, and “interruption and disturbance of a public office” under article 340 of the Penal Code, which carried a penalty of 1–5 years in prison. Almost all the charges were eventually dropped. See L’Unità, January 24, 1968, p. 4.

42. D. Della Porta (1998) “Police Knowledge and Protest Policing: Some Reflections on the Italian Case,” in D. Della Porta and H. Reiter (eds) Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota), p. 247.

43. Marica Tolomelli (2001) Repressiv getrennt oder organisch verbündet: Studenten und Arbeiter 1968 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Italien (Opladen: Leske & Budrich), p. 163.

44. G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 503.45. Andrea Liberatori interviewed by the author. Turin: May 28, 1997.46. Recollection of Giorgina Levi, PCI Deputy for Turin in 1968. Interview by the

author. Turin: April 14, 1997.47. See V. Spini (1972) “The New Left in Italy,” 66.48. Bruno Manghi (1991) “Il ’68, gli studenti e il movimento operaio,” in

A. Agosti, L. Passerini and N. Tranfaglia (eds) La cultura e i luoghi del’68 (Milan: Franco Angeli), pp. 360–62.

49. For examples see R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 209–14.50. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 309.51. Marica Tolomelli (2001) Repressiv getrennt oder organisch verbündet,

pp. 156–63.52. G. Horn notes that in 1967, 2.24 million Italian workers went on strike;

in 1968, 4.50 million workers went on strike; and in 1969 during the peak of the “Hot Autumn,” 5.5 million workers went on strike. See his chapter, (2004) “The Working Class Dimension of 1968,” in G. Horn and P. Kenney (eds) Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989, pp. 99–100.


Notes 157

53. G. Horn (2007) The Spirit of ’68, pp. 114–15.54. In “Documento 9” of Liliana Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione

operaia del Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968 (Pistoia: Centro di Documentazione di Pistoia), pp. 36–40. The Lega Studenti e Operai listed four reasons why the Turin students objected to a major connection with the workers: (i) the movement was too “immature” for this type of work, (ii) the movement can really only be an “auxillary” to the traditional union organizations, (iii) the movement is not politically homogeneous and is unable to carry a homogeneous position vis-a-vis labor and would create confusion within the factories, (iv) the attempts to ally with the workers has taken away space from the work in the universities.

55. Ibid.56. L’Unità, February 26, 1968, p. 2.57. “In particolare la classe operaio pùo e deve intervenire nella lotta perchè tutti

possano studiare.” Translation by the author, L’Unità, February 28, 1968, p. 2.58. L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studen-

tesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, p. 10.59. G. Galli (1970) “The Student Movement in Italy,” 503.60. Andrea Liberatori interviewed by the author. Turin: May 28, 1977.61. Giorgina Levi interviewed by the author. Turin: April 14, 1997. Also see

P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 307.62. Giovanni Alasia interviewed by the author. Turin: April 24, 1997.63. L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studen-

tesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, pp. 5–6.64. Ibid., pp. 7–8.65. Peppino Ortoleva interviewed by the author. Turin: April 18, 1997.66. Vittorio Rieser, a former graduate student in sociology in 1968 and currently

an official of the CGIL in Turin, noted that despite vast class differences between the students and the workers, both shared a powerful rejection of authority in the late 1960s. Interview by the author. Turin: June 2, 1997. Giampiero Carpo, a skilled worker at FIAT and militant labor activist also noted that the student movement’s critique of authoritarianism helped spur on the workers’ strikes in 1969. See the testimony of Giampiero Carpo in:G. Polo (1989) I Tamburi di Mirafiori: Testimonianze Operaie attorno all’ Autunno Caldo alla FIAT (Turin: Cric Editore), p. 116.

67. L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studen-tesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, pp. 12, 17.

68. G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a Torino,” pp. 192–93.69. B. Manghi (1991) “Il ’68, gli studenti e il movimento operaio,” p. 363.70. Parlanti cited in G. Polo (1989) I Tamburi di Mirafiori, p. 64.71. G. Polo (1989) I Tamburi di Mirafiori, pp. 109–113.72. M. Tolomelli (2001) Repressiv getrennt oder organisch verbündet, pp. 203–04.73. Ibid., 205. 74. L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studen-

tesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, p. 8.75. Ibid, p. 11.76. Documento 13 in L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del

Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, p. 62.


158 Notes

77. Antonioni had migrated to Turin from the poor farm regions near Piacenza and had not been raised in the culture of the urban working class. Cited in G. Polo (1989) I Tamburi di Mirafiori, p. 82.

78. L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studen-tesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, pp. 13–14.

79. Former FIAT worker, Luciano Parlanti, interviewed by the author. Turin:May 5, 1997.

80. Documento 1 in L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, pp. 21–22.

81. Documento 6 in L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, p. 26.

82. “Il mondo di unversitari era un mondo veramente diverso che il mondo del lavoro.” Luciano Parlanti interviewed by the author. Turin: May 5, 1997.

83. Documento 13 in L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, pp. 58–59.

84. “… gli operai della FIAT non sono dei bambini—anche se molti li trattano così.” Documento 12 in L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, p. 50.

85. “Se dieci studenti portano avanti questa cosa, avranno l’appoggio degli operai. Ma cento studenti che ci vogliono guidare non l’avranno mai.” Documento 12 in L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, p. 56.

86. Giovanni Alasia interviewed by the author. Turin: April 24, 1997.87. Documento 12, “Riunione Studneti e Operai, 12 maggio 1968,” in L. Lanzardo

(1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967-maggio 1968, p. 56.

88. Cited in G. Polo (1989) I Tamburi di Mirafiori, p. 80. Lumley also noted the southern workers efforts to create their own organizations and forms of protest outside the usual union channels at the Pirelli factory, see R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 183–91.

89. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, p. 83. 90. Giovanni Alasia interviewed by the author. Turin: April 24, 1997. Also see

P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 309–10.91. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, p. 211.92. B. Manghi (1991) “Il ’68, gli studenti e il movimento operaio,” p. 365.93. Former member of Lotta Continua and sociology assistant at the University

of Turin, Vittorio Rieser, also believed that many of the workers organized in 1968 by the radical student groups later were elected as shop-floor repre-sentatives to the labor unions and demanded greater changes for the workers. Interview by the author. Turin: June 2, 1997.

94. “… era il sessantotto … perchè poi c’era stato il pasticcio con gli studenti.” Luigi Addari interviewed by Enrica Capussoti as part of an oral history project focusing on the workers in Turin. Turin: December 18, 1995.

95. “1968—ahh un anno buono anche quello … hanno spaccato tutto gli stu-denti allora.” Francesco Gattino interviewed by Enrica Capussoti. Turin: December 18, 1995.

96. Luciano Parlanti interviewed by the author. Turin: May, 5 1997.97. G. Horn (2007) The Spirit of ’68, pp. 112–13.


Notes 159

98. M. Tolomelli (2001) Repressiv getrennt oder organisch verbündet, pp. 316–17. 99. Peppino Ortoleva interviewed by the author. Turin: April 18, 1997.100. M. Tolomelli (2001) Repressiv getrennt oder organisch verbündet, pp. 252–53.101. For example see G. Horn (2007) The Spirit of ’68, p. 113.102. The workers of Turin struck and remained within their workplaces begin-

ning in March 1943 and later after Mussolini’s arrest in July. See P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 10–17.

103. Vittorio Rieser interviewed by the author. Turin: June 2, 1997.104. Giovanni Alasia interviewed by the author. Turin: April 24, 1997.105. Daniela Torresini interviewed by the author. Perugia: March 17, 1997.106. M. Capanna (1998) Formidabili quegli anni, p. 27.107. “L’ubbidienzza non è più una virtù” cited in I. Lana (1968) “Senza Vangelo

il futuro degli studenti in rivolta?,” from the Catholic weekly, Il Nostro Tempo May 19, 1968, p. 2.

108. “Il Cattocomunismo,” http://web.genie.it/utenti/i/interface/CattoCom.html (accessed May 10, 2008).

109. Don Giuseppe Tuninetti interviewed by the author. Turin: May 5, 1997.110. “L’avvenire è già presente nei giovani: in essi si può leggere come in un microcosmo,

i segni dei tempi. …Nella società contemporanea, i giovani esercitano una forza (vim exercent) di grande importanza. Le circostanze della loro vita e la mentalità e gli stessi rapporti con la propria famiglia sono grandemente mutati. …I giovani hanno preso coscienza del proprio potere, accelerando non poche trasformazioni ed esigono una loro participazione, non quali soggetti passivi di una pedagogia ben intenzionata, ma quali artefici della propria promozione culturale, sociale, e politica.” Paul VI cited in V. Morero (1968) “L’avvenire è già presente nei giovani ma evitiamo il mito del giovanilismo,” Il Nostro Tempo, April 14, 1968, p. 7.

111. “La gioventù possiede un potenziale di grandissimo valore che gli adulti devono riconoscere e utilizare; ma i giovani dall’altra, non possono prescindere dalla sto-ria e dalla necessità di acquisire una preparazione che, senza rifiutare il consiglio dei padri e dei maestri, eviti loro di ripetere gli errori che essi stessi criticano.” Paul VI, Ibid.

112. Don Giuseppe Tuninetti interviewed by the author. Turin: May 5, 1997.113. See Chapter 2, “Traditional Values under Attack—The Emerging

Counter culture.” 114. See D. Della Porta (1995) Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State,

p. 60.

5 The National Dimension I: Constructing an Imageof Protest

1. K. Fahlenbrach (2002) Protest-Inszenierungen, p. 176. 2. In particular, the stunning photographs of the French ‘68 by Bruno Barbey,

an independent photographer for Magnum, have subsequently been reprinted in many of the books on the student movement. http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.ExhibitionDetail_VPage&pid=2TYRYDKUU22I (accessed February 11, 2008).

3. K. Fahlenbrach (2002) Protest-Inszenierungen, pp. 237–43.


160 Notes

4. T. Gitlin (1980) The Whole World is Watching. 5. M. Brasted (2005) “Framing Protest: The Chicago Tribune and the New York

Times during the 1968 Democratic Convention,” 5. 6. T. Gitlin (1980) The Whole World is Watching, pp. 27–28. 7. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 291. 8. According to Paul Ginsborg, 49 percent of Italian families owned television

sets in 1965 and this number rose to 82 percent by 1971. See P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, Statistical Appendix, Table 9, p. 432.

9. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 240–41.10. See the Preface and Chapter 1 of E. S. Herman and N. Chomsky (1988)

Manufacturing Consent, pp. xi–35.11. “The Press: Opinions are sacred,” in (1967) “Italy Catches Up: A Survey by the

Economist,” The Economist, vol. CCXXII, (March 18, 1967), after p. 1044, xxix.12. See G. Mazzoleni’s chapter on the Italian mass media in B. S. Ostergaard (ed.)

(1992) The Media in Western Europe (London: Sage), pp. 123–42. For more on the Springer Press’ conflict with the West German students see S. Hilwig (1998) “The Revolt Against the Establishment: Students Versus the Press in West Germany and Italy,” pp. 321–49.

13. M. Grandinetti (1996) Un giornale, un’azienda La Stampa dal 1945 ad oggi (Turin: Gutenberg 2000), p. 210.

14. G. Mazzoleni’s chapter in B. S. Ostergaard (ed.) (1992) The Media in Western Europe, p. 128.

15. For an exhaustive administrative history of the Corriere della Sera, seeG. Licata (1976) Storia del Corriere della Sera (Milan: Rizzoli Editore).

16. E. Bettiza (1999) Via Solferino: La vita del Corriere della Sera dal 1964 al 1974 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori), p. 102.

17. G. Spadolini “Offesa,” in Il Corriere della Sera, (March 22, 1972) cited inE. Marcucci (1998) Giornalisti Grandi Firme (Roma: RAI-ERI), pp. 456–57.

18. E. Marcucci (1998) Giornalisti Grandi Firme, pp. 453–55.19. E. Bettiza (1999) Via Solferino, p. 97.20. For an excellent biography of De Benedetti see A. Papuzzi and A. Magone

(2008) GiDiBì: Giulio De Benedetti: il potere e il fascino del giornalismo. Saggi (Roma: Donzelli).

21. Statistical data from the periodical (1968) Resistenza: Giustizia e Libertà,vol. X, 3. ENI stands for National Agency for Hydrocarbons, a public corpo-ration that ran the oil refining industry and later expanded its interests to become one of Italy’s largest companies.

22. Ibid.23. Peppino Ortoleva interviewed by the author. Turin: April 18, 1997.24. Maria Valabrega interviewed by the author. Turin: June 6, 1997.25. Valabrega characterized the protest years as “wonderful,” “full of strong ide-

als” that were all lived in “good faith” and that only a small number had taken dangerous paths like the Red Brigades. Interview with the author. Turin: June 6, 1997.

26. On the Springer Press’ editorial policies against students and the German Left see H. D. Müller (1969) Press Power (trans. J. A. Cole) (London: Macdonald), pp. 182–83.

27. P. Bourdieu (1998) On Television, p. 7.28. Peppino Ortoleva interviewed by the author. Turin: April 18, 1997.


Notes 161

29. L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation, p. 141.30. A partial collection of copies of l’Anti-Stampa can be found in the papers

of Marcello Vitale (Fondo Marcello Vitale) housed in the Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Turin.

31. Quoted in M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 213.32. S. Woolf (1968) “Student Power in Italy,” 487.33. Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale sui movimenti politici e sociali

degli anni Sessanta e Settanta: “Commentiamo l’articolo comparso su ‘La Stampa’ del 3 dicembre 1967 dal titolo ‘Negli atenei va difesa la libertà del docente,’ firmato da Giuseppe Grosso.” A cura del Comitato d’ Agitazione. Box W2, Folder I.

34. Il Corriere della Sera, March 12, 1968, p. 8.35. L’Osservatore Romano is the Vatican’s daily newspaper. Article cited in June

3–4 edition, 1968, p. 4. 36. K. Fahlenbrach (2002) Protest-Inszenierungen, p. 177.37. La Stampa, March 2, 1968, p. 138. Il Corriere della Sera, March 2, 1968, p. 1.39. Translation by the author. Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale:

Box N1, Folder II, l’Anti-Stampa (March 2, 1968).40. Il Corriere della Sera, March 26, 1968, p. 8.41. Il Corriere della Sera, April 18, 1968, p. 9.42. For a description of the Piazza Statuto demonstrations, see P. Ginsborg

(2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 251–53.43. For examples see A. Portelli (1997) The Battle of the Valle Giulia: Oral History

and the Art of Dialogue (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 192–98.

44. Photo and article in La Stampa, March 8, 1968, p. 2.45. Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale: Box I4, Folder II, l’Anti-

Stampa (March 8, 1968).46. C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il Movimento Studentesco e le sue lotte, p. 28.47. D. Caute (1988) Sixty-eight, pp. 61–62.48. The word “hooligan” comes from the violent career of Irishman Patrick

Hooligan, a street thug who terrorized residents of Southwark, London, in the late nineteenth century.

49. See S. M. Lipset’s essay on the parabolas of protest in modern Italian history in S.M. Lipset and P. Altbach (eds) (1969) Students in Revolt, pp. 495–521.

50. Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale: Box I4, Folder II, l’Anti-Stampa (February 8, 1968).

51. For a discussion of Jürgen Habermas and the controversy surrounding his remarks at the Kongress Hochschule und Demokratie (1967) see H. Marcuse (1998) “The Revival of Holocaust Awareness in West Germany, Israel, and the United States,” in C. Fink, P. Gassert, and D. Junker (eds) 1968: The World Transformed, p. 429 and Note 38.

52. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, p. 73.53. R. DeFelice (1977) Interpretations of Fascism (trans. B. H. Everett) (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 14–54.54. S. H. Barnes (1972) “The Legacy of Fascism: Generational Differences in

Italian Political Attitudes and Behavior,” Comparative Political Studies, vol. V, 41–57.


162 Notes

55. On the remnants of Mussolini’s fascism in the postwar era see G. De Luna and M. Revelli (1995) Fascismo/Antifascismo: Le idée, le identità (Florence:La Nuova Italia); C. Duggan and C. Wagstaff (eds) (1995) Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society, 1948–1958 (Washingston, DC: Berg), pp. 3–6;S. M. Di Scala, who noted that the PCI even allowed former fascists to join their party after the war, (1999) “Resistance Mythology,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. IV, 67–72; J. E. Miller (1999) “Who Chopped Down that Cherry Tree? The Italian Resistance in History and Politics, 1945–1988,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. IV, 37–54; and P. Ginsborg, who noted that nostal-gia for the Fascist regime remained strong in the south and had contributed to the electoral success of the Fronte dell’ Uomo Qualunque (Common Man’s Front) in (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 98–100.

56. See M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi.”57. G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a Torino,” p. 194.58. La Stampa, “Specchio dei tempi,” December 5, 1967, p. 2.59. Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale sui movimenti politici e sociali

degli anni Sessanta e Settanta: “Commentiamo l’articolo comparso su ‘La Stampa’ del 3 dicembre 1967 dal titolo ‘Negli atenei va difesa la libertà del docente,’ firmato da Giuseppe Grosso.” A cura del Comitato d’ Agitazione. Box W2, Folder I.

60. Nicola Tranfaglia interviewed by the author. Turin: June 22, 2002. For a full description of Freud’s concept of the “elaboration of mourning” in relation to memories of war, see F. Fornari (1975) The Psychoanalysis of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 51.

61. Avanti! November 30, 1967, p. 8.62. La Stampa, “Specchio dei tempi,” December 3, 1967, pp. 1 and 2.63. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 216.64. La Stampa, “Specchio dei tempi,” February 21, 1968, p. 2.65. Ibid.66. La Stampa, March 3, 1968, p. 2.67. The cornuto gesture signifies to the targeted audience that they are a cuckold.68. “Mamma, Manganello, Malafede,” in Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo

Marcello Vitale, l’Anti-Stampa (February 12, 1968), Box I4, Folder II.69. La Stampa, “Specchio dei tempi,” March 14, 1968, p. 2.70. Police and legal records in Turin have indicated that very few of the univer-

sity activists resorted to the levels of violence as suggested by this analogy, see Chapter 4 on the police.

71. Il Corriere della Sera, May 18, 1968, p. 8.72. See Il Corriere della Sera, March 2, 1968, p. 1; La Stampa, March 2, 1968, p. 1;

and L’Osservatore Romano, March 3, 1968, p. 8.73. La Stampa, March 2, 1968, p. 1 and L’Osservatore Romano, March 3, 1968,

p. 8.74. Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale, l’Anti-Stampa (March 2,

1968), Box N1, Folder II.75. G. Mazzoleni’s chapter on the Italian mass media in B.S. Ostergaard (ed.)

(1992) The Media in Western Europe, pp. 124–30.76. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 39–40.77. See Chapter 4, “The Case of Turin II: A City Reacts from Precinct to Parish.”78. M. Kurlansky (2004) 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, p. 355.


Notes 163

79. B. G. Myerhoff (1971) “The Revolution as a Trip: Symbol and Paradox,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. CCCXCV, 114–16.

80. See “Laughter and Games,” in L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation, pp. 76–80.

81. For a scathing criticism of the student Left see R. Aron (1969) The Elusive Revolution.

82. Corriere della Sera, May 15, 1968, p. 5. 83. Corriere della Sera, May 16, 1968, p. 5. 84. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem, “The PCI to the Young!!” continues for over 180

more lines, quoted in Ben Lawton and L. K. Barnett (trans.) (2005) Heretical Empiricism (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing), p. 150. Originally appeared in L’Espresso, April 16, 1968, Nuovi Argomenti X (April–June 1968), and Il Corriere della Sera, June 12, 1968, p. 3.

85. Corriere della Sera, June 28, 1968, p. 3. 86. R. Aron (1969) The Elusive Revolution. 87. K. Fahlenbrach (2002) Protest-Inszenierungen, p. 177. 88. B. G. Myerhoff (1971) “The Revolution as a Trip: Symbol and Paradox,”

108–111. 89. For a description of the sciopero bianco from the perspective of a professor,

see Chapter 3. 90. M. Revelli (1991) “Il ’68 a Torino. Gli Esordi,” p. 220. 91. L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation, pp. 76–77. 92. For a short description of the influence of the Provos, see N. Pas (2008)

“Subcultural Movements: The Provos,” in M. Klimke and J. Scharloth (eds) 1968 in Europe, pp. 13–21.

93. La Stampa, May 10, 1968, p. 2. 94. La Stampa, July 9, 1968, p. 3. 95. La Stampa, February 1, 1968, p. 5. 96. La Stampa, March 26, 1968, p. 2. 97. Laura DeRossi interviewed in L. Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a

Generation, pp. 24–25. Laura DeRossi later wrote a critical commentary on Passerini’s book in a periodical called Indice in which she claimed Passerini had taken much of the interview out of context. DeRossi claimed that although she came from a wealthy family, her father was not a repressive, conservative “padrone” as may have been implied in Passerini’s work.

98. Corriere della Sera, April 10, 1968, p. 5; the word “signori” in Italian denotes more than simply gentleman, in this case, it also implies in a sarcastic man-ner that the students are part of the city’s elite.

99. Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale, l’Anti-Stampa (January 26, 1968), Box I4, Folder II.

100. In Italian, “tifosi” refers to crazed soccer fans. The word comes from the Italian word for typhoid because these fans often act like they have a kind of illness.

101. Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, Fondo Marcello Vitale, l’Anti-Stampa, “I Due Bracci della Tenaglia,” (February 8, 1968), Box I4, Folder II.

102. An archival note attached to a copy of l’ Anti-Stampa from February 14, 1968 indicated that 3000 copies of the article had been distributed. Fondo Marcello Vitale, Box I4, Folder II.


164 Notes

103. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 291.104. L’Unità, February 28, 1968, p. 2.105. L’Unità, January 21, 1968, p. 10.106. For example, Lotta Continua, a radical left-wing student-worker organi-

zation created in 1968 in Turin, had been founded originally as Nuova Resistenza. Benevenuto Revelli interviewed by the author. Cuneo: April 11, 1997.

107. Giovanni Alasia, former chairman of the Turin Chamber of Labor, inter-viewed by the author. Turin: April 24, 1997.

108. L’Unità, February 26, 1968, p. 3.109. L’Unità, November 29, 1967, p. 8. 110. L’Unità, March 26, 1968, p. 2.111. The “terrible fiancés” in La Stampa, April 3, 1968, p. 2.112. L’Unità, January 21, 1968, p. 4.113. Ibid.114. L’Unità, February 24, 1968, p. 2.115. Ibid.116. L’Unità, March 2, 1968, p. 1.

6 The National Dimension II: Italy’s Politicians Confront the Issue of University Reform

1. See G. Quazza (1977) “Sessantotto, scuola e politica,” Rivista di storia con-temporanea, vol. VI, 234–54.

2. G. Ricuperati (1991) “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla Contestazione Studentesca,” pp. 403–34.

3. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 309. 4. See Chapter 3. 5. See G. Canestri (1977) “Scuola e politica in Italia dalla Resistenza al

Sessantotto,” Rivista di storia contemporanea, vol. VI, 29–52. 6. Based on a 1951 survey, in P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary

Italy, p. 410. 7. G. Ricuperati (1991) “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla

Contestazione Studentesca,” pp. 404–07. 8. It is important to note that only a minority of students continued on to

the liceo. G. Canestri (1977) “Scuola e politica in Italia dalla Resistenza al Sessantotto,” 29.

9. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 409–15. 10. O. J. Groeg (ed.) (1980) Who’s Who in Italy 3rd Edition (Milan: Who’s Who

in Italy), p. 269. 11. Gui received his laurea in history and philosophy from the Augustinianum

dell’ Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in 1937 and later attended the Scuola di perfezionamento in Filosofia of the Università Cattolica. SeeM. C. Bouvier and G. Ronconi (eds) (1994) Tra Ragione di Stato e Ragione dell’ Uomo: contributi per una cultura della pace offerti a Luigi Gui per l’ottantesimo compleanno (Padua: La Garangola), p. 103.

12. G. Ricuperati (1991) “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla Contestazione Studentesca,” p. 419.


Notes 165

13. I. Giordani and S. S. Taylor (eds) (1958) Who’s Who in Italy 1st Edition (Milan: Intercontinental Book and Publishing), p. 500.


15. I. Giordani and S. S. Taylor (eds) (1958) Who’s Who in Italy 1st Edition,p. 60.

16. Gaetano Pieraccini, a Socialist, had been appointed Minister of the Budget to help keep the fragile center-left coalition together and had advocated a more systematic, long-term plan for the federal budget. The Pieraccini Plan for the economy ultimately died with the center-left government in 1968.P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 280–81.

17. Atti Parlamentari: Discussioni (Camera dei Deputati) vol. 41 (January 16, 1968), p. 42346. [Hereafter abbreviated as AP.]

18. Gui presented this data on university enrollments to the Camera dei Deputati:

Enrollments Full-time Part-time

1959–60 176,193 71,5241960–61 191,790 76,3911961–62 205,965 82,0101962–63 225,796 86,5481963–64 240,234 94,4471964–65 259,338 101,0691965–66 297,783 107,1551966–67* 329,326 115,0001967–68* 350,000 120,000

* Projected data from AP vol. 41 ( January 17, 1968), p. 42427.

19. I. Giordani and S. S. Taylor (eds) (1958) Who’s Who in Italy 1st Edition,p. 380.

20. The Italian laurea is similar to a Master’s Degree in the United States, and the more recently introduced laurea breve is the equivalent to an American or English undergraduate degree.

21. On the conservative nature of the Gui Bill see P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 303 and G. Ricuperati (1991) “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla Contestazione Studentesca,” pp. 421–22.


23. Socialist Deputy Sanna was severely critical of the government’s behavior during the Valle Giulia incidents, claiming that Gui had conspired with the Rector of the University of Rome to call in the police and force immediate passage of the Gui Bill. Socialist Tristano Codignola also charged the Rector of the University of Florence with conspiring with police to break up a peaceful demonstration in Florence. See AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968), pp. 44581–82 and 44583–84, respectively. On Codignola’s reform efforts after 1968, see G. Ricuperati (1991) “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla Contestazione Studentesca,” p. 424. Christian Democratic Deputy Magri defended the Rector of Rome’s actions, supported Gui’s Bill


166 Notes

2314, and echoed Minister of the Interior Taviani’s declaration that “We live, and intend to live in a democratic state!” AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968), p. 44590.

24. AP vol. 40 (December 7, 1967), pp. 41319–34. In an article entitled “La riforma Sullo e i problemi dell’ Università,” a PCI work group articulated the theoretical basis of the Communists’ reform plans, noting that access to schools and universities should be opened to all so that the education system would no longer remain a system of perpetuating class hierarchy, see Rinascita, V (January 31, 1969), 12.

25. Salvatore Valitutti was born in 1907 near Salerno and taught history and politics before becoming the Vice-Chancellor of the University for Foreigners in Perugia. Valitutti was elected a deputy to Parliament in 1963 and under the Andreotti and Cossiga governments, in the 1970s and 1980s, he held the position of Minister of Public Instruction, see O. J. Groeg (ed.) (1980) Who’s Who in Italy 3rd Edition, p. 507. According to Giuseppe Ricuperati, Valitutti was instrumental in constructing an anti-Gui Bill alliance within the Chamber of Deputies, see G. Ricuperati (1991) “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla Contestazione Studentesca,” p. 421.

26. See remarks of Antonio Capua in AP vol. 40 (December 11, 1967), p. 41412.27. Translation by the author. See remarks by Salvatore Valitutti in AP vol. 41

( January 16, 1968), p. 42356.28. One month prior to Rossi’s death, a group of Communist deputies had

attempted to renew the debate on educational reform following protests at the Liceo Parini in Milan. See remarks of Deputies Ingrao, Rossanda, Berlinguer, Natoli, Levi in AP vol. 22 (March 25, 1966), pp. 21616–17.

29. C. Oliva and A.Rendi (1969) Il movimento studentesco e le sue lotte, p. 16. 30. Translation by the author. AP vol. 23 (April 27, 1966), pp. 22578–79.31. AP vol. 23 (May 17, 1966), pp. 23246–47.32. The modern parts of the University of Rome had all been constructed during

the Fascist period. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23322–27.33. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), p. 23328.34. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23330–31.35. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23331–33.36. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23333–34.37. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23343.38. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23346.39. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23346–52.40. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23366.41. AP vol. 23 (May 18, 1966), pp. 23366.42. AP vol. 33 (April 4, 1967), pp. 32961–69.43. AP vol. 34 (April 19, 1967), pp. 33587–90.44. Della Porta may have made this claim in an effort to draw stronger parallels

to her corresponding case study of political violence in West Germany, seeD. Della Porta (1995) Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State, p. 192.

45. Translation by the author, AP vol. 40 (November 28, 1967), p. 40950.46. AP vol. 40 (December 5, 1967), p. 41214.47. See remarks by Deputies Grilli (MSI), Vedovato (DC), Ferrara-Cariota (PLI),

and Barba (DC) in AP vol. 40 (December 5, 1967), pp. 41215–36.48. AP vol. 40 (December 7, 1967), pp. 41319–34.


Notes 167

49. AP vol. 40 (December 11, 1967), p. 41398.50. AP vol. 40 (December 12, 1967), p. 41433.51. Deputy Maria Cinciari Rodano (PCI) passionately defended the students of

the Palazzo Campana and demanded an explanation for the police repres-sion. AP vol. 41 ( January 10, 1968), p. 42129.

52. Deputy Biaggi Francantonio (PLI) hinted on January 9 that the issue of uni-versity reform would probably have to wait for the next legislature. AP vol. 41 ( January 9, 1968), p. 42095.

53. AP vol. 41 ( January 11, 1968), pp. 42216–47.54. On the earthquake and its aftermath, see P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of

Contemporary Italy, pp. 345–47.55. The Liberals’ vote to stop passage of the Gui Bill no. 2314 to the amendment

phase was defeated by 291 nays (PSU, CD) to 183 yeas (PCI, PLI, PSIUP), AP vol. 41 ( January 17, 1968), p. 42459.

56. On the amendment debates, see AP vol. 41 (January 18, 1968), p. 42503–39. On the passage of Article 8 on university departments, see L. Gui (1973) Libro bianco sull’ università (Rome: Abete), p. 376.

57. For the DC’s interpellation see AP vol. 41 (January 19, 1968), p. 42588; PCI’s interpellation: AP vol. 41 ( January 24, 1968), pp. 42667–88; PSI’s interpella-tion: AP vol. 41 (January 25, 1968), pp. 42745–64.

58. Gui cited in C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il movimento studentesco e le sue lotte, p. 25.

59. Translation by the author. L’Unità, January 27, 1968, p. 1.60. R. Rossanda (1968) L’anno degli studenti and A. Touraine (1968) Le Mouvement

de mai ou le Communisme utopique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil).61. AP vol. 42 (February 7, 1968), p. 43190.62. L’Osservatore Romano, February 12, 1968, p. 7.63. C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il movimento studentesco e le sue lotte, p. 28.64. AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968), p. 44575.65. AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968), pp. 44576–77.66. See Deputy Aldo Natoli (PCI) in AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968), pp. 44577–80. 67. Ibid.68. AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968), p. 44582.69. See Deputy Sanna (PSI) and Codignola (PSI) in AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968),

pp. 44581–87.70. Deputy Magri (DC) translated by the author in AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968),

pp. 44590–91.71. AP vol. 43 (March 1, 1968), pp. 44593–94.72. C. Oliva and A. Rendi (1969) Il movimento studentesco e le sue lotte, pp. 29–31.73. Ibid., 37–38.74. G. Quazza (1977) “Sessantotto, scuola e politica,” 248.75. V. Spini (1972) “The New Left in Italy,” 64.76. G. Canestri (1977) “Scuola e politica in Italia dalla Resistenza al Sessantotto,”

36.77. G. Quazza (1977) “Sessantotto, scuola e politica,” 248.78. P. Ginsborg (2003) A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 280–81.79. See Chapter 5, Notes 71 and 72.80. Amendola quoted in Rinascita in June 1968, cited in P. Ginsborg (2003)

A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 307.


168 Notes

81. Cited in G. Quazza (1977) “Sessantotto, scuola e politica,” 247.82. Nicola Tranfaglia interviewed by the author. Turin: June 20, 2002.83. Ibid.84. Norberto Bobbio interviewed by the author. Turin: April 23, 1997.85. Communication to the author from Angelo Galeano, Davide Borsa, and

Cristina Visentin, students at the University of Turin in the 1990s.86. P. Ginsborg (2003) Italy and Its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State: 1980–

2001 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 232–33.

7 Conclusion: Revolution or Rebellion?

1. The “establishment” has been defined in this study as the professors, police, press, workers, politicians, and parents of the activists.

2. A. Feenberg and J. Freedman (2001) When Poetry Ruled the Streets, p. 4. 3. See Chapter 5, “The National Dimension I: Constructing an Image of

Protest.” 4. N. N. Korzh (2001) “Representation of Historical Knowledge in Collective

Memory,” (trans. M. E. Sharpe) Journal of Russian and East European Psychology vol. XXXIX, 70.

5. For the charges that the professors in Italy represented a group of oligarchs or university Mafiosi, see (1967) “Youth who complain but do not rebel,” in “Italy Catches Up: A Survey by the Economist,” The Economist vol. CCXXII (March 18, 1967), xxix.

6. See Chapter 3, “The Case of Turin I: Defending the Ivory Tower.” 7. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 84–85. 8. See remarks by Giovanni Alasia and Robert Lumley in Chapter 4, “The Case

of Turin II: A City Reacts from Precinct to Parish.” 9. G. Martinotti (1969) “The Positive Marginality: Notes on Italian Students in

Periods of Political Mobilization,” pp. 194–95.10. See Chapter 6, “The National Dimension II: Italy’s Politicians Confront the

Issue of University Reform.”11. In France, a major reforms in university teaching were passed on November 7,

1968; see G. Paolini and W. Vitali (eds) (1977) PCI, Classe Operaia e Movimento Studentesco, p. x. Major reforms were also enacted for the Free University of Berlin offering the students parity with professors in planning the future of the university; see J. Tent (1988) The Free University of Berlin, pp. 344–45.

12. G. De Luna (1991) “Aspetti del Movimento del ’68 a Torino,” p. 208.13. See R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 79 and 87. 14. Giancarla Cicoletti, professor of sociology at the University of Perugia, inter-

viewed by the author. Perugia: March 17, 1997.15. D. Caute (1988), Sixty-Eight, pp. 58–62. Pope Pius XII, in sharp contrast

to his successor, John XXIII, was a fervent anticommunist as described byP. Hebblethwaite in his essay (1995) “Pope Pius XII,” pp. 67–75.

16. See his memoir: M. Capanna (1998) Formidabili quegli anni.17. On the Milan case, see R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 217–23

and for Turin, see L. Lanzardo (1997) Cronaca della Commissione operaia del Movimento studentesco torinese, dicembre 1967–maggio 1968.

18. See Chapter 3, “The Case of Turin I: Defending the Ivory Tower.”


Notes 169

19. For examples of police and student violence, see Alessandro Portelli’s chap-ter, “I’m Going to Say It Now: Interviewing the Movement,” in (1997) The Battle of the Valle Giulia, pp. 183–98.

20. Norberto Bobbio interviewed by author. Turin: April 23, 1997.21. K. Ross (2002) May ’68 and its afterlives, pp. 57–58.22. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 73–74.23. See Chapter 5, “The National Dimension I: Constructing an Image of

Protest.”24. La Stampa, “Specchio dei tempi,” March 14, 1968, p. 2.25. La Stampa, February 21, 1968, p. 2, and March 3, 1968, p. 2.26. R. Lumley (1990) States of Emergency, pp. 342–43.27. L’Unità, January 21, 1968, p. 10.28. See Chapter 6, “The National Dimension II: Italy’s Politicians Confront the

Issue of Reform.” 29. P. Piccone, “Reinterpreting 1968: Mythology on the Make,” 11.30. See S. Hilwig (1998) “The Revolt Against the Establishment,” pp. 321–49. 31. Maria Valabrega interviewed by the author. Turin: June 6, 1997.32. P. Piccone (1988) “Reinterpreting 1968: Mythology on the Make,” 40–43;

G. Ricuperati concluded that as far as the student movement was concerned, “in each country they battled with social realities and political responses that were very diverse,” in (1991) “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla Contestazione Studentesca,” p. 426; and S.M. Lipset’s final view that “the small minority of them [student activists] that is impelled to be activist has concentrated the fire of its attack on domestic ills,” in (1971) Rebellion in the University, pp. 509–10.

33. Former Communist Deputy Rossana Rossanda called the left-wing terrorists of the 1970s, such as the Red Brigades, the “unwanted children” of the pro-tests begun in the 1960s; see D. Della Porta (1995) Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State, p. 23.

34. Maria Valabrega interviewed by the author. Turin: June 6, 1997.35. Marco Revelli is a professor of political science. Luisa Passerini is a professor

of history. One of the former writers for Anti-stampa, Peppino Ortoleva, now writes books on the mass media, and Luigi Bobbio is a lawyer in Turin. Massimo D’Alema was nineteen years old in 1968 and a member of the Communist Youth Federation. He held the position of President of Italy’s Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) from October 21, 1998, to April 25, 2000.


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Perlini, Tito. 1971. “Left-wing culture in Italy since the Last War.” Translation by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. 20th Century Studies, vol. V, 6–17.

Piccone, Paul. 1988. “Reinterpreting 1968: Mythology on the Make,” Telos, vol. LXXVII, 7–43.

Polo, Gabriele. 1989. I Tamburi di Mirafiori: Testimonianze Operaie attorno all’Autunno Caldo alle FIAT. Turin: Cric Editore.

Portelli, Alessandro. 1997. The Battle of the Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Prefettura di Torino Gabinetto: Personale Questura 1966–68. -“Reparto Mobile: Anno 1968” Busta nr. 52. -“Notiziario Sindacale” Busta nr. 184.“The Press: Opinions are Sacred,” in “Italy Catches Up: A Survey by the

Economist,” The Economist, vol. CCXXII (March 18, 1967), after p. 1044, xxix.Quazza, Guido. 1968. “Nella protesta dei giovani lo spirito della resistenza,”

Resistenza: Giustizia e Libertà. 1968. vol. IX, 3.Quazza, Guido. 1970. Piani di Studio. Florence: La Nuova Italia.

Quazza, Guido. 1977. “Sessantotto, scuola e politica,” Rivista di storia contempo-ranea, vol. VI, 234–54.

Resistenza: Giustizia e Libertà. 1968. vol. X. evelli, Anna and Benvenuto. Former partisans and parents of Marco Revelli, activist at the University of Turin. Interview by the author. Cuneo: April 11, 1997.

Revelli, Marco. 1991. “Il ‘68 a Torino. Gli Esordi: La Comunità Studentesca di Palazzo Campana,” in Aldo Agosti, Luisa Passerini, and Nicola Tranfaglia (eds) La cultura e i luoghi del ‘68. Milan: Franco Angeli.

Ricuperati, Giuseppe. 1991. “La Politica Scolastica Italiana dal Centro-Sinistra alla Contestazione Studentesca,” in Aldo Agosti, Luisa Passerini, and Nicola Tranfaglia (eds) La cultura e i luoghi del ‘68. Milan: Franco Angeli.

Rieser, Vittorio. Trade unionist and former graduate assistant at the University of Turin. Interview by the author. Turin: June 2, 1997.

Rinascità. various volumes. November 1967–January 1969.Ross, Kristin. 2002. May ’68 and its afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Rossanda, Rossana. 1968. L’anno degli studenti. Bari: De Donato.Santomassimo, Gianpasquale (ed.) 1989. “Il Sessantotto: una storia difficile,”

Passato e Presente, vol. XIX, pp. 13–30.Scheuch, Erwin K. 1969. “The Liberation from Right Reason,” Encounter, vol.

XXXII, 56–61.Schnapp, Alain and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. 1971. The French Student Uprising,

November 1967–June 1968: An Analytical Record. Translation by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

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178 Bibliography

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“Youth who complain but do not rebel,” in “Italy Catches Up: A Survey by the Economist,” The Economist, vol. CCXXII (March 18, 1967), after p. 1044, xxix.


179

Index

Addari, Luigi 75Agnelli family 59, 60, 64, 71, 83, 91Alasia, Gianni 69, 74–75, 77, 135Allara, Mario 34, 36, 38–47, 49–53,

56, 62, 134, 137Altomare, Armando 62–63Amendola, Giorgio 69, 100, 128Anni di piombo (Years of Lead) 22Antifascism 13, 36–37, 59, 82,

132, 137, 140; see CLN and Resistance

Anti-Stampa (student publication) 86–87, 90, 92, 95–96, 99, 106, 139

Antonioni, Dino 72, 75Arendt, Hannah 4Aron, Raymond 6, 102, 104, 108Autunno Caldo see ‘Hot Autumn’

(1969) Avanzini, Federico 24, 49, 64, 91

‘baby boomers’ 6Badaloni, Maria 116Barnes, Samuel 94Barriera di Milano 59, 70Battle of the Piazza Statuto 59–60, 76Battle of the Valle Giulia 23–25,

49–50, 56, 69, 71, 80, 89–91, 93, 98, 101, 112, 117, 125–128, 136–137

Berlinguer, Luigi 117, 122Bettiol, Giuseppe 123Biennio Rosso see Red Years Bobbio, Luigi 10, 44, 55, 57, 59,

62–63, 104, 109–110, 137Bobbio, Norberto 36–38, 43, 45,

50–51, 54, 57, 63, 129–130, 138Bourdieu, Pierre 81, 86Bozzi, Aldo 119Bravo, Anna 43

Cacciatore, Francesco 119Cafo, Giuseppe 61, 63, 65

Canestri, Giorgio 128capelloni 26–27Capanna, Mario 56, 77, 137Carpo, Giampiero 71Catenacci, Elvio 60–61, 63Catholic Action 9, 116Cattocomunismo (Catholic

communism) 78CGIL (Italian General Confederation

of Labor) 70Chamber of Deputies 15, 114,

117–118, 122, 136Chomsky, Noam 83Christian Democrats see DC 9,

13–15, 85, 100, 106, 114–118, 120–122, 124–127, 129, 136

Church 2, 9, 29, 43, 77–79, 94, 115, 129, 134;

Canova, Don Mario 28–29; Cardinal Cicognani 78; Cardinal Pellegrino see Pellegrino,

Cardinal Michele 77–79, 134;Clergy 11, 28, 59, 77–79; Pope John XXIII 9, 15–16, 115; Pacem in Terris 16; Pope Paul VI 78; Pope Pius XII 137; Second Vatican Council

(1962–65) 16, 77–78CISL (Italian Confederation of

Workers’ Unions) 75Civitas (journal) 116CLN (Committees of National

Liberation) 38 Codignola, Tristano 117, 120,

126–127, 129Cogestione 51Cold War 4, 14, 38, 86, 93,

98, 112, 140Commissione Operaia

(Workers’ Commission) 68Committees of National Liberation

see CLN 38

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180 Index

Common Market 13Communità del Vandolino 77Communists see PCI

(Partito Communista Italiano) 6, 9, 13–19, 29, 31, 37–38, 40, 53–54, 63, 65, 68–70, 74–75, 79, 81–84, 86, 93, 99–102, 107–109, 112 113, 114, 116–119, 121–129, 131, 138

contadini (farmers) 75Il Corriere della Sera 24, 32–33, 81,

83–84, 87–93, 97–99, 101, 105, 107–108, 112, 137–138;

Bettiza, Enzo 84;Crespi family 83;Spadolini, Giovanni 83–84

Costa, Angiola Massucco 118, 122–123, 128

Counterculture 5, 7, 21, 26, 28–31, 33, 79;

beatniks 26;capelloni 26–27;Dylan, Bob 29;LSD 29;marijuana 26; Rock-n-Roll 26, 29;Seger, Pete 29

Cruciani, Achille 122Cultural Revolution 17, 19, 22,

28, 98

D’Alema, Massimo 140Davis, Natalie Zemon 30DC (Democrazia Cristiana; political

party) 13, 19, 115, 117–119, 123–124, 129

De Gaulle, Charles 5, 25, 71, 124, 138

Delfino, Raffaele 119Della Porta, Donatella 7, 65, 79, 121 De Lorenzo Affair 60De Luna, Giovanni 2, 15, 48, 70, 136democracy 5, 15, 17–18, 20, 35,

37–40, 69, 95, 99, 102, 118–119, 122, 125, 133, 135, 138

Democratic National Convention (1968) 24

De Rossi, Laura 20, 37, 56, 62, 104–105, 109–110

direct democracy 15, 18, 37–39, 135Divorce 5, 30;

Amendment 123–124;Film, Divorce—Italian Style 30

Dutschke, Rudi 18, 25; ‘long march through the

institutions’ 18, 25

Einaudi, Luigi 37Ermini, Giuseppe 117, 120eskimo (jackets) 28l’Espresso 101‘Establishment’ 1–4, 11, 24, 26, 60,

66–67, 93, 95–96, 127, 131–132, 134, 139–140

Fahlenbrach, Kathrin 30, 80–81, 89, 102, 133

Fanfani, Amintore 13, 18Farinelli, Fiorella 28Fascism 4, 6, 9, 15, 35–36, 43, 53,

76, 93–97, 99, 102, 106–107, 112–113, 122, 126, 132–134, 138–140;

‘March on Rome’ 94–95 Federal Republic of Germany 5, 13;

see Dutschke, Rudi;see Ohnesorg, Benno; Free University of Berlin 33;Protests in 7, 23, 25, 32, 93, 108,

127, 131;Springer Press 84, 86

Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo 17, 99Ferrara, Maurizio 68, 108Feuer, Lewis 26FGCI (Italian Federation of

Communist Youth) 74FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili

Torino) 11, 25, 57, 59–60, 64, 68–76, 83–85, 91–92, 134–135, 137, 139;

figli di papa 62, 69–70, 79, 125, 135

Mirafiori plant 25, 74, 76;workers 2, 5, 9, 11, 13, 18, 20, 22,

24–25, 33, 44, 53, 57–60, 62, 64–77, 79, 82–85, 91–92, 94, 99–100, 105–106, 132, 134–135, 137, 139


Index 181

filocinesi (Maoists) 52, 65, 75, 84, 91, 93, 96–98, 101, 106, 111, 120, 138–139

Finnegan, Ruth 4Firpo, Luigi 34 Florence 19, 24, 43, 83, 92, 122,

124, 139France 4, 14, 18, 26, 68, 71, 94,

100–101, 116, 119, 124, 130, 136, 138;

Cohn Bendit, Daniel 44, 138;Events of May 68, 71, 101,

124, 138;Grenelle Accords 68;Latin Quarter 5, 23, 80, 132;Le Figaro 24, 93;March 22 Movement 44;Nanterre 32, 40, 44, 132;Sorbonne 33, 43–44

Frankfurt School 5, 7, 16Frassati, Pier Giorgio 95Freud, Sigmund 26;FUCI (Italian Federation of Catholic

University students) 63

Galli, Giorgio 14, 28Genoa 13, 19, 108, 119, 124Getto, Giovanni 63 Gentile, Angelo 61–62, 65, 139Giachetti, Diego 11, 26Ginsborg, Paul 9, 59, 75, 115,

128, 130Gitlin, Todd 24, 56, 81, 85, 107, 133Gobetti, Piero 95Godineau, Dominique 30Goffman, Erving 81Goidanich, Athos 36, 38–39, 41, 47,

50, 52, 134, 139Gonella, Guido 115–116Gramsci, Antonio 16, 18, 54, 72, 95,

108; The Prison Notebooks 18

Grand Coalition 5, 121 Grosso, Giuseppe 36–37, 41–42, 45,

50, 53–55, 134; see also Turin, Mayor of 36,

40–41, 134 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 17, 21, 27,

55, 99, 114;

Foco theory 17Gui, Luigi 14–15, 19, 23–25, 39,

41, 53, 112, 115–118, 120, 122–129, 136

Guidetti-Serra, Bianca 66Gullini, Giorgio 36, 39, 50, 52,

63, 134

Habermas, Jürgen 6, 93;Linksfaschismus

(left-wing fascism) 93Hebblethwaite, Peter 29Ho Chi Minh 17, 71, 89, 92Horn, Gerd-Rainer 11–12, 68, 96‘Hot Autumn’ 25–26, 67–68, 71, 75

Il Manifesto 124Il Messagero 108Il Risveglio 28Ingrao, Pietro 120Intesa 15, 74, 79Italian General Confederation of

Labor see CGIL Italian Confederation of Workers’

Unions see CISL

Journalists 2, 11, 80, 82, 84, 86,101

King, Martin Luther 22Korzh, N.N. 133Kraushaar, Wolfgang 133Kurlansky, Mark 3Kurz, Jan 9, 22

L’Osservatore Romano 29, 79, 81, 88, 98, 134

La Stampa 27, 31, 33, 36, 46, 61, 64, 71–72, 81, 83–87, 91–93, 95–99, 103–105, 110, 112, 137–139;

Lanzardo, Liliana 11, 69–70, 72, 74La Palombara, Joseph 28Law of 3 December 1947 119Lega Studenti e Operai (League of

Students and Workers) 67Lenin 16, 68, 108lentocrazia 14Leone, Giovanni 127Letter to a Professor 16


182 Index

Levi, Giorgina 31, 63, 69, 118, 121–122, 124, 128

Levitt, Cyril 20Liberals 13–15, 94, 117–118,

121–123Liberatori, Andrea 54, 67, 69, 79Lipset, Seymour Martin 8, 20Longo, Luigi 69Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle),

11, 67–68, 71, 73, 76, 135, 137Lumley, Robert 9, 16, 75, 138

MSI (Italian Social Movement; political party) 14, 84, 94, 119–121;

Missini 19, 94, 96 Magri, Domenico 126Manghi, Bruno 67, 70–71, 75Mao, Tse Tung 16–17, 19, 22, 27,

47, 55, 92–93, 96–98, 100–101, 106, 108, 114, 138

Maoism 48, 52, 75, 79, 82, 84, 101, 106, 120; see also filocinesi

Marconi, Diego 21, 46–47Marcuse, Herbert 16–17, 55, 90,

96, 100; One Dimensional Man 17

Marshall Plan 12Martinotti, Guido 48, 135Marwick, Arthur 3, 8, 26Marx, Karl 16, 18, 72, 74, 96Marxism 5, 9, 16–18, 29, 68, 82, 89,

93–94, 99–102, 118, 136Mausbach, Wilfried 2Mazzini, Giuseppe 20Medici, Sandro 62Memory (collective, nostalgic,

popular; of 1968) 8, 36, 63, 75, 134, 139, 140

Mexico 1Mezzogiorno 67Milani, Don Lorenzo 16 Mills, C. Wright 16Minh, Ho Chi 17, 71, 89, 92miracolo economico 8, 13, 59 Monarchist 38Montanti, Antonio 122Moro, Aldo 114, 117, 121, 123, 125,

127–128

Mottura, Andrea 46–47movimento studentesco 3, 25, 49, 53,

85, 133Mussolini, Benito 21, 33, 53, 59, 61,

67, 94–95, 97, 102, 133Myerhoff, Barbara 100, 102

Naples 19, 124Napolitano, Giorgio 128NATO (North Atlantic Treaty

Organization) 13Natoli, Aldo 125–126

La Nazione 24, 81, 92Negarville, Massimo 137Neofascists 14, 19, 53, 82, 94–96,

121–122, 133, 137; also see MSINicosia, Angelo 120Nenni, Pietro 19, 64, 98, 118New Left 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 16–20,

28–29, 34, 77, 82–84, 93–94, 96, 99–103, 106, 108, 132, 138, 140

Newspapers 2–4, 11, 22–26, 30, 32–33, 35, 44, 49, 52, 54, 56, 61, 63–65, 70, 72–73, 80–89, 91–114, 118, 124, 128, 131–140;

‘protest paradigm’ in 81–82, 86–87, 89, 94, 99, 106, 112, 133;

see Chomsky Noam;see Gitlin, Todd;see Il Corriere della Sera, Il Manifesto,

La Nazione, L’Osservatore Romano, La Stampa, l’Unità

Nozzoli, Serena 21Nuova Resistenza see Lotta ContinuaNuova Sinistra see ‘New Left’numerus clausus 14, 116, 130

Ohnesorg, Benno 19Old Left 28, 84, 106, 129Operaismo 18–19, 47oral history 2, 10Ortoleva, Peppino 10, 22, 28, 41, 70,

85–86, 103

PCI (Italian Communist Party) 6, 9, 13, 16–19, 29, 31, 35, 37–38, 40, 54, 63, 65, 68–70, 75, 81–83, 93, 99–102, 107–109, 112–113,


Index 183

116–118, 120, 122–126, 128–129, 131, 138

PSI (Italian Socialist Party) 9, 13–16, 19, 64–65, 68, 74, 97, 99–100, 118–119, 125–27, 138

PSDI (Italian Democratic Socialist Party) 127

PSIUP (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity) 65, 68, 74, 119, 122, 126

PSU (Unified Socialist Party) 18, 64, 117, 127, 129, 136

Pajetta, Giancarlo 65Palazzolo, Giovanni 120Panzieri, Raniero 16, 18Papi, Giuseppe 118Parlanti, Luciano 70–71, 73, 76, 135Pasolini, Pier Paolo 69, 101,

104–105, 108, 113Pasquali, Giorgio 35Passerini, Luisa 10–11, 21, 30, 86,

100Pellegrino, Cardinal Michele

77–79, 134 Piccone, Paul 7, 139Police 2, 5, 11, 17, 20, 22–24, 33, 36,

38–39, 41–46, 49, 52, 54, 59–66, 68–69, 73, 79–80, 85, 87–89, 91–92, 94, 98–101, 106–107, 110–13, 117–121, 123–126, 131, 134–39;

Carabinieri 24, 33, 59–61, 64–65, 91, 106, 110;

Polizia di Stato 60Politica (journal) 124Politicians 2, 4, 11, 49, 83, 86, 89,

99–100, 104, 113–115, 119, 122, 125–127, 129–31, 138–139

Portelli, Alessandro 91Potere Operaio (Workers Power)

11, 67, 76, 135, 137Press see NewspapersProfessors 2, 10–11, 14–15, 20–22,

25, 34–40, 42–43, 45–55, 63, 66, 74, 79, 100, 103, 105–106, 114, 116–118, 120–122, 126, 128, 130, 135, 138–40;

Senato Accademico 34, 43, 46–47, 50–57

Protesters 1–3, 7, 10, 19–20, 23–24, 30, 36, 43, 59–61, 64, 66, 68–70, 76, 82, 84, 89, 91–92, 95, 100, 102, 106–108, 111–113, 123, 132–133, 135, 137–140

Provos 103

Quazza, Guido 35–39, 41, 43, 45–46, 49–50, 52–53, 57, 114, 128, 134

Quaderni Piacentini 18, 48Quaderni Rossi 18

Red Years (Biennio Rosso) 9, 53Resistance (Anti-fascist) 3–4, 22, 28,

35–38, 46, 52, 56, 58–59, 63, 87–89, 93–95, 107–108, 112, 115, 119–120, 129, 132, 137–139

Resistenza (journal) 37, 43, 45, 54Revelli, Benevenuto 62 Revelli, Marco 10, 17, 20–21, 23, 39,

47–48, 54–55, 59, 95, 102, 137Revolutions of 1848 1, 20, 102Ricuperati, Giuseppe 114Rieser, Vittorio 43, 76Rock-n-Roll 26, 29Rome 2, 14, 19–20, 22, 24, 26–27,

31–32, 39, 42, 49–50, 56, 58, 61–62, 64–65, 77, 84, 88–89, 93–95, 98, 101–102, 111–112, 114, 116–121, 125, 137–138

Rossanda, Rossana 6, 116, 118, 121, 124, 128

Rossi, Paolo 19, 118–121Roszak, Theodore Youth and the Great

Refusal 26Ruffini, Mario 37Rumor, Mariano 127Russell, Bertrand 5

Sanna, Carlo 119, 126Sartoris, Pietro 36, 38Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 102Scelba Law of 1952 119Second World War 4, 6, 9, 12, 14,

59, 65, 100, 120, 138Seminara, Niccola 64Sessantotto 2–3, 8, 10–11, 30, 40, 47,

80–81, 83, 85–86, 107, 129, 131–133, 137, 140


184 Index

Sessantottini 16, 45, 140Silvana, Fazio 63Situationists 31, 89, 102Socialists see PSI, PSDI, PSIUP, PSUStalinism 5, 27

DeBenedetti, Giulio 84;Valabrega, Maria 33, 85, 139

Tarrow, Sidney 8–9Taviani, Paolo Emilio 119, 125Television 3, 47, 80–82, 86, 101Terzmondismo (Third Worldism)

17, 82Togliatti, Palmiro 16, 69Tolomelli, Marica 9, 11, 22,

66, 68, 71Torresini, Daniela 77Touraine, Alain 5–6, 124Tranfaglia, Nicola 34, 95, 129Trento (Trent) 12, 19, 77, 109Tuninetti, Don Giuseppe 77–79Turin 2–4, 9–11, 13, 17, 19–25, 28,

30–33, 34–57, 58–79, 85–87, 90–91, 93–94, 99, 104, 109, 111, 114, 120–122, 124, 128–129, 131–132, 134–137, 139–140;

Chamber of Labor 38, 64, 69, 74, 77;

Court of Appeals 42, 46;Juventus, 65;Mayor of (Giuseppe Grosso)

36, 40–41, 45, 54, 134

UGI (Union Goliardica Italiana) 15, 40, 79

UNURI (Unione nazionale degli studenti) 15

Unified Socialist Party see PSU L’Unità 54, 67–69, 77, 81–83,

107–113, 124, 138United States 7, 18, 20, 24, 26,

28–29, 32, 56, 81, 83, 100, 107, 121, 131–133;

Columbia University 33;Grant Park, Chicago 1968 24, 80;Humphrey, Hubert, Vice President’s

visit to Europe (1967) 121;Students for a Democratic Society

(SDS) 107;

University of California at Berkeley, 3, 17, 132;

War in Vietnam 4, 5, 7, 9–10, 24, 34, 38, 51, 64, 70–71, 79, 106, 108, 121, 124, 132, 140

Universities 4, 5, 9–11, 15, 19–23, 25, 29, 32, 34–36, 38, 41, 43–44, 57–58, 62, 64, 76, 93, 99, 101, 106–107, 114–118, 120–125, 127–130, 136–137;

Catholic University of Milan, La Cattolica 77, 134, 137;

Enrollments 5, 14, 116–117, 130;Florence (University of) 19, 24, 43,

83, 122, 124, 139;Law 910, 127, 129–130;Milan (State University of) 19,

21–25, 38, 56, 84, 87, 92, 97, 122, 136, 139;

Bramantesco Gate 87–89;Perugia (University of) 137;Pisa (University of) 19, 28, 55,

110, 122;Tesi della Sapienza 55;

Reform Bill 2314 (GuiPlan) 14–15, 25, 117–118, 120–124,126–127, 129;

Rome (University of) 14, 19, 22–23, 31, 49–50, 56, 88, 101, 111–112, 118–120, 125, 137

See Battle of the Valle GiuliaFaculty of Architecture 23, 49, 112Paratore, Ettore, professor 101Rector Pietro D’Avack 23, 49,

112, 125, 137Trent (University of) also

Trento 12, 19, 77, 109 ‘contromessa’ (anti-mass) 77

Turin (University of) also Università di Torino 9–11, 19, 22, 32–33, 34–35, 39, 44, 47, 49–50, 53–54, 56, 59, 63, 66, 77, 95, 120, 128–129, 132, 136–137

Academic Senate (Senato Accademico) 19–20, 34, 36, 39, 43–44, 46–47, 49–51

Assistants 39–40, 43, 47Aula Magna 45, 47, 63


Index 185

Bomb threat (alleged) 22, 51–52, 96

Campus occupations 20–25, 29, 33, 38–44, 46–50, 54–56, 63, 65–67, 76–77, 87, 91, 95, 122, 126, 128, 137

Carta Rivendicativa (Charter of Demands) 45, 55, 64, 139

Faculty of Architecture 22‘guerilla phase’ 23, 48Interfacultà 37, 42La Mandria decision 19, 32,

40–41, 136Palazzo Campana 20–22, 24, 30,

38–45, 47, 49–51, 53, 55, 61–63, 67, 72–73, 87, 91, 95–96, 110, 122, 137–138

Palazzo Nuovo 25Polytechnic University 64, 73Rector see Allara, MarioScioperi bianchi (white strikes)

44, 50, 56, 102–103

Valabrega, Maria 33, 85, 139Valitutti, Salvatore 118, 120, 123, 126Viale, Guido 28, 47–48, 51, 56, 103

Contro l’Università 48

Vietnam War 4–5, 7, 9–10, 24, 34, 38, 51, 64, 70–71, 79, 106, 108, 121, 124, 132, 140

Viola, Tullio 63Voce Operaia (Worker’s Voice)

(journal) 70

Warsaw Pact 16Weber, Max 118 Welch, Raquel 31West Germany see Federal Republic of

GermanyWomen 5, 29–31, 37, 118, 140

Donna e Società (journal) 30Feminism in the universities 5,

29–31, 140Patriarchy 29, 31Role in demonstrations 29–31

Workers 2, 5, 11, 13, 18, 20, 22, 24–25, 33, 44, 53, 57, 58–60, 62, 64–77, 79, 82–85, 91–92, 94, 99–100, 105–106, 132, 134–135, 137, 139

See Hot AutumnFIAT 11, 25, 57, 59–60, 64, 68–76,

83–85, 91–92, 134–135, 137, 139Pirelli 137


1968 - youth unrest and democratic culture

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