Read Online Pushing Past the Night by Mario Calabresi - Free Book Online Page A

made this same proposal earlier, in January 2005, when a commemorative stamp was issued for my father, as if one stamp should offset the other. He observed, correctly, that the prosecutor had verified that Calabresi was not in the room when Pinelli died, but he then revived the most absurd hypothesis from the early 1970s: “Pinelli did not commit suicide. And tons of proof was found that first he had been knocked out, perhaps with a karate chop (or perhaps killed by the blow), and then thrown from the window, lifeless, to make it look like suicide.”
    In January 2007, the provincial government of Milan issued a decision to place a commemorative plaque in memory of LuigiCalabresi on the thirty-fifth anniversary of his death, which fell on May 17 of that year. Shortly thereafter the mayor of the city of Milan, Letizia Moratti, announced that another plaque would be placed on Via Cherubini, the street where he had been shot. Together these initiatives sought to fill in a void in the collective memory of the city, but they immediately triggered a controversy in which Pinelli was once again brought into the fray.
    The education commissioner, a member of the far left, abstained from the vote on the memorial. In his explanation, he touted the party line. “Not to deny the validity of a healing process, but out of respect for the history of the city of Milan and its citizens, we think that a more accurate historic context would be created by granting equal recognition and appreciation to the innocent victim Giuseppe Pinelli.” The commissioner from the Green Party voted in favor, invoking the need for a gesture of reconciliation that should, however, be “coupled with the decision to name a school after Pinelli, the innocent man killed after the Piazza Fontana massacre.” At that point the provincial leader, from the Democratic Party of the Left (a center-left formation), stated that the left-wing coalition had voted in favor, and that the far left had abstained rather than oppose the measure. He phoned my mother that same evening to convey the decision, and with great honesty he told her, “We succeeded in making an important gesture, thirty-five years after the death of your husband. Unfortunately we had to associate his name once again with that of Pinelli. I’m sorry about this imbroglio. I’m sorry that we always have to create pain. We should stop comparing the two things. For that matter, there is already a plaque for Pinelli. For Calabresi we don’t have anything.”
    There are actually two tablets for Pinelli on the small plot of grass opposite the bank in Piazza Fontana. The first was set there almost thirty years ago by an anarchist group. It says that Pinelli, “an innocent, was murdered on the premises of the policeheadquarters.” The second, bearing the symbols of the city of Milan, was placed in March 2006 by the outgoing mayor, Gabriele Albertini. It states that Pinelli “died tragically.” For a few days the anarchists’ tablet, with its false allegation of homicide, was removed in favor of the city’s tablet. After a chorus of protests against the “revisionist” mayor for attempting to “rewrite history,” it was returned to its place, so that today, grotesquely, there are two plaques—leaving suspended, for now, the question of whether our history will be written on the basis of documents, expert testimony, and judicial sentences, or on the basis of Xerox copies of Lotta Continua pamphlets.

6.
the interview
    If they want to issue a stamp commemorating the anarchist Pinelli, then why not give everyone the right to a commemoration, no matter how much time has passed? But they’re out of their minds if they’re using this measure to reintroduce the idea of first-degree murder. It would be like killing Inspector Calabresi for a second time. He was not even in the room at police headquarters from which Pinelli fell.
    So began