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Reviewed by:
  • Body of State: The Moro Affair, A Nation Divided by Marco Baliani, and: Trilogy of Resistance by Antonio Negri
  • Richard Drake (bio)
Body of State: The Moro Affair, A Nation Divided. By Marco Baliani. Translated by Nicoletta Marini-Maio, Ellen Nerenberg, and Thomas Simpson. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010; xii + 157 pp. $65.00 cloth, e-book available.
Trilogy of Resistance. Antonio Negri. Translated by Timothy S. Murphy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011; 163 pp. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

On 12 December 1969, a bank explosion in Milan’s Piazza Fontana killed 17 people and wounded 90. Thus began an era of political violence in Italy that became known as the “Years of Lead.” It lasted for nearly two decades. During this period, neofascist and communist extremists murdered and maimed hundreds of victims, making Italy the most terror-ridden country in the industrialized world. The problem thereafter subsided, but then resurfaced sporadically on the radical left from the late 1990s to the present. Italy’s dire economic woes and social crises today have the country’s authorities worried over the prospect of a return to the Years of Lead or to something like it.

Working in the politically engaged theatrical tradition of Italy’s Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo, Marco Baliani presents in Body of State testimony about his own involvement in the “Movement,” the radical left-wing culture from whose most extreme elements such terrorist groups as the Red Brigades emerged. As a young man in his 20s and just starting out in the theatre, he took an empathic view of the Red Brigades, admiring their revolutionary aims, if not all their methods. Even when in 1978 they kidnapped Aldo Moro, Italy’s leading political figure, and killed his five-man security guard, Baliani felt a thrill of revolutionary solidarity with the terrorists. Moro’s murder nearly two months later, however, brought about a crisis of conscience in Baliani, as it did in many other erstwhile sympathizers of the Red Brigades. Filmed for television in 1998, Body of State serves as a vehicle for his personal impressions of the Moro tragedy and the Years of Lead generally.

The play certainly deserves to be recognized as an invaluable historical document for the light it sheds on the Movement’s ideological complicity with the Red Brigades. Baliani says of the Red Brigades that they spoke his language. It was the language of revolution, which the by then thoroughly reformist Communist Party no longer spoke. The Red Brigades had emerged in 1970 as the Movement’s most ideologically consistent element. Baliani concedes that he, along with everyone else actively engaged in the Movement, had played the same game. At political meetings, “everyone there believed more or less the same thing, that the revolution was nigh and the world was about to change, from one day to the next” (35).

About the still-controversial conspiracy theories in the Moro murder case, and chiefly the claims that the government did not want to find Moro, Baliani limits himself to saying, “we feel and know that not everything has been said, that the truth is still far off, and that what is hidden is more troubling than what is visible” (27). The relevant footnote in the text cites the work of Sergio Flamigni, a leading proponent of conspiracy theories surrounding the case. [End Page 169]

Unmentioned are the rebuttals to Flamigni, chiefly in Italy by Agostino Giovagnoli, Il caso Moro: Una tragedia italiana (2005), and Vladimiro Satta, Odissea nel caso Moro: Viaggio controcorrente attraverso la documentazione della Commissione Stragi (2003) and Il caso Moro e i suoi falsi misteri (2006). Though explicitly wanting to stay clear of the debate over conspiracy theories, Baliani expresses himself on this contentious point in a way that reveals where he stands. No less indicative of his predilection for conspiracy theories about the Moro case is the unchallenged Flamigni reference in the footnotes.

In the fascinating diary that follows the text of the one-man play, Baliani recounts key episodes in his career as an actor and director. For students of theatre especially, Baliani’s diary will make for fascinating reading. Describing...

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