The sacrifice of Piermanni and Beni in the book by Bommarito and Di Stefano

The lawyer’s new book came out a few days ago Giuseppe Bommaritowho in his new literary effort is joined by Marco Di Stefano, general of the Carabinieri, former provincial commander of the Carabinieri. The title of the volume, “Bloody night. 18 May 1977: the three firefights of Porto San Giorgio and Civitanova Marche”, is eloquent of the topic covered within it. The book will be presented as part of “Macerata Tells” on Friday 3 May at 6pm at the Macerata Philharmonic theater in the presence of the two authors. We publish the introduction in full.

«Many years ago, almost half a century now, the officer Alfredo Beni and the chief marshal Sergio Piermanni, both belonging to the Carabinieri, fell while carrying out their service in favor of the State, to defend the entire community, after a entire life spent in the trenches. On the same occasion, Captain Rosario Aiosa was seriously injured, between life and death for several weeks, and Brigadier Velemiro Di Toro Mammarella, hit in the temple, was saved by a pure miracle. In the three firefights that took place on the night between 17 and 18 May 1977 between Porto San Giorgio and Civitanova Marche the same dynamic always occurred: the initiative, of investigation and identification, was taken by the carabinieri, then there was a reaction cowardly, by surprise and shots fired, by the group of criminals who had just arrived in the Marche and finally the lethal reaction of the military with the weapons supplied.

The carabinieri who fell in these head-on clashes were nevertheless protagonists on the front line of the fight against an increasingly organised, increasingly ferocious underworld, ready, even for the slightest trifle, to shoot and kill, especially those wearing a uniform, often with acts of gratuitous and banal violence, useless even from a strictly criminal point of view. A mafia-type underworld, even if at that time the crime of mafia-style criminal association did not yet exist, would only be introduced in September 1982, after the tragic deaths of Pio La Torre and General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

The cover of the book

Of course, nothing will be able to restore life to the Fallen or soothe the wounds of the soul of the survivors and their families, much less a book, but telling their stories, the ways of their sacrifice, will help those who were there in that era to remember them and it will allow younger people (who know little or nothing about that triple firefight) to learn about the most serious criminal event that occurred in the Marche region after the Second World War onwards, about which incredibly nothing has ever been written. And, by keeping the memory alive, it will ensure that the experience is elaborated more fully and will prevent it from becoming obscured and irremediably sinking into oblivion, perhaps replaced by partial, if not distorted, reconstructions, even on crucial aspects of the story.

Yet it was an affair that at the time shook the conscience of the entire country and especially of the people of the Marche region, who were directly concerned due to “territorial jurisdiction”, an affair that ended in a bloodbath, in a terrible scenario of death that emerged in a land that until at that time it was considered immune from big crime, both common and political. A real inferno that suddenly exploded without being preceded by any premonition of doom, covered far and wide for weeks by all the press and television outlets of the time, then slowly, despite the annual commemorations, slipped a little into oblivion, like a candle that slowly burns out and goes out. It is therefore necessary to revive the collective memory of that terrible event, a memory that is still necessary as an exercise of conscience and knowledge and to protect the dignity and sacrifice of the fallen soldiers.

The unthinkable happened on the night of May 18, 1977 and affected two quiet coastal towns in the Marche region, Porto San Giorgio and Civitanova Marche. Never had something so impressive happened in the Marche, never had three separate and close exchanges of pistol and machine gun fire between criminals and the police occurred in the space of a few hours, with very serious consequences. Two of the firefights took place in Porto San Giorgio, the third, a few hours later, still in the middle of the night, in Civitanova Marche. Three clashes in rapid succession, therefore, which brought death, anguish and suffering. Not only in the families of the deceased or seriously injured, not only in the large body of the Carabinieri, but also in the entire community, in the institutions, in common feeling.

The bust dedicated to Piermanni in Civitanova

The arrest of the only bandit still on the run, which occurred on the morning of May 19, 1977, after just over 24 hours of an intense manhunt, put an end to a real, sensational and shocking nightmare that ended with a very heavy toll . At the end of the bloodiest night in the criminal history of the Marche, two Carabinieri soldiers and four bandits were killed; a captain and a brigadier were seriously injured, a bandit was arrested immediately and the last of the fleeing bandits – as mentioned above – was caught a few hours later. Not to mention, in this tragic calculation, the two young widows left dramatically alone with five orphans, all very young, prematurely deprived of their precious paternal support.

It was the culmination of a series of criminal activities of an extremely dangerous gang, characterized by considerable firepower, which had already struck blood in other parts of the country, made up of criminals in the throes of a delirium of omnipotence, obsessed by greed of money, of easy profit, of power to be exercised with the blindest violence. An insensitivity that left us dismayed. They considered common morality, laws, rules, human life to be zero, they felt like supermen. However, the clashes of May 18th closed forever the tragic parable of that gang of murderers, of merciless killers who arrived in the Marche to commit crime and kill, after having already sown widespread death elsewhere. A gang of high criminal caliber, however mafia-like in nature, which was therefore completely annihilated after a few hours of bloody madness: the sacrifice of Beni and Piermanni, and that of the wounded, however irreparable and painful, had served to completely eradicate a gang of murderers with multiple criminal convictions, fugitives or escapees from their homeland’s prisons.

The affair disturbed and moved the entire country, it also had a vast echo in the national press, where all the possible and imaginable news about this bloodbath came out. And it sparked a great wave of solidarity towards the police forces in the Marche and throughout Italy. The enormity of what happened on that distant and rainy night in the Marche was then concretely reflected in the exceptionally high number of military honors awarded to the protagonists of those firefights, both to those who unfortunately lost their lives and to the survivors. Yet little is said about that double massacre, ever less, as if it were a minor event or an event to be forgotten, already unknown to the younger generations.

This book, based on the procedural documents, on direct testimonies and on the articles of the time that appeared in the local press, aims to fill this incomprehensible gap and to give the right emphasis to five great heroes from next door (three gold medals for valor soldier and two silver medals, also for military valor) dead or seriously injured or left deeply scarred, as will be seen, doing their duty to the end and even something more. Going further.”