In Brescia on the morning of May 28, 1974 it’s raining cats and dogs, an anti-fascist demonstration is taking place in the city organized by the main trade union organisations, CGIL, CISL and UIL, four processions that converge in the central Piazza della Loggia where, at 10 o’clock, the speakers are expected to speak from the stage, set up in front of the municipal building.
A dense array of umbrellas crowds in the center of the square, many find shelter under the porticoes waiting for the rallies to start. All the parties of the constitutional arc are participating in the demonstration, the communists, the socialists, the republicans, even the Christian Democrats, with the exception of the Italian Social Movement accused of fomenting and covering up the dark plots of fascist terrorism.
The fear of an authoritarian turning point in our country in that historical moment was tangible, looming, it had happened in Greece in 1967 with the colonels’ coup, it had happened in Chile the previous year with Pinochet’s coup. Everyone also remembers the real or presumed attempts to overthrow the democratic order with the Solo Plan (1964) and the failed Borghese coup (1970).
And then there were the other massacres, the Italian ones as bloody as they were shrouded in mystery: the December 12, 1969 the bomb at the headquarters of National Agricultural Bank in Piazza Fontana in Milan (17 dead 88 injured), the July 22, 1970 another bomb derails at the height of Gioia Tauro the direct train to Turin coming from Sicily (six dead, sixty injured), the May 31, 1972 a Fiat 500 packed with explosives kills three carabinieri a Petean, in the province of Gorizia. It is the strategy of tension, carried out by hidden minds and hands in the labyrinth of black subversion and deviant services. State massacres were called even if the judicial truths did not always match the conspiracy hypotheses, also due to subsequent misdirections.
In the Brescia area, in the months preceding May 28th, a whole sequence of violence and attacks which the trade unions and left-wing organizations do not hesitate to define as “neo-fascist” in nature: the February 16 a bomb devastates the entrance to the Coop in Viale Venezia, claimed by a leaflet from Sam (Mussolini action squads), the February 27 in Lumezzane the headquarters of the unitary union of metalworkers, the8th of March two other bombs were found inside the Church of the Grazie, il March 14 in Leno a bomb hits the CISL building, the March 14 five bombs are found in a public park in Brescia,April 8 more shots fired at the Coop, the April 27 the police foil an attack against the local PSI headquarters in Largo Torrelunga; The first of May, Labor Day, another failed attack against the CISL: in front of the entrance to the headquarters, a canvas bag with eight sticks of dynamite already primed; The May 18th in Piazza del Mercato, a 21-year-old neo-fascist militant called Silvio Ferrari lost his life and was carrying a bomb on the floor of his Vespa Primavera.
It is to respond to this escalation of provocations that the unions are calling for the demonstrations on May 28, but few think that that demonstration could itself have been the object of a brutal attack. The police do not see any particular risks, there are no exceptional security measures, they carry out a routine inspection of the stage where the speakers speak, but the officers do not control the square, in particular no one thinks about the metal waste boxes placed under the porticoes: they had been emptied before 7am by garbage collectors.
When he speaks CISL trade unionist Franco Castrezzati it is 10.08, in his speech he attacks head-on the MSI and its secretary Giorgio Almirante, “a gloomy servant of the nefarious ideals of the Republic of Salò who plotted shootings and repression”, stating that his party should be outlawed because it is a direct and never repentant heir of the twenty years of Mussolini. Six minutes later, at 10.12, Castrezzati utters the following expression: «In Milan…», then a sudden and terrible explosion tears the air: a TNT bomb explodes in the eastern part of the square, hidden right at the inside the waste bins under the columns of the portico which the police did not want to check. The scene is apocalyptic, a sea of blood everywhere, pieces of dismembered bodies, screams of desperation and calls for help that cover the moans of the dying wounded, the effect of the explosion is increased by the density of the participants, crowded together more like sardines.
From the stage Castrezzati invites his comrades to stay still, to remain calm and to remain inside the square, we must avoid that someone is crushed in the panic but it is not easy, in a few minutes the ambulances arrive and at that point the demonstrators are made to flow towards the nearby Piazza della Vittoria. The toll will be eight dead and over one hundred injured.
The victims are Giulietta Banzi Bazoli, 34 years old; Livia Bottardi in Milani, 32 years old; Alberto Trebeschi, 37 years old; Clementina Calzari Trebeschi, 31 years old; Euplo Natali, 69 years old; Luigi Pinto, 25 years old; Bartolomeo Talenti, 56 years old; Vittorio Zambarda, 60 years old. At 1.00 pm, once the rescue phase is over, the fire hydrants clean the square, an operation that seems normal to everyone, even to the small crowd of workers who are still inside Piazza della Loggia. Except that those water cannons, which arrived at the site of the explosion before the forensic police, forever erased the traces and evidence of the bomb, an irresponsible act that would further complicate the investigations and judicial trials that would follow over the years.
