It was the anarchists: The quest for the truth about Italy’s bombs

On 12 December 1969 a bomb exploded in Piazza Fontana, in Milan, killing 17 people and wounding 84. This paper uses critical and activist criminology, and explores, through a resistance lens, the struggle for truth that followed. On the one hand, denial through a strategy of manipulation was carried out by both the Italian government and mainstream media, which placed the blame on the anarchist movement, laying the groundwork for an authoritarian upheaval. On the other hand, the mobilization of both the old and the new left solidified to counter this denial by illuminating state responsibility for the Piazza Fontana bombing. This paper models the specific species of state crime denial used by a transnational coalition of far-right forces operating in and around the Italian state, and the forms of resistance within left civil society that helped counter denial and stall the authoritarian drift. It also looks to expand the literature on resistance to state crime, by documenting a still poorly understood episode in Italian history where civic opposition to state violence helped abort the further institutionalization of authoritarian politics. This paper will shed a light on the dialectical process between state crime and resistance, as theorized by Green and Ward. Moreover, an analysis of resistance stages through the use of Stanley and McCulloch’s work, will allow me to carry out an in-depth analysis of the mobilization process that took place after the Piazza Fontana bombing.