In 2015, a court of appeal in Milan issued a final life sentence to rightist militant Ordine Nuovo (New Order) members Carlo Maria Maggi and Maurizio Tramonte for ordering the bombing.
This closed one of the longest-running cases on terrorism during Italy’s ‘years of lead’ of rightist and leftist terror.
Currently two other Ordine Nuovo-linked former militants, Roberto Zorzi and Marco Toffaloni, are on trial for actually carrying out the bombing.
“Fifty years have passed since the cowardly attack in Piazza della Loggia that killed eight people and wounded 102, some seriously, with permanent injuries,” Mattarella said at the ceremony.
“Today the Italian Republic is Brescia, it is Piazza della Loggia.”
The head of State bemoaned the cover-ups that long denied justice to the victims, as with other atrocities committed during the ‘years of lead’.
“From the Piazza Fontana massacre in 1969, to the Bologna [train station] bombing in 1980, the greatest massacre of neo-fascist terrorism, and again in 1984 in San Benedetto, there was a shocking sequence of bloody events,” Mattarella said.
“[They were all] linked by the single thread of black (neo-Fascist) subversion and characterised by difficulty in finding the historical and judicial truth, hindered by unacceptable depredations, errors and inefficiencies.
“But the desire for truth and justice never stopped.
“Accomplices and colluders, the strategists of death, do not represent the State, but pose a very serious threat to the Republic.
“They betrayed Italy.
“They plotted in the shadows against their people and their country.
“Faced with the violent war of opposing forms of terrorism - black and red (leftist) - which, in that season of bloodshed and bitter international conflict, tried to overthrow the Republic and democracy, we can say today with certainty that the State, the Republic, its people, with its authentic, loyal servants, prevailed.”
ANSA
