Luigi Calabresi (14 November 1937 – 17 May 1972) was an Italian Polizia di Stato officer in Milan. Responsible for investigating far-left political movements, Calabresi was assassinated in 1972 by members of Lotta Continua, who blamed him for the death of anarchist activist Giuseppe Pinelli in police custody in 1969. The deaths of Pinelli and Calabresi were significant events during the Years of Lead, a period of major political violence and unrest in Italy from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Early life and education
Calabresi was born on 14 November 1937 into a middle-class Roman family. His father was a wine and cooking oil merchant. He attended the classical secondary school San Leone Magno and then the Sapienza University of Rome to study Law. In 1964, he successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on the Sicilian Mafia. Having been part of Catholic associations during his years in school, he enrolled, while studying at the Sapienza, in the Oasis movement, founded in 1950 by Jesuits.
Police career
After finishing his studies, Calabresi, feeling himself, as he'd confided to friends, unsuited for the forensic work of jurisprudence, chose to try and enlist in the police. In 1965, he won the competition to enter L'istituto superiore di polizia and, after completing his studies there, he was assigned to the position of deputy commissioner in Milan. During his time in the police force, he occasionally wrote articles that were published under a pseudonym in the newspaper Momento-sera.
Calabresi, in the course of his work in the political section of the police, cultivated contacts with various persons of the Italian left. Journalist Giampaolo Pansa, who knew him, described Calabresi as having a "cordial and easygoing air," someone who "reads a lot and tries to understand the ideas and the men of the extra-parliamentary left," ideas that had become "his job".
In 1967, after a series of contacts with the organizers of an event in Colico, Calabresi supported their request for a camping license, subsequently provided by the Como Police. During these contacts, Calabresi, according to his son Mario, met railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist activist and organizer. At next year's Christmas, Calabresi gave Pinelli as a gift Enrico Emanuelli's book 1000 Millions of People, a gift reciprocated by Pinelli the following August with Edgar Lee Masters' poetry collection Spoon River Anthology, ostensibly Pinelli's favorite book.
On 19 November 1969, the funeral of murdered policeman Antonio Annarumma in Milan was attended by large crowds and a number of prominent politicians. Mario Capanna of the Marxist group Movimento Studentesco joined the funeral procession in a public gesture of denunciation of political violence, but was physically attacked by a number of attendees. Calabresi was present and escorted Capanna away from the attacks. He'd previously met Capanna on 16 November 1967 while in charge of the police force that had evacuated Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, occupied for a few hours by students led by Capanna.
Family
In 1968, Luigi Calabresi married Gemma Capra whom he'd met at a celebratory party hosted by a friend in Milan. Genna had found him "witty, like Alberto Sordi." They had three sons: Mario, who grew up to become journalist and author, and also an editor of La Repubblica; Paolo; and Luigi, born a few months after his father's death.
Piazza Fontana bombing
The late 1960s and early 1970s years was a period of intense political agitation in Italy, characterized also by frequent acts of violence, including assassinations. On 12 December 1969, at 16:37 hours local time, a bomb exploded at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura (the National Agricultural Bank) in Piazza Fontana, near the Duomo cathedral, in Milan, Italy, killing seventeen people and wounding eighty-eight. The same day, three more bombs were detonated while a fourth was found unexploded, in Rome and Milan. No organization declared itself responsible for the attacks. Calabresi, having already undertaken investigations into other bombing attacks, was assigned the inquest for Piazza Fontana. MP Francesco Cossiga of the Christian Democrats believed the terrorist attack had been undertaken by the "extreme right," as he testified in the Parliament decades later. There has not been yet a final judicial verdict as to the culprits of the massacre.