The Assassination of Aldo Moro

Aldo Moro was born on 23 September 1916 in Maglie, in Italy’s southern region of Apulia. Trained as a jurist, he became a professor of criminal law at the University of Bari, where his intellectual seriousness and measured temperament first brought him to prominence. Politics followed scholarship. During the Second World War and its aftermath, Moro aligned himself with Christian Democracy, the party that would dominate the Italian government for decades.

Moro’s rise coincided with Italy’s fragile postwar reconstruction. As a member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Italian Constitution in 1946–47, he helped shape the legal foundations of the new republic. From the outset, he was known less for charisma than for patience. He spoke carefully, avoided theatrical gestures, and preferred negotiation to confrontation. This approach would become both his defining strength and, ultimately, his most significant liability.

He served as Prime Minister of Italy five times between 1963 and 1976, though rarely with sweeping authority. Italian governments of the period were coalition affairs, fragile and short-lived. Moro excelled in this environment. He believed stability depended on inclusion, compromise, and gradual reform rather than ideological purity. During the 1960s, he promoted the centre-left coalition, bringing the Socialist Party into government and marginally widening Italy’s political base.

By the 1970s, Italy faced a different crisis. Economic stagnation, labour unrest, and political violence had eroded public confidence. Extremist groups on both the far left and far right used bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations to destabilise the state. Moro responded with what he believed was the only viable strategy: dialogue across ideological lines.

This led to his most controversial project, the “historic compromise”. Moro argued that the Italian Communist Party, then the largest communist party in Western Europe, should be allowed a role in government to reflect electoral reality and prevent further radicalisation. To his supporters, this was pragmatic realism. To his critics, it was a dangerous concession that threatened Italy’s alignment with NATO and the Western bloc.

By 1978, Moro was no longer prime minister, but he remained central to Italian political life as president of the Christian Democratic Party. On 16 March 1978, parliament was due to vote confidence in a new government supported, for the first time, by Communist abstention. Moro was travelling to the chamber when his convoy entered Via Fani in Rome.

He never arrived.

At the moment he was most committed to reshaping Italy’s political future through compromise, Aldo Moro became the target of those who believed violence, not negotiation, should decide the nation’s course.

Italy’s Years of Lead

By the late 1960s and 1970s, Italy had entered a period of sustained political violence that came to be known as the Years of Lead (Anni di piombo), a phrase drawn from the weight of bullets and the sense of permanent instability that settled over the country. It was an era defined by bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and armed confrontation, carried out by extremist groups who believed the Italian state itself was illegitimate.

The roots of the violence lay in a volatile mix of factors. Rapid industrialisation had transformed Italian society unevenly, producing economic growth alongside sharp inequality. Universities and factories became centres of protest. Student movements, labour strikes, and mass demonstrations challenged traditional authority, while the Cold War intensified ideological divisions. Italy’s position as a NATO member with the largest communist party in Western Europe made it a geopolitical fault line.

Extremism flourished on both ends of the political spectrum. Far-right groups pursued a strategy of chaos, using bombings to create fear and provoke authoritarian responses. The most notorious of these was the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which killed sixteen people and marked a psychological turning point. At the same time, far left organisations rejected parliamentary politics entirely, arguing that armed struggle was the only path to revolution.

The most prominent of these groups was the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse). Founded in the early 1970s, they targeted judges, police officers, journalists, business leaders, and politicians, framing their violence as attacks on the “imperialist state of the multinationals.” Kidnapping became a central tactic, intended to humiliate the state and expose what they saw as its weakness.

Successive Italian governments struggled to respond. Emergency laws expanded police powers, while intelligence services operated under layers of secrecy shaped by Cold War fears and domestic mistrust. Investigations were often slow, compromised, or politically charged. Public confidence eroded as violence became routine. Ordinary life continued, but with the constant expectation that another attack was inevitable.

Within this climate, compromise itself became dangerous. Politicians who advocated dialogue across ideological lines were accused of betrayal from multiple directions. Aldo Moro’s historic compromise, which sought to stabilise Italy by integrating the Communist Party into the political system, was viewed by extremists as an existential threat. For the Red Brigades, it undermined the revolutionary narrative. For hardline conservatives, it risked legitimising an enemy ideology.

By 1978, Italy was a democracy under siege from within. Violence had become a language of politics, and symbolism mattered as much as bloodshed. In that environment, Aldo Moro was not just a senior statesman. He was a symbol of negotiation in an age that increasingly rewarded force.

The Ambush on Via Fani

On the morning of 16 March 1978, Aldo Moro left his apartment in Via del Forte Trionfale in Rome, heading toward Parliament, where a crucial confidence vote was due to take place. The vote would formalise the new government led by Giulio Andreotti, supported for the first time by the abstention of the Italian Communist Party, the practical expression of Moro’s long-pursued historic compromise. It was one of the most politically sensitive days in postwar Italian history.

Moro travelled in a small convoy consisting of two cars and five bodyguards, all members of the Carabinieri and State Police. As the vehicles turned into Via Mario Fani, a quiet residential street in northern Rome, the convoy was suddenly blocked. A car cut across the road ahead, while another boxed them in from behind. Within seconds, armed men emerged from multiple directions.

The attackers were members of the Red Brigades, operating with military precision. Disguised in airline uniforms to avoid suspicion, they opened fire at close range with automatic weapons. The ambush lasted less than two minutes, but it was devastating. All five bodyguards were killed at the scene: Oreste Leonardi, Domenico Ricci, Raffaele Iozzino, Giulio Rivera, and Francesco Zizzi.

Moro himself was pulled from the car unharmed. Witnesses later described the operation as calm, controlled, and meticulously rehearsed. The attackers showed no hesitation and no interest in collateral damage beyond their intended targets. Within moments, they had transferred Moro into another vehicle and disappeared into the city.

The street was left littered with shell casings and shattered glass. Residents emerged to scenes of chaos and disbelief. The scale of the attack, carried out in broad daylight in the capital, shocked even a country accustomed to political violence. This was not a symbolic kidnapping. It was an act of war against the Italian state.

News spread rapidly. Parliament was suspended. Emergency meetings were convened. Within hours, the Red Brigades claimed responsibility, declaring Moro a “prisoner of the people” and announcing their intention to put him on trial for crimes against the working class.

The ambush on Via Fani marked a point of no return. It demonstrated that the Red Brigades could strike at the very heart of Italian power and escape. It also transformed Aldo Moro from a politician into a hostage whose fate would test the Italian state’s resolve, principles, and capacity to govern in the face of terror.

Fifty-Five Days in Captivity

From 16 March to 9 May 1978, Aldo Moro was held captive by the Red Brigades, hidden in a series of clandestine locations in Rome. The group announced that Moro would be placed on “trial” for what they described as crimes against the Italian people, framing the kidnapping as a political act rather than a ransom operation. What followed was a prolonged confrontation between a terrorist organisation determined to force negotiation and a state determined to resist it.

Moro’s captivity was punctuated by letters. Writing in careful, lucid language, he addressed his family, party colleagues, the Pope, and senior figures within the Italian government. In these messages, he urged negotiation and warned that refusal would lead to his death. He appealed to Christian Democratic values, arguing that saving a human life should outweigh political rigidity. The letters revealed a man under extreme psychological pressure, but not incoherent. They were measured, strategic, and deeply unsettling.

The Italian government adopted a position of non-negotiation, supported publicly by the Christian Democratic leadership and backed by Italy’s Western allies. The fear was that conceding to the Red Brigades would legitimise political kidnapping and invite further violence. This stance hardened as the weeks passed, despite public protests, appeals from Moro’s family, and growing discomfort within sections of the political class.

Inside the Red Brigades, debates also unfolded. Some members believed Moro could be exchanged for imprisoned militants, achieving a symbolic victory. Others argued that execution was necessary to demonstrate resolve and expose what they saw as the moral emptiness of the state. As time passed without negotiation, the group escalated pressure, releasing staged photographs of Moro and issuing communiqués that alternated between ideological rhetoric and procedural menace.

Police operations ran continuously in the background. Thousands of officers conducted raids, checkpoints, and searches across Rome and beyond. Safe houses were uncovered, suspects arrested, but Moro remained hidden. The gap between operational effort and tangible progress became painfully visible, reinforcing a sense of impotence.

The captivity ended as it had begun, with a unilateral decision. On 9 May 1978, after fifty-five days, the Red Brigades announced that Moro had been executed. The state’s refusal to negotiate had held, but at the cost of a life that many believed could have been saved.

The period of captivity exposed deep fractures within Italian society: between principle and pragmatism, deterrence and mercy, state authority and human cost. Moro’s letters would continue to haunt Italian politics long after his death, not as evidence of weakness, but as records of a crisis in which every option carried irreversible consequences.

The Body in the Renault 4

On the morning of 9 May 1978, the Red Brigades made their final move. After fifty-five days of captivity, they telephoned a journalist to announce that Aldo Moro had been executed. They provided precise instructions for where his body could be found. It was not hidden in a remote location or abandoned carelessly. It was placed deliberately, with meaning.

Moro’s body was discovered inside the boot of a red Renault 4, parked in Via Michelangelo Caetani, a narrow street in central Rome. The location was chosen with calculated symbolism. The street lay roughly midway between the headquarters of the Christian Democratic Party and the Italian Communist Party, the two forces whose attempted cooperation Moro had spent years trying to engineer. In death, he was placed between them.

The car itself was unremarkable, blending effortlessly into the city. Moro had been shot multiple times at close range while seated in the boot, wrapped in a blanket. The execution was clinical rather than theatrical. There was no attempt to disguise what had been done, but neither was there gratuitous display. The message was political, not sensational.

News of the discovery spread rapidly. Rome fell into a stunned silence. Parliament halted proceedings. Flags were lowered. Across Italy, public reaction was mixed: grief, anger, and exhaustion. The protracted crisis was over, but there was no sense of relief. The outcome felt both inevitable and unbearable, the end point of a confrontation in which every path had narrowed toward loss.

For the Red Brigades, the killing was intended as a demonstration of power and ideological consistency. They argued that the state had chosen principle over a human life, and that Moro’s death exposed the moral bankruptcy of parliamentary democracy. Instead, the execution marked the beginning of their decline. Public sympathy evaporated. The brutality of the act hardened resolve against them, strengthening anti-terrorism measures and isolating the group from the broader left.

For the Italian state, the moment was one of bitter vindication and profound failure. The refusal to negotiate had held, but the cost was undeniable. Questions that had simmered throughout the captivity now erupted openly. Could Moro have been saved? Had political rigidity overridden human judgment? Did the state protect itself, or had it sacrificed one of its own?

The image of the Renault 4 became one of the defining symbols of the Years of Lead. Not because it shocked, but because it clarified. It revealed the outcome of a political standoff in its starkest form: a body placed carefully in the centre of the city, forcing a nation to confront what its choices had produced.

Moro’s death closed the immediate crisis, but it opened a reckoning that Italy has never fully resolved.

Responsibility, Aftermath, and an Unfinished Reckoning

The assassination of Aldo Moro did not end with the discovery of his body. It triggered a prolonged legal, political, and moral reckoning that continues to divide Italy decades later. In the immediate aftermath, the state moved aggressively against the Red Brigades, arresting key members and dismantling much of the organisation’s leadership. Trials throughout the late 1970s and 1980s led to multiple convictions, including life sentences for those directly involved in Moro’s kidnapping and murder.

Yet accountability did not stop with the gunmen. Almost immediately, questions arose about the actions, and inactions, of the Italian state itself. Parliamentary inquiries examined intelligence failures, police missteps, and the political decisions that shaped the response to the kidnapping. Several commissions concluded that while there was no single conspiracy, the investigation had been marked by fragmentation, rivalry between agencies, and missed opportunities. The possibility that Moro could have been located alive was never conclusively disproven.

Moro’s letters became central to this debate. Some politicians dismissed them as the coerced words of a broken man, written under duress and therefore politically irrelevant. Others argued that they revealed a clear, rational appeal for negotiation that was ignored for reasons of ideology and international pressure. The divide over how to read those letters hardened into a broader dispute about whether the state had defended democracy or betrayed its own ethical foundations.

The international context further complicated the reckoning. Italy’s allies, particularly within NATO, had viewed the historic compromise with deep suspicion. Moro’s attempt to bring the Communist Party closer to power alarmed Washington and others, adding a layer of geopolitical tension to an already volatile domestic crisis. While no evidence has proven foreign involvement in his death, the broader Cold War environment shaped the decisions taken in Rome.

In Italian public memory, Moro occupies a singular position. He is remembered simultaneously as a principled statesman, a victim of terrorism, and a man abandoned by the political system he helped sustain. Streets, schools, and institutions bear his name, yet consensus about his fate remains elusive.

The Moro case endures because it resists closure. The killers were identified and punished, but the deeper questions, about responsibility, choice, and the price of political principle, remain unresolved. Italy emerged from the Years of Lead battered but intact. Moro did not. His assassination remains not just a historical event, but a fault line, a moment when democracy, fear, and ideology collided, and the consequences continue to shape how Italy understands power, compromise, and loss.

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