1. Luigi Calabresi was an Italian Polizia di Stato officer in Milan.
23 Facts About Luigi Calabresi
1. 2.
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.
3.
The deaths of Pinelli and Luigi 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.
4.
Luigi Calabresi was born on 14 November 1937 into a middle-class Roman family.
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Luigi Calabresi's father was a wine and cooking oil merchant.
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Luigi Calabresi attended the classical secondary school San Leone Magno and then the Sapienza University of Rome to study Law.
7.
In 1967, after a series of contacts with the organizers of an event in Colico, Luigi Calabresi supported their request for a camping license, subsequently provided by the Como Police.
8.
Luigi Calabresi was present and escorted Capanna away from the attacks.
9.
In 1968, Luigi Calabresi married Gemma Capra whom he'd met at a celebratory party hosted by a friend in Milan.
10.
Luigi Calabresi, having already undertaken investigations into other bombing attacks, was assigned the inquest for Piazza Fontana.
11.
In commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office were present Antonio Allegra and four policemen from the political section, Vito Panessa, Giuseppe Caracuta, Carlo Mainardi, and Pietro Mucilli, as well as Carabinieri lieutenant Savino Lograno, subsequently identified as a SISDE agent.
12.
Luigi Calabresi had cited [to Pinelli] his dealings with a third person whom [Calabresi] obviously was not in a position to name, leaving [Pinelli] with the impression that he knew a lot more than in fact he did.
13.
In 1975, D'Ambrosio closed the investigation by establishing that Luigi Calabresi had not been present in the room at the time of Pinelli's fall and that the "suicide thesis" was unlikely due to lack of any plausible motivation.
14.
The letter, denoted as a "manifesto," directly and explicitly accused Luigi Calabresi of being "responsible" for the death of Pinelli and denounced the actions in that affair of judge Carlo Biotti, Luigi Calabresi's lawyer Michele Lener, commissioner Marcello Guida, and magistrates Giovanni Caizzi and Carlo Amati.
15.
On 15 April 1970, Luigi Calabresi brought charges against Pio Baldelli, editor-in-chief of the Lotta Continua magazine, for "ongoing and aggravated defamation through attribution of a specific act", to wit, the responsibility for Pinelli's death.
16.
In October 1971, the newspaper of Lotta Continua published a "letter of support" to the organization and its newspaper, in view of the trial that followed Luigi Calabresi's lawsuit, addressed to the Turin Attorney General.
17.
On 17 May 1972, at 09:15, after Luigi Calabresi had exited from his home at 06:00 via Cherubini and started to walk towards his office, a man approached him from behind and fired two gunshots, one hitting Calabresi in the back and the other in the neck.
18.
Luigi Calabresi started writing as guest columnist for Il Foglio, La Repubblica, and Panorama, and authored books on Italy's recent political past, such as L'ombra di Moro.
19.
When Milite died in 2015, journalist Mario Luigi Calabresi tweeted that Milite had raised them and "taken [them] out of the night", citing a line from Milite's poems.
20.
Luigi Calabresi used that reference in the title of the book that he wrote about his father's history in 2007: "Spingendo la notte piu in la".
21.
Cardinal Camillo Ruini found merit in the petition and it was forwarded to Milan Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi who asserted that such an action would be "premature" given that the figure of Luigi Calabresi still had a "divisive effect" on the city of Milan.
22.
On 9 May 2009, during the Day of Commemoration of the Victims of Terrorism, Licia Rognini, Giuseppe Pinelli's widow, and Gemma Capra, the widow of Luigi Calabresi, met for the first time at the Quirinal Palace, invited by Giorgio Napolitano, President of the Italian Republic.
23.
The story of the Piazza Fontana massacre and the deaths of Pinelli and Luigi Calabresi were the inspiration for Marco Tullio Giordana's 2012 film Romanzo di una strage, in which Luigi Calabresi was portrayed by Valerio Mastandrea, and of the 2014 television miniseries Gli anni spezzati - Il commissario, with Emilio Solfrizzi as protagonist.