Free The Italians by John Hooper

prison sentences at a trial in which the prosecution claimed that the victim had been killed in a bizarre sex game that turned brutally and tragically violent. But between the trial and the appeal, court-appointed experts poured scorn on the forensic evidence submitted by the prosecution, so by the time the case returned to court, not only were the two young appellants on trial, but also Italy’s methods of investigating and prosecuting serious crime.
    Such was the publicity given to the case that, by the time counsel were ready to sum up, it was no exaggeration to say that the eyes of the world were on the frescoed underground courtroom in Perugia where the appeal was being heard. So it was all the more surprising that, as he listened to their final pleas, the judge made no move to interrupt counsel, who repeated as fact claims that had been utterly discredited in earlier hearings. Each of the lawyers had his or her verità . It was only fair that they should be allowed to air it. How on earth the lay judges who sat alongside the professional judges were expected to get at the truth is anybody’s guess. But then, when the case was over, the presiding judge gave an interview in which he appeared to say that the task was anyhow impossible.
    “Our acquittal is the result of the truth that was created in the trial,” he said. “The real truth will remain unresolved, and may even be different.” Lewis Carroll could not have put it better. *
    I have sometimes reflected that the last part of that comment—“The real truth will remain unresolved, and may even be different”—deserves to be carved in marble on a suitable monument that could then be erected in the center of Rome. Time and again, important turning points in Italy’s modern history have been wrapped in a dense fog of discrepancy and contradiction as the various players aired their particular verità . You might start with the fate of its Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
    On the morning on April 27, 1945, at Dongo on the banks of Lake Como, a partisan commissar, Urbano Lazzaro, was checking trucks carrying German troops out of Italy when he discovered Mussolini in the back of one of them. The dictator was wearing glasses, was wrapped in a greatcoat and had a helmet pulled down over his face. Two days later, as dawn broke over Milan, early morning strollers were confronted with a gruesome sight in Piazzale Loreto. Hanging upside down from meat hooks attached to the roof of a petrol station were the bodies of the dictator; his mistress, Clara Petacci; and three senior Fascist officials. But what exactly happened in the intervening forty-eight hours will probably never be known.
    The official version is that the decision to execute Mussolini was taken at a meeting of partisan leaders and that the job of killing him was given to Walter Audisio, a Communist commander whose nom de guerre was Colonnello Valerio. But in a book he wrote in 1962, Lazzaro said the man he saw and who was identified as Colonnello Valerio was not Audisio but Luigi Longo, a very senior Communist official who, two years later, would become the leader of the Italian Communist Party. The implication was that Longo’s involvement had been hushed up so as to wipe the blood from the hands of a man destined for the top. Meanwhile, Audisio, who originally had said Lazzaro had been present at the execution, named a different person in his memoirs published thirty years later.
    Officially, Mussolini and Petacci died at the gates of a villa overlooking Lake Como on the afternoon of the day after they were caught. But in 1995 Lazzaro complicated matters further by saying they had been killed earlier, after Petacci tried to grab a gun from one of the partisans who had been escorting them to Milan for what was intended to be a public execution.
    At about the same time, yet another version began to emerge. It came from a retired Fiat executive, Bruno Lonati, who had been a Communist partisan. Lonati