Free The Italians by John Hooper Page A

said he had killed Mussolini on the orders of a British secret agent and that the execution took place even earlier in the day, at eleven a.m. In 2005 the state-owned Rai television network broadcast a documentary containing new evidence in support of Lonati’s version. According to this, the British agent’s mission was to ensure Mussolini was killed and to recover compromising letters written to him by Winston Churchill. The wartime British prime minister was claimed to have secretly considered with Mussolini the possibility of a separate peace—a clear breach of his agreement with the U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, that they would not cease hostilities until they’d secured the unconditional surrender of each of the Axis powers.
    As the bodies of Italy’s dictator and his lover were being stoned by the mob in Piazzale Loreto, the first moves were being made in what would later come to be known as the Cold War. A few days earlier, Russian troops had fought their way into Berlin and on May 2 would raise the red flag over the Reichstag. The division of Europe that followed was to provide fertile ground in Italy for the nurturing of mysteries. And this was particularly true of the years following the student revolts of 1968, when the spirit of revolution swept across Europe and fears grew in Washington and elsewhere that Italy risked falling into the hands of Marxists.
    On December 12, 1969, a bomb went off in Milan a few hundred yards from the Duomo, in Piazza Fontana. Sixteen people were killed. To this day, nobody can say for certain who planted it, or why. The police originally blamed the attack on anarchists, but the case against them soon fell apart and suspicion fell on neo-Fascists, one of whom had close links with an officer in the Italian secret service who was also a convinced far-right-winger. The suspects were tried, but cleared on appeal. Every year, to this day, friends and relatives of the victims gather on the anniversary of the bombing to call in vain for answers and justice.
    The Piazza Fontana bombing was the first in a succession of unexplained terrorist attacks over the next fifteen years. Bombs exploded on trains, at an anti-Fascist rally and—most lethally—in the railway station at Bologna in 1980. Altogether, more than 150 people died in what is thought to have been a campaign by neo-Fascists and rogue members of the intelligence services. The supposed aim was to create an atmosphere of constant trepidation in which people would be more apt to back conservative, or perhaps even authoritarian, responses.
    Bombs, though, were not the only causes of mysteries that have proved insoluble to police and judges alike. In 1974 a young magistrate uncovered evidence of an organization called the Rosa dei Venti (“The Weather Vane”). It was suspected of planning terrorist attacks and of having links to an organization set up by NATO. After a warrant was issued for the arrest of the head of Italy’s secret service, the investigation was transferred to Rome, where it rapidly lost momentum. * The Rosa dei Venti has since been all but forgotten. What exactly it was and what exactly it did will probably never be known. Equally impenetrable mysteries were to develop out of the crash of an Italian airliner off the island of Ustica in 1980 and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II the following year.
    For true connoisseurs of the unexplained, however, nothing is perhaps quite as tantalizingly baffling as the story of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last, unfinished book, Petrolio . After the poet, novelist and film director was murdered in 1975—and the reasons for his death are themselves a mystery—it was found that Pasolini had left a manuscript running to more than five hundred pages. It was divided into numbered sections the author called appunti (notes). The central figure in Petrolio is a man (who turns into a woman halfway through) working for the state-owned oil and gas company, Eni. The book