the essay by Miguel Gotor-Corriere.it

The fulcrum of the book is, of course, the Moro case, which the author studied at length. But not only does Miguel Gotor tell illuminating details about the assassination of the DC president; it goes beyond the traditional reading, according to which Moro’s death closes the 1970s and the Christian Democrat era.

the opposite is true. Rightly Gotor places the end of the decade in 1982, with the victory of the World Cup in Spain. then that Italy changes mood. The politics of the streets and squares, which had caused so much trouble, but had called a generation to public life, ended. And the ebb begins, the retreat into privacy, the disengagement. The age of sandwiches. About disco music, joie de vivre, consumerism, rampantism as the author writes, and also about the economic recovery. With the end of that mimesis of civil war that lasted for more than a decade.

As for the DC, it will survive the murder of one of its thoroughbred horses without too many worries. Gotor recalls not only that the Christian Democrats will govern the country until 1992 (albeit temporarily handing over Palazzo Chigi between 1981 and 1987, always keeping it for the Ministry of the Interior), but that the protagonists of the Moro case will all have a future light. Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga resigns later the discovery of the body in via Caetani, a plastic symbol of the bankruptcy of the interior ministry and the state; but a little over a year later we find him Prime Minister, then President of the Senate, then President of the Republic. Bettino Craxi, proponent of the negotiation, has brighter years ahead of him, before the abrupt decline and dramatic end. As for Giulio Andreotti, the man of the hard line and of the tissue paper – false – on the widows of via Fani ready to set themselves on fire, he will be the last head of government of the Christian Democrats.

Generation Seventy. History of the longest decade of the short century (Einaudi) it has the advantage of showing us the decade often defined as leaden from different points of view. For example from that of social evolution: Workers’ statute, divorce law confirmed by the 1974 referendum, family law reform with the abolition of marital power and equality between men and women, decriminalization of abortion, opening of the school to family representatives.

Obviously there is the story of political violence. Severe on both fronts: red terrorism, ferocious in its fury on magistrates, carabinieri, policemen, reformists, foremen, even workers; and black terrorism, whose massacres are remembered in detail, with the subsequent misdirections that cannot be attributed to the usual deviant sectors of the secret services, because at times they were the responsibility of the heads of the secret services. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is related to the evolution of costume Italian.

Gotor’s work is no coincidence opens up on the music and film scene. Italy exiting the economic boom covered by tensions that emerge explicitly in films such as Fists in the pocket by Marco Bellocchio e Before the revolution by Bernardo Bertolucci, but also in a more nuanced way in songs such as Nobody can judge me by Caterina Caselli – Everyone has the right to live as they can – e There was a boy like me who loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones by Gianni Morandi.

From these signs of the times Gotor deduces that the desire to be there and to count was mixed with an uncertain but pungent anxiety of rebellion, which challenged the respectable values ​​​​and bourgeois life models breathed up to that moment in the family, at school, at the university, in relations with religion and the constituted authority. The reaction was already preparing its answer: in 1965 the conference at the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome dedicated to the Revolutionary War, inspired by the idea that communism was on the offensive all over the world, including Italy, and therefore a maneuver of intelligence, open to neo-fascist labor but guided by pro-Atlantic minds, capable of provoking an authoritarian change. the beginning of the strategy of tension, which bloodied the first half of the 1970s (with the aftermath of the Bologna station massacre); while in the second half of the decade red terrorism will rage.

In the background, a petty bourgeois Italy, frightened by the news, incredulous in the face of violence, ready to take refuge behind the Christian Democrat shield but at the same time dissatisfied with the present. An Italy that Gotor acutely stages from the first pages, through letters to Gigliola Cinquetti, very young winner of the 1964 Sanremo festival with a reassuring song right from the title, I don’t have the age. Many write to the candid Gigliola often superimposing the slender figure of the child singer on the Madonna, but also on Lucia dei Betrothed. A girl from Novara explains that she identifies with her and that she is a bit old-fashioned, who would never wear a miniskirt and would never fall in love with a longhair. A thirteen year old from Nuoro is advised not to do like Rita Paone (yes) and Minas. An elderly gentleman from Rome celebrates his victory against the degeneration of the art of music and singing prevailing in this demeaning post-war period and against the multiple aberrations of today’s deranged youth. But even more significant is the letter from Lena da Boves, in the province of Cuneo, who appreciates Gigliola’s grace and her good education, very rare things in these dynamic times.

Around that allocution and the paradoxical meaning that Lena da Boves attributes to it – dynamism as disvalue – Gotor builds his compelling narration, which lasts 450 pages without ever getting boring precisely because it is anchored to this key concept: Italy in the 1970s appears frightened of itself, of too sudden changes, from the risks of civil war, from the impetuous development of the industrial age with its dramatic consequences – the uprooting of southern youth, toxic clouds, social conflict, the temptation of the armed party -; yet that Italy was able to avoid the worst, saving democracy, freedom, and also an idea – however confused and contradictory – of progress.

The book and the author

Miguel Gotor’s essay Generation Seventy
(Einaudi, pages 450, euro 34) analyzes the events that marked our country between 1966, the year of the Florence flood, and 1982, the year of Italy’s victory in the World Cup. Born in Rome in 1971, Gotor teaches modern history at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and holds the position of councilor for culture of the municipality of Rome. Among his books: Italy of the twentieth century
(Einaudi, 2019); The Republic Memorial (Einaudi, 2011). Also for Einaudi you edited the Letters from captivity
by Aldo Moro (2008)