A pinch of truth. The Moro case and the end of Italian politics

The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro marked the end of an era. Marco Damilano has decided to go back to that moment, to investigate the trajectories that, starting from one of the darkest chapters in Italian history, have spread outwards to the present. With the help of Moro's personal papers, mostly kept in the private archive of Sergio Flamigni and left unpublished, he sheds light on the point where the drastic interruption of a political season met with the personal events of a generation, which between 16 March and 09 May 1978 brought forward the end of an era. After the dramatic events in Rome, according to Damilano, the long end of the First Republic began. An autobiographical tale that goes through the dissolution of the once-dominant Democrazia Cristiana political party, the death of Berlinguer, the fall of the Wall, Tangentopoli and the inaction of Craxi in Tunisia, until the last season, inaugurated by his television metaphor: Big Brother. And so we arrive at Berlusconi, and on to Grillo and Renzi, protagonists of a politics that has made a virtue of narcissism and nihilism, that has tapped into fear and anger.