... II Background of The Play Late in the afternoon of December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded inside the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricolture in downtown Milan, killing sixteen people and wounding eighty-eight. The event had enormous political repercussions all over Italy. It touched off an immediate police roundup of left-wing activists and sympathizers; throughout the country, members of "far-left" organizations, and numerous Communist Party militants as well, were arrested and brought to police headquarters for identification. Many were held for days without bail or legal assistance of any kind. Soon after the terrorist attack, a young Milanese railroad worker named Giuseppe Pinelli, member of a small anarchist group, was summoned to central police headquarters for "questioning." He was kept in prison for three days, during which time he was repeatedly and brutally interrogated by the police. On December 15, during the course of an examination by Inspector Luigi Calabresi and several other officers, he "precipitated" from the fourth-story window of the building. Pinelli's death and was officially declared a suicide, and taken as a confession of guilt. In the meantime, an ill-starred Roman anarchist named Pietro Valpreda, along with two other members of his group, were arrested in a police dragnet and formally indicted for the bombing. They remained in jail for nearly four years before being brought to trial. During the months which followed Pinelli's death and the arrest of the three anarchists, thousands of political activists were engaged in an intense effort to discover the truth about the crimes. They were operating under the most unfavorable circumstances: the police and law courts had responded to the bombing by launching a fierce campaign of repression and intimidation against the left. Names of some 14,000 workers, students, union organizers and political militants were placed on file with the police; mere were hundreds of arrests and searches. ...
