Central Rome, 9 May 1978. A crowd of curious passersby spills out by an open car boot. There lies the bullet-riddled body of Aldo Moro, Italy’s Prime Minister, parked mid-way between the party headquarters of the Christian Democrats and those of the Communist Party. The scene concludes 55 days of kidnap and sequestration by the Marxist revolutionaries of the Red Brigades.
One of the darkest chapters in Italian history, the Aldo Moro affair continues to be revisited and written up to this day. Acclaimed film director Marco Bellocchio is the latest to add his take. In his mini-series Esterno Notte (“Exterior Night”), which was broadcast on French-German channel Arte throughout March, Bellochio walks us through the tortuous and often little-known history of Italian terrorism.
Bellocchio gives the floor to the tragedy’s protagonists: from the members of the Red Brigades to Aldo Moro himself, without forgetting his family and the representatives of the political class of the time. The assassination remains a national trauma closely linked to the “Years of Lead” in Italy, which spanned the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
