Ordine Nuovo

On December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded in the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan's Piazza Fontana, killing 16 and wounding 90. [Page 452]Authorities later determined that Ordine Nuovo, an Italian right-wing neofascist group also known as Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, was responsible for the attack. The bombing marked the beginning of Ordine Nuovo's “strategy of tension”—a series of public bombings intended to destabilize Italy and diminish support for the Communist Party. The group's terror-bombing campaign would continue for more than a decade.

The origins of Ordine Nuovo are still in dispute. Among of the fiercest advocates for fascism in Italy, Ordine Nuovo was organized around 1960 by a journalist named Pino Rauti. The group was long mired in controversy over an alleged connection to the CIA. Informants have testified that Rauti and many other Italian fascists were actually “rehabilitated” Nazi collaborators tapped by the CIA for a NATO “stay behind” anticommunist terror network, known as “Gladio.”

Ordine Nuovo's terror campaign began with the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing and continued with a number of similar attacks throughout Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s. In July 1970, Ordine Nuovo bombed a Rome-Messina train, leaving six people dead and nearly 100 wounded. Four years later, members of the group threw grenades into an antifascist march in Brescia, killing eight activists. Its most infamous and horrific attack occurred on August 1, 1980, when an offshoot of Ordine Nuovo, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (ARN), bombed the Bologna train station. More than 80 civilians died.

On June 30, 2001, three members of Ordine Nuovo received life sentences for planting the Piazza Fontana bomb in 1969. Some prosecutors and families of the victims maintain that this was a political sentencing; one of the original suspects, Giuseppe Pinelli, died after falling out of a police-house window during questioning. Another suspect, Pietro Valpreda, spent only three years in prison before being set free. Rauti is now the head of another neofascist group, Fiammi Tricolore (Tricolor Flame), which is popular with both skinheads and neo-Nazis.