Italy Town Debates Whether to Honor the Assassin of King Umberto I

Italy is a nation where history dies hard, if at all. The past, be it that of the Etruscans, the Romans or medieval princelings and Popes, is always a part of the present.

Nowhere has that become more evident than in the bizarre, bitter debate over terrorism that has recently monopolized public life here in Carrara, a modest Tuscan town nestled between the calm Mediterranean Sea and the hard marble quarries of the Apuan Alps.

For Carrara, one of the birthplaces of European anarchism in the 19th Century, is in the throes of a bitter historical dispute. The question is: When is a terrorist not a terrorist?

Deep Divisions

The argument, which has received national attention in recent months, has revived the deep historical divisions between monarchists and republicans that dominated the birth of the Italian nation in 1860, resurrected Italy’s anachronistic anarchist movement and resulted in at least 15 members of the City Council being sued for allegedly supporting an attempt on the life of an Italian head of state.

Typically, the debate stems not from any recent events--and Italy has certainly had its share of modern terrorism--but from an anarchist’s assassination of Italy’s King Umberto I 86 years ago.

The argument is rooted in a decision by Carrara’s city council to donate public land for a monument honoring the king’s assassin, an Italian anarchist named Gaetano Bresci, who had migrated to Paterson, N.J., before returning to Italy to gun down the king in July, 1900.

Hero or Terrorist?

At issue is whether Bresci was, in fact, freeing Italy from a murderous tyrant, as his supporters claim, or, as his critics argue, indulging in an act of terrorism of the type that killed the prominent Christian Democratic Party political leader Aldo Moro in 1978 and innocent tourists at Rome’s airport last December.

The debate, in fact, revolves around the contemporary issue of how to distinguish a terrorist from a freedom fighter.

“There can never be any shame in killing an oppressor of the people,” said 83-year-old Ugo Mazzucchelli, a former marble-quarry worker and anti-fascist resistance leader who remains Carrara’s--and Italy’s--most prominent anarchist.

“And there is no question that King Umberto was an oppressor,” Mazzucchelli, the spirit behind the monument for Bresci, said in an interview. “We don’t consider Bresci an assassin or a terrorist. We view him as a justified avenger who brought justice for Umberto’s victims.”

Monument Proposed

Mazzucchelli began advocating a monument for Bresci in 1982 as a means of honoring all those who, he said, “had fought against tyranny, fascism and the repression of man by man.”

His proposal got its initial endorsement a year ago when a City Council majority consisting of its republicans, socialists and independents, along with three communists, first voted in favor of granting the monument committee a small plot of land in front of the local cemetery.

The vote outraged the city’s conservative minority, who called it the equivalent of endorsing a terrorist. It soon led to a mobilization of Italy’s long-discredited monarchists (the monarchy was abolished in a national referendum because of its support for the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini during World War II) and the nation’s neo-fascist movement.

Suits Filed

This spring, because of a suit brought by monarchists and neo-fascists, 14 of the original 15 City Council members who voted for the monument were accused of having violated the law by supporting an attack on the Italian head of state, even though it occurred before the current penal code was enacted.

When a new City Council endorsed the same motion this summer, a new suit on the same charge was initiated against 21 persons--the 14 council members who voted again in favor of it and seven others, including Mazzucchelli, who had promoted the monument.

“I maintain this vote is an offense against the morality of Italians and the dignity of the Italian people,” declared the exiled pretender to the Italian throne, Victor Emanuel of Savoy. “Umberto I was a good, constitutional sovereign, called to do his duty in a time that was not easy.”

Umberto’s many critics, past and present, accuse him of doing much more than his constitutional duty in repressing the nation’s rising populist movement. In particular, Umberto is held responsible for a bloody incident involving demonstrating workers in Milan in 1898 when one of his generals, Bava Baccaris, turned his cannons on the crowd and killed at least 80 people. It was that act, Bresci testified at his trial in 1900, that convinced him to return to Italy to shoot the king.

Life Sentence

Bresci was arrested on the spot after the slaying. He was tried within months and sentenced to life imprisonment, with seven years of solitary confinement. He was found hanged in his cell under mysterious circumstances shortly after going to prison. His supporters claim that his death was the work of police, while his detractors contend that it was suicide.

Carrara lawyer Alberto Pincioni, who is both the defense attorney for the 15 City Council members sued last year and one of the 21 defendants sued this fall, claims that the issue has been blown out of proportion largely because anti-terrorism is a popular political issue today.

“The law we are being accused of violating didn’t even exist at the time of Bresci’s killing of the king,” he said.

Pincioni claims that the town favors honoring Bresci because of its tradition of opposing tyranny--an opposition led in the 19th Century by the anarchists who came from the city’s famous marble quarries and the republicans (the party Pincioni belongs to today) who always opposed monarchy and oppression.

Debate Called ‘Ridiculous’

“I don’t think we can confuse the act of a Bresci against a tyrant like King Umberto and that of the Red Brigades against someone like Aldo Moro,” Pincioni said. Sitting in his office just off the city’s central Piazza Matteoti, where the Italian Federation of Anarchists still keeps an office with a flagpole and official crest, he added: “Bresci had a reason to do what he did and did it openly and accepted the consequences. The Red Brigades had neither a reason nor acted openly.”

The site for the monument, meanwhile, has been sequestered by the courts pending the outcome of the judicial proceedings.

“The whole thing is ridiculous,” said one of Carrara’s leading businessmen, asking that his name not be used. “We are honoring a libertarian tradition here that has always been our legacy; we are not approving terrorism.