was a far-left Italian Marxist–Leninist terrorist group, active in the country from the late 1970s until the early 1980s.
Context
Following the 1969–70 large-scale series of industrial action in Northern Italy, the acts of civil disobedience and mass demonstrations often turned to violent confrontations between leftist militants and the law enforcement authorities of the Italian state. A period of unprecedented social conflict began in the urban centers of Italy began, with acts of violence carried out almost daily by both right- and left-wing organizations. Many militants from both extremes turned to urban guerrilla warfare, officially designated as terrorism.
Background and creation A movement of autonomist ideology was formulating among leftist youth in 1974, the same year that the organization Comitati comunisti per il potere operaio ("Communist Committees for Worker Power") moved to establish a "military network". During the period between the spring and autumn of 1974, there was intense internal discourse among the ranks of the extra-parliamentary left organization Lotta Continua ("Continuous Struggle") about its future course. Some militants, mostly members of the group's security service, and particularly those based in Milan, Turin, Naples, and Brianza, criticized the "too intellectual line" ostensibly followed by Lotta. They proposed instead a "more interventionist, insurrectionist initiative". The proposal was essentially equivalent to Lotta joining the "armed struggle" and, as such, was rejected by the leadership, a development that led to a split in the ranks. During approximately the same time, some former members of Potere Operaio ("Workers' Power"), which had dissolved itself the previous year, came together with two groups of Milanese militants who had left Lotta Continua. By 1975, some of those who'd left Lotta had established connection and co-operation with militants from other formations of the extra-parliamentary left, besides Potere Operaio. They'd also began contacts with the people publishing the magazine of political discourse Senza Tregua ("Hard Target"), which was promoting "militant anti-fascism". In the autumn of 1976, and after numerous meetings, three formations of organized "military and insurrectionist combat" emerged: Comitati comunisti rivoluzionari ("Revolutionary Communist Committees"), Unità comuniste combattenti ("Communist Combat Units"), and Prima Linea.
Ideology and structure According to analysis by the Italian state's internal security services, Prima Linea, instead of the "state-centric" approach, based on the "class-against-state" worldview of other militant groups, and particularly of the Red Brigades, supported a "social concept of the class war" shaped as a "historical conjunction between a fighting organization and the armed spontaneism of the masses". Therefore, rather than being the "vanguard of the working-class party", the Front Line aspired to "represent the vanguard component" of the masses, in "direct contact" with them.
Hence, the name itself of the organization, representing a "semi-militarized force", dedicated to fight against ideological opponents and "defend communist comrades". Defining itself as a "pluralist and flat formation", Linea aimed to be less sectarian than the "military verticalism" of the Red Brigades and, in fact, far from the "elitist logic" of Leninists. Linea co-founder Enrico "Chicco" Galmozzi, wrote in a 2019 book that they attached "importance" to have workers inside the organization and "roots" in the factories.
Linea'''s leaders were Roberto Sandalo, Marco Donat-Cattin, Sergio D'Elia, Michele Viscardi, Enrico Galmozzi, Fabrizio Giai, Sergio Segio, Susanna Ronconi, Diego Forastieri, Roberto Rosso, Maurice Bignami, Bruno La Ronga, Giulia Borelli, and Silviera Russo. The organization, depending on the operation, sometimes used other names, such as Comitati Comunisti Combattenti ("Communist Combatant Committees"), Brigate Comuniste Combattenti ("Communist Fighting Brigades"), and Ronde Proletarie ("Proletarian patrols"), the latter name denoting the organization Ronde armate proletarie that had temporarily disbanded after assassinating lawyer and MSI supporter Enrico Pedenovi.
Major actions The first time the organization acted militarily was in 1976, a year when other armed formations also appeared, such as Nuovi partigiani, Formazioni comuniste armate, and Potere comunista. On 29 November 1976, a group of five Linea members in Turin attacked the headquarters of the Fiat group. Three men and two women, all armed with pistols and assault rifles, stormed the Fiat offices, chained the employees present there, "expropriated" all the company money they found on the premises, and left, after writing with spray paint the name Prima Linea on the walls. The leaflet they left behind read in part as follows:
Previous to that attack, the Linea grouping had committed its first assassination. On 29 April 1976, Bruno La Ronga, Giovanni Stefan, Pietro Del Giudice, and Enrico Galmozzi, at the time militants in Lotta Continua who, as was subsequently revealed, had also moved on to the armed struggle, in Prima Linea, ambushed in a gas station and killed Enrico Pedenovi, lawyer and member of the Italian Social Movement party. The attack took place on the first anniversary of the assassination of neofascist student Sergio Ramelli by members of Avanguardia Operaia. Pedenovi's assassination was possibly in retaliation to the fatal stabbing of communist activist Gaetano Amoroso by neofascists two days before. The next year, on 12 March 1977, a Linea unit assassinated 29-year old policeman Giuseppe Ciotta, in Turin.
In the spring of 1977, Enrico Galmozzi and six workers in the Magneti Marelli and Falck factories were arrested in Val Grande, above Verbania, while training and exercising in the use of arms. The episode, according to Sergio Segio, demonstrated that "arming the workers was not some abstract political propaganda but a reality concretely in place." In April, a number of Linea members met at San Michele a Torri, near Florence, to debate the organization's statutes and its internal structure.
In July of the same year, a Milanese unit robbed an armory shop in Tradate, in the province of Varese, and took forty pistols and some rifles. When they were getting into a car, the shop owner, Luigi Speroni, having freed himself from his bonds, came out of the store and started firing at the car with a shotgun. One member of the unit, Romano "Valerio" TogniniTognini had chosen "Valerio" as his nom de guerre in honor of Communist partisan Walter Audisio. See Tassinari (2016). was killed instantly while another was seriously injured. The unit abandoned the lifeless body of Tognini in the woods. In a phone call to an Ansa journalist, the attackers identified themselves as "the communist fighting organization Prima Linea." They also gave the name of their fallen comrade, who was unrecognizable from the shooting. Tognini, the first member of Linea to be killed, was described in the media as a "quiet person," a Banco di Roma employee always "conservatively dressed" who did not seem to have any interest in politics.
On 20 January 1978, a group led by Sergio D'Elia, while attempting to liberate fellow members held at the Murate prison, faced a police patrol. In the firefight that followed, officer Dario Atzeni was hit by four bullets but subsequently survived after surgery. Another policeman managed to return fire at the terrorists, who then threw a grenade and ran away. The third member of the patrol, 23-year old policeman Fausto Dionisi, was killed. The Italian state honored Dionisi posthumously with the Award for Civil Valor. An elementary school in the city in which the policeman was killed and a street in Rome were given his name.
On 15 May 1978, in the Quarto Inferiore of Bologna, Antonio Mazzotti, personnel director of the Menarini plant, a factory that had just come out of prolonged and "tough" dispute with the workers' union, was shot and injured by three armed individuals. Initially, the attack was attributed to the Red Brigades but eventually the signature name (Formazioni comuniste combattenti) left behind on flyers pointed to Linea. The episode marked the end of the media's characterization of Bologna as a city immune from terrorism.
On 11 October 1978, four assailants, three men and one woman, shot and killed University of Naples criminology professor Alfredo Paolella in the garage of his Naples home, an act for which Linea for the first time directly assumed the responsibility. In 2020, in a commemoration ceremony, the president of the Benevento province described Paolella as someone among "those who were dedicated to the implementation of a prison system in line with the fundamental principles of a democratic state". At the time of his assassination, Paolella, as reported at the time, was working, along with magistrate Girolamo Tartaglione, assassinated the previous day by the Red Brigades, on a project whose aim was "to improve the living conditions of the prisoners." The executioners were subsequently identified to have been Susanna Ronconi, Nicola Solimano, Sonia Benedetti, Bruno La Ronga, and Felice Maresca. On 1 December 1978, outside a Milanese bar, Linea members Maurizio Baldasseroni and Oscar Tagliaferri, after an "evening of heavy drinking," killed three people with whom they had been arguing inside the bar about the merits of armed struggle in Italy. The pair of killers were refused endorsement of their act by the Linea leadership and left the country to disappear in South America.
Deputy prosecutor Emilio Alessandrini had become known since 1972 for leading the state's case against terrorists of the extreme right, such as the perpetrators of the Piazza Fontana massacre, as well as the extreme left. During his investigative work, Alessandrini had claimed the discovery of various "anomalies" in the work of the Italian intelligence services. On 29 January 1979, while driving to his workplace, he was shot dead by Sergio Segio and Marco Donat Cattin, who fired at the prosecutor, while Michele Viscardi and Umberto Mazzola acted as protective cover; Bruno Russo Palombi was the getaway driver. Hours after the attack, a call was made to Milanese newspapers, claiming the assassination by the "fire unit Romano Tognini 'Valerio' of the communist organization Prima Linea." The callers, in justifying the act, stated the following:Alessandrini was one of the central figures that the capitalist command uses to re-establish itself as an efficient military and judicial machine and as a controller of social and proletarian behavior, on which [the state] intervenes when the proletarian struggle becomes antagonistic and subversive to the state's authority.
Beginning from 1979, the organization initiated also a campaign of wounding targets with gun shots, in actions such as the wounding of prison guard Raffaela Napolitano on 5 February, the shooting of Stanislao Salemme, a retired employee of the Social Security authority, on 22 June, the October crippling of Piercarlo Andreoletti, Praxis managing director, in Turin, the November raid of a youth detention center during which guard Sulvatore Castaldo was shot in the knees, and many others.