Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Just around the corner from the turtle fountain, a little way up Via Caetani on the right, is a memorial to the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro , whose dead body was left in the boot of a car here on the morning of 9 May, 1978, 54 days after his kidnap by an Italian terrorist group. It was a carefully chosen spot, not only for the impudence it showed on the part of the terrorists, in that it was right in the centre of Rome, but also for its position midway between the headquarters of the Communist and Christian Democrat parties.A plaque (and sometimes a wreath) marks the spot, and tells part of the story of how Moro, a reform-minded Christian Democrat, was the first right-wing politician to attempt to build an alliance with the then favourite Italian Communists. Whether it was really left-wing terrorists who kidnapped him, or whether it was darker, right-wing forces allied to the establishment, or perhaps a combination of the two, there’s no doubt that Moro’s attempt to alleviate the Right’s postwar monopoly of power found very little favour with others in power at the time - though that didn’t make his death any less of a shock. Given the “mani pulliti’ years that have followed, and the minuscule change and the political cynicism that has resurfaced in the 1990s, it’s a tragedy which must still carry a lot of resonance for Romans. The prime minister who took over after Moro’s death was after all none other than the recently tried (and acquitted) elder statesman of Italian politics, Giulio Andreotti

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