Kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro

On the morning of March 16, 1978, gunmen of the Red Brigades, an armed far-left group, ambushed the car of Aldo Moro on Via Fani in Rome. Moro, a former prime minister and president of the Christian Democrats, was on his way to Parliament for a vote on a new government that would, for the first time, rely on the support of the Italian Communist Party, a deal he had negotiated and called the historic compromise. The attackers killed all five of his police and carabinieri escorts and took him to a hidden apartment. For 55 days they held a so-called people's trial while Moro wrote letters pleading with his party to negotiate. The government of Giulio Andreotti refused, and on May 9 Moro's body was found in the trunk of a red Renault 4 on Via Caetani in central Rome.¹²³

Members of the Red Brigades, including its leader Mario Moretti, were later convicted. Yet the case became the darkest mystery of Italy's years of lead, the period of political violence in the 1970s. Several parliamentary commissions examined failures in the police search, the presence of members of the secret P2 Masonic lodge in the crisis committees, and claims of foreign involvement, and some theories hold that parts of the state preferred Moro dead.²⁴