Historical Background
Italy's Years of Lead
Anni di Piombo · 1968 – 1988
The Years of Lead — in Italian, Anni di Piombo — describe roughly two decades of political violence in Italy that began in the late 1960s and ran through the late 1980s. The name borrows from the German film Die bleierne Zeit (1981), and the "lead" refers literally to bullets: assassinations, kneecappings, bombings, and kidnappings became routine instruments of political struggle.
How it started
The era is usually dated from the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan on 12 December 1969, which killed seventeen people and injured nearly a hundred. Carried out by a neo-fascist cell but initially blamed on anarchists, Piazza Fontana set the template for what historians later called the strategy of tension — a campaign of bombings designed to push public opinion toward authoritarian, anti-communist crackdowns.
Red and Black
Violence came from both extremes. On the far left, the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) launched a campaign of kneecappings, kidnappings, and assassinations targeting judges, journalists, industrialists, and politicians. On the far right, neo-fascist groups such as Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale carried out the era's deadliest bombings, often in coordination with elements of the Italian secret services and the secret Masonic lodge P2.
The Moro affair
The Years of Lead reached their peak in spring 1978 with the kidnapping and murder of former prime minister Aldo Moro. Moro, the architect of a historic compromise between the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, was abducted by the Red Brigades on 16 March 1978; his five-man escort was killed on the spot. After 55 days of captivity and failed negotiations, his body was found in the trunk of a Renault 4 parked in central Rome, halfway between the headquarters of the two parties he had tried to bring together.
Bologna and the long tail
The single deadliest attack of the period was the Bologna massacre of 2 August 1980, when a bomb planted in the central railway station's waiting room killed 85 people and wounded more than 200. Italian courts eventually convicted members of the neo-fascist Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, with later judgments establishing the involvement of P2 and elements of the military intelligence service SISMI.
Political violence declined sharply through the 1980s, but the judicial reckoning continued for decades — and many of the era's questions about state complicity remain open.
Why it still matters
The Anni di Piombo are not a closed chapter. They shaped modern Italian democracy, exposed the entanglement of state security services with terrorist cells, and left a generational scar that still surfaces in Italian politics, cinema, and literature.
THE MONK is set in this world — Rome at the height of the Years of Lead, where a single cold militant moves between political terrorists, the Roman underworld, and a corrupt Secret Service.