The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy's Rogo di Primavalle by Amy King, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, xxviii + 255 pp., £99.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780031455490
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: The Politics of Sacrifice is a valuable and original contribution to the field of memory studies, which has burgeoned in recent years, in the wake of works by Anna Cento Bull, Philip Cooke, John Foot and other scholars.The study focuses on one of the bloodiest, and least studied, events of the so-called 'years of lead' in Italy: the arson set by three exponents of the extra-parliamentary left-wing group Potere Operaio, Achille Lollo, Marino Clavo and Manlio Grillo, in the small flat where the Mattei family lived, in the working-class suburban district of Primavalle, in Rome, on the night of 16 April 1973.The father was secretary of the local section of Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the Italian post-fascist party at the time, and the arson killed two of his sons, Virgilio and Stefano, aged 22 and 10 respectively: they were burnt alive.The attack was immediately dubbed as rogo, a term that evokes the pyres of religious persecution and the stakes of witch hunts.King works on a very wide repertoire of printed materials, photographs (the in-depth analysis of which is one of the book's merits), posters and unpublished oral testimonies.From these materials, the author traces the construction and evolution of the public memory of the event over a period of 50 years, focusing on the proliferation of narratives marked by the rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom in the sphere of the right, on the one hand, and defensive counternarratives (completely false) in the sphere of the left, on the other.She also delves into the political use of the tragedy first by the MSI and then by the populist extreme right, in terms of 'agonistic memory', in function of the construction of a community defined along political lines.The book is divided into three parts, in each of which, first, the material events and, later, the evolution of investigations and trials are interwoven with the careful reconstruction of the public discourse and memorial practices that have taken shape around the attack.In the first part, the most substantial, after placing the Primavalle fire in its incandescent political context, King illustrates how, in parallel with investigations and trials, two distinct and incompatible narratives took shape almost immediately.On the left, a narrative took root, spread artfully by the group responsible for the double murderthat is, Potere Operaioaccording to which the massacre was the result of an internal feud within the extreme right, or even saw the complicity of the MSI itself.Potere Operaio talked a good game in presenting itself as a scapegoat by virtue of the previous, serious
Source: Modern Italy
DOI: 10.1017/mit.2024.45
Author: Benedetta Tobagi
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404419951