Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Adriano Sofri was the founder of the autonomist Lotta Continua (the Struggle Continues), a radical and militant political group that mirrored and voiced the political unrest of the Italian 1970s. Years after the group dissolved, Sofri was accused of being the instigator of police officer Luigi Calabresi's 1972 assassination, and after a long and controversial trial he was found guilty. However, he is regarded as innocent by many. Sofri was born in Trieste on August 1, 1942 and was admitted to the Scuola Normale in Pisa where he strongly debated with Palmiro Togliatti . He graduated in 1964 with a dissertation on L'Ordine Nuovo 1919–20 . He engaged in left politics and was one of the founders of the group called Il Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) that published a periodical with the same name and tried to connect itself to workers in factories on the Tuscan coast. When the student revolt took place in the University of Pisa in 1968 and 1969, Sofri influenced a tendency in the student movement to align themselves with workers and any part of the working class that was taking to outspoken struggle, were they the glass workers of Saint Gobain in Pisa or the Olivetti workers in Massa. The Potere Operaio, after a public debate on the question of the organization, eventually split into three groups: the Centro Carlo Marx, of Gian Mario Cazzaniga, Umberto Carpi, and Vittorio Campione; ... log in or subscribe to read full text