Breakthrough in Piersanti Mattarella's murder, two suspects
Breakthrough in investigations 45 years after the murder of the President of the Republic's brother: two alleged killers investigated

Published 1 day agoFrom the editorial team
The Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office is once again investigating the murder of the President of the Sicilian Region Piersanti Mattarella, who was murdered in front of his wife, Irma Chiazzese, on January 6, 1980, in front of his home in the center of Palermo. The magistrates, as reported by the newspaper la Repubblica, have also identified the killers as two men of honor. This last piece of news is something that investigators have not confirmed. A new chapter in a 45-year-long investigation that in recent months has led the Public Prosecutor's Office to request photographs taken at the crime scene from several newspapers, including ANSA.

The members of the Cosa Nostra Commission that decided on the ambush were convicted for the Mattarella murder. While the material perpetrators remained nameless. The two accused fascists, Valerio Fioravanti and Gilberto Cavallini, were tried and definitively acquitted. In particular, Fioravanti had been identified as the possible killer by Mattarella's widow, but his testimony did not stand up to the scrutiny of the judges. In the investigation, shelved several times, a convergence of interests between the mafia and black subversion was always hypothesized. This thesis was also advanced by Giovanni Falcone. Red herrings, dark plots, mafia, occult powers, black subversion: 45 years later, the killing of Piersanti Mattarella, president of the Sicilian Region and brother of the head of state, is therefore still a seething magma. A case that has never been closed.

In addition to the prosecutors, on the anniversary of the ambush, it is being reopened by a documentary film by Giorgia Furlan (“Magma. Mattarella, the perfect crime”), a pressing investigation into what is described as the most serious crime after that of Aldo Moro. Mattarella was his protégé and his heir: in Sicily he had taken up his line of renewal of political life and of convinced openings towards the PCI. The documentary film – produced by Mauro Parissone for 42° Parallelo, Antonio Campo dell'Orto and Ferruccio De Bortoli – will be presented in Rome with a national preview on 9 January 2025 (Cinema Moderno) and in Bologna with a special screening (Cinema Modernissimo). The lines of a political project that, already with Moro, had called into question the balances of the Cold War, are being recomposed around the Mattarella case. And in addition, a government with “the right papers” had been created that had lifted the veil on the Sicilian system of connivance and convergence of interests between the mafia, occult powers and politics. Mattarella himself was aware of the risks he was facing, as he confided to the head of his secretariat, Maria Trizzino, after a confidential conversation with Minister Virginio Rognoni. Many moral lessons and images of Piersanti Mattarella’s political relations have come down to us from that experience, as well as the dramatic shots of Letizia Battaglia who by chance found herself filming her brother Sergio, the current head of state, while he was trying to help him.

The docufilm reconstructs and reinterprets through various testimonies such as those of the journalist Attilio Bolzoni, the sociologist Pino Arlacchi, the former presidents of the anti-mafia commission, Rosy Bindi, a student of Vittorio Bachelet, and Luciano Violante, of Andrea Speranzoni, a civil party lawyer in the Bologna massacre trial, the complex scenario in which the crime matured. The film does not offer answers but raises relevant questions and issues. It is a journey into collective memory, the reconstruction of a "perfect crime" (Licio Gelli's definition) and an open wound in an Italy that, as Rosy Bindi claims, "has never been a completely free country".