The contribution analyses the centrality of the piazza Fontana massacre in the dynamics of development of the political system. The Republic experienced a break that marked the transition from the Golden Age to the crisis of the 1970s. The link between the internal framework and the international dimension takes on the characteristics of an observation point to follow the transformations of institutions, parties, political cultures. The overflowing of political violence marks a point of no return in the social and generational framework.

Documents from the Nixon administration – declassified and made public by the United States in recent years – show that the Italian coup movement, in the early 1970s, had a broad reach and deep roots in the military, more than we knew. This sheds new light on various aspects of the history of Italy: not only the events of the strategy of tension, but also the relations between the Italian government and the army, the history of political parties, the relations between Italy and the USA.

Martino Siciliano and Carlo Digilio’s testimony to the judges in Milan in 1993/94 allowed the reopening of the inquiry into the events of piazza Fontana. Both members of the far-right terrorist group Ordine Nuovo since the 70s, their witness accounts allowed the Cassazione to finally pin the responsibility of the attack on Ordine Nuovo. This ruling was in stark contrast with the absolution for lack of evidence awarded to the alleged material perpetrators of the massacre: Carlo Maria Maggi, Delfo Zorzi and Giancarlo Rognoni. Digilio’s testimonies especially – for a long time discarded in regard of piazza Fontana – recently found renewed credibility in the trial over Piazza della Loggia in 2017, which found Carlo Maria Maggi guilty. The rehabilitation of his version of the facts over both piazza Fontana and Piazza della Loggia offer historians new data for understanding the intricate events revolving around them, enriching the research for an historical truth.

While prisoner of the Red Aldo Moro wrote a memoir of his detention (the «memoriale»). The memoir contains revealing passages about the piazza Fontana massacre and the period of «strategy of tension». This essay analyzes these passages, and focusses on Moro’s statements concerning the role played by military intelligence, the international aspect of the project aiming to destabilize Italy, and the figure of Giulio Andreotti, who was repeatedly Minister of Defense between 1959 and 1966, and also Prime Minister in 1972.

Pier Paolo Pasolini in a famous article – published on 14 November 1974 in “Corriere della Seraµ – claims to know the identity of the terrorists who placed the bombs during the Italian strategy of tension (1969-1974). He mentioned two different types of massacre: in 1969 it was an anticommunist massacre and in 1974 it was an antifascist massacre. Starting from this consideration, this essay proposes the same distinction deepening the circumstances around two different moments.

In 1969 the Italian State and society underwent four systemic crises within the country’s institutional and social body. "he crises of the Armed Forces, industrial relations, political party system and public order contributed to the composition of the framework and overall historical conditions that would lead to the attacks in Milan and Rome on 12 December 1969 and, on the same day, the piazza Fontana massacre as the Senate voted on the approval of the “Workers’ statute".

In a bid to use a historiographic lens to look at the cultural exchanges between China and the West in the 18th century, this paper explores the shaping of King Zhao of Zhou’s image in China, comparing it with that in the West. The text will focus on the changes of King Zhao’s image in Chinese historical texts and in Western literature. By taking a global view, we see how the Chinese history was read in the West, witnessing the subtle emergence of a specific way to write it.

Taking inspiration from a recent book by Peter Burke, the article examines the contribution provided by exiles and expatriates to the formation of an open and pluralistic cultural identity in Europe. Thanks to the “distanciationµ and to the “displacement of conceptsµ, exiles and expatriates exerted an influential role for the cross-fertilization of European scientific experience.