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A conference on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings (17th May 1974) took place on Monday 27th May 2024 in Brescia, Italy, as part of the 50th anniversary of the Piazza della Loggia bombing (28th May 1974.)
The conference, held in the Sala del Camino, Palazzo Martinengo delle Palle, Via San Martino della Battaglia, Brescia, focused on the similarities between these two atrocities.
The conference has been organized by the Education Committee of the National Association of Italy’s Partisans (Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia, ANPI) in Brescia and by the Casa della memoria (the association of the Piazza della Loggia bombing victims’ families,) Justice For the Forgotten, and ANPI Brescia.
The Piazza della Loggia bombing was a bomb attack that took place on the morning of the 28th of May 1974, in the heart of Brescia, during an anti-fascist protest. The 
no-warning attack killed eight people and wounded over 100. The bomb was placed inside a litter bin at the east end of the piazza.
The first judicial inquiry led to the sentencing in 1979 of a member of Brescia’s far-right movement. However, this first sentence was quashed in 1983 and the suspect acquitted in 1985 by the Supreme Court of Cassation.
A second investigation led to another far-right activist being charged, who was acquitted in 1989 because of insufficient evidence.
Six people were ordered to stand trial in the third investigation in 2008, including 4 leading members of the Ordine Nuovo neo-fascist armed group (Delfo Zorzi, Carlo Maria Maggi, Maurizio Tramonte, and Pino Rauti,) and Francesco Delfino, a former General of the Carabinieri (a Captain in 1974.) The defendants were acquitted in 2012 by the Court of Appeal, but Cassation later quashed the verdict for Carlo Maria Maggi and Maurizio Tramonte (an informer of the then State intelligence agency SID,) who were sentenced to life in jail in July 2015 (sentence confirmed in 2017) for ordering the bombing. Tramonte escaped to Portugal, but was arrested, extradited to Italy and imprisoned, Maggi died in 2018.)
The conference
May 2024 marked the 50th anniversary of these two atrocities, which took place 11 days apart. Two foreign nationals died in the attacks in the Irish capital: Simone Chetrit (30), a French citizen visiting Ireland on an English language course, and an Italian immigrant, Antonio Magliocco (37), who ran a restaurant in the city.
The panel was asked to reflect on a number of key issues which appear to make the two incidents relate to each other: Can “strategy of tension”, an Italy-specific expression, be applied to the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, which, falling on the third day of the Ulster Workers’ Council strike against the Sunningdale power-sharing experiment, strongly contributed to the success of the agitation and the eventual demise of the fledgling new Belfast executive? To what extent can the May 17 bombings and the successive massacre in Brescia be associated in the light of evidence of involvement of State security agencies, and of the cover-ups which have hampered the search for truth and justice for 50 years?
The panel
ENRICO TERRINONI
Full professor of English literature at the University for Foreigners of Perugia and translator. He researches English-speaking literatures, with a focus on Ireland and Scotland, and translation theory and practice. His 2012 Italian translation of Ulysses won the “City of Naples Award” for Italian language and Culture. His Italian translation of Finnegans Wake (with Fabio Pedone, Mondadori) won the Annibal Caro Prize in 2017, and his translation of The Spoon River Anthology won the City of Florence Von Rezzori Prize for translation in 2019. His publications include Occult Joyce. The Hidden in Ulysses (Cambridge SP, 2008), Oltre abita il silenzio. Tradurre la letteratura (Il saggiatore, 2019), Fantasmi e ombre. Roma, James Joyce e Giordano Bruno, con Vittorio Giacopini (Luca Sossella editore 2021), Su tutti i vivi e i morti. Joyce a Roma (Feltrinelli 2022), La vita dell’altro. Svevo, Joyce: un’amicizia geniale (Bompiani 2023). A novel, A beautiful nothing (Blu Atlantide) is to be released in May 2024.
MARGARET URWIN
Co-ordinator of Justice for the Forgotten, the Dublin-based organisation campaigning for truth and justice for the victims of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. JFF advocates for families in the Republic of Ireland that lost relatives during the conflict. Fifty people were killed in cross-border bombings, ostensibly carried out by Loyalist paramilitaries. Since
2010, JFF has been part of the human rights’ organisation, the Pat Finucane Centre, based in Derry. (More on JFF here.) Margaret Urwin is the author of (among others) The Murder of Charles Daniel Boyd, in Hanging Crimes (Mercier Press, 2005), COUNTER-GANGS: A history of undercover military units in Northern Ireland 1971-1976 (SpinWatch/Pat Finucane Centre, 2013), A State in Denial: The British Government and Loyalist Paramilitaries: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries (Mercier Press 2016), Fermanagh: From Plantation to Peace Process (Wordwell Books, 2021).
ALFREDO BAZOLI
Born 1969; barrister, Senator, son of Giulietta Banzi, one of the eight victims of the Piazza della Loggia bombing. Politically active since the mid-1990’s, Bazoli joins the centre-left “Margherita” political party in 2002, and the newly-formed Democratic Party in 2007. A member of Brescia city council since 2010, Alfredo Bazoli is elected MP to the Chamber of Deputies in 2013, and to the Senate of the Republic in 2023.
