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CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO ACCOUNTOn 20 February 1998, Le Monde newspaper carried the following report:
THE INTIMATE SUFFERING OF THE WIFE OF ITALIAN NOBEL PRIZEWINNER DARIO FO
On 9 March 1973, in the evening, on via Nirone in Milan, France Rame is returning home. A van stops nearby. Five men get out of it, hold a gun to her head and force her to get into the vehicle. One after another, they rape her, while one of them holds her. "Move you whore... make me feel good..." They stub out cigarettes on her breasts. They cut her hair with razors. "If you tell anyone, we'll kill you." This act of collective rape lasts for three quarters of an hour.
Finally Franca Rame reached home. She said nothing to her husband - today a Nobel prizewinner for literature � or to her son Jacopo. "It was something too painful for my family, too nightmarish for me. I had to keep it as an inner suffering. It seemed to me that if I had told people, if the newspapers had got hold of it, it would have brought pleasure to too many people. And I didn't want to give the fascists that satisfaction." So she said, in a recent interview with La Repubblica.
The rape had been carried out by militants of the far Right. This was the period of the "strategy of tension". Franca Rame was part of a Leftwing organisation � Soccorso Rosso, or Red Aid. Dario Fo was already writing plays that castigated the powers-that-be, the Christian Democrat Party, the corruption... Both of them were seen as a major threat to public order.
A RAPE WHICH COMES UNDER THE STATUTE OF LIMITATION
Five years later, in 1978, Franca Rame created a theatre piece out of this nightmare experience � "Lo Stupro" � "The Rape". But it was still too early. The memory of it still hurt. Then, in 1987, a repentant neo-Fascist by name of Angelo Izzo made a public reference to this dark episode of the "Years of Lead", and he explicitly blamed the Carabinieri.
But nobody believed this psychopath, who was in prison on a murder charge. It took the confession of another "repentant" terrorist, Biagio Pitarresi, giving precise details, before a magistrate by name of Guido Salvini took an interest in the case.
Pitarresi's revelations are shocking. The "punishment" of France Rame was allegedly inspired directly by a number of Carabinieri of the Pastrengo division in Milan. These accusations are corroborated by Nicolo Bozzo, a retired general, who at that time was a captain in Milan. He remembered clearly how the news of Franca Rame's rape was received at the barracks "with euphoria". "Everyone was happy" � and particularly the commander Giovanni Battista, a member of Licio Gelli's P2 masonic lodge, who was subsequently suspected of having manipulated certain judicial inquiries.
But Pitarresi's revelations have come much too late. By the time the examining judge had put together his dossier, the event was already covered by Italy's statute of limitation, making legal proceedings impossible.
This was why, on 16 February 1998, Dario Fo picked up his pen and wrote directly to the President of the Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. He says that he finds it strange that "nobody wanted to look into this case until the point where legal proceedings became impossible." He calls for investigations in order to uncover "the truth about the crimes of the past".
Materials translated from Le Monde, 20 February 1998.