﻿HAIDI AND GIULIANO GIULIANI

WITH ANTONELLA MARRONE


A YEAR WITHOUT CARLO

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Genoa, 20th of July 2001: during the clashes between police and anti-G8 demonstrators somebody fired two pistol shots from the back of a carabinieri Land Rover in Piazza Alimonda. One of the shots hit Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old demonstrator full in the face and killed him. Carlo had a fire extinguisher in his hands.
A year later - a year of political and legal controversies, investigations by the Genoa attorney’s office and parliamentary commissions of enquiry, false trails and coups de theatre, - journalist Antonella Marrone met Carlo’s parents, Haidi and Giuliano, to talk about how their lives had changed since the death of their son. This book, a sort of diary of the past and present, a collection of interwoven thoughts and memories, is the result.
A year without Carlo is about a father and mothers’ search for the truth. A year of patiently examining photos, films and documents on Genoa. A year in which desperation is channelled into action, in which the Giulianis see it as their moral duty to speak out and appeal directly to peoples’ consciences (in schools, trade union meetings, social forums, etc.) in an attempt to “warn” other young people not to forget what happened.
The book is a clear, factual and strongly argued indictment, arousing more than just a hint of suspicion that those responsible for public order on that fateful day actually provoked the demonstrators into actions which “justified” a drastic police response, thus creating the conditions for what became the “trap” of Piazza Alimonda. But rather than arousing hatred or crying for revenge, the book gives a moral lesson: the right to justice goes far beyond the question of compensation for the victim and involves the very roots of the state and legality in a democratic country. And so, if the memory of a son can be used to ensure that “the killing of a young person in this way can never happen again”, then this use is entirely justified.

Antonella Marrone, journalist, edits a page on non-profit organisations, voluntary work and the tertiary sector in the newspaper l’Unità (also online). She has closely followed the development of the “Movement of Movements” and has written many articles on the anti-G8 demonstrations in Genoa.

These are the words of a song...

Bands on of black, pink, white
Travelling across the night
People from every state
Witness and delegate
of Earthin its silent pain
of children in chains again
Gathered in Genoa
to mourn for our whole sick world
Viva, viva, viva Carlo
Viva, viva, viva Carlo
But the 'crowned heads' of Italy
turned blind eyes to fascisti
letting them infiltrate,
agreeing to leash their hate
Carlo, our Labor's son,
took action without a gun
Now crumpled beneath a sheet
His blood flows into the street
Viva, viva, viva Carlo
Viva, viva, viva Carlo
Later the youth all slept
off shouting and tears they'd wept
Thugs crept into by cracking skulls
What of the sixty-three
savaged in Italy?
And what of the dozen more
no one's heard from?
Viva, viva, viva Carlo
Viva, viva, viva Carlo
Violence is not the way
they'll hear what we have to say
They use it to twist the truth
and split apart every group
But we hold the deeper power
It's growing with every hour
We are their economy
and we own our destiny.
Viva, viva, viva Carlo
Viva, viva, viva Carlo

These are the words of a song written by two young Americans who came to Genoa to demonstrate against the G8 conference. Jennifer (voice) and Sean (guitar). It’s a sad, deep song in true protest music style, bringing to mind Sacco-Vanzetti, the Strawberry Statement and Pete Seeger, with the voice and words used in a way reminiscent of Joan Baez and Violeta Parra. It’s called Viva Carlo! and Haidi Giuliani (Carlo’s mother) loves it. “Now that he’s not here any more,” she says, “this son of mine has become everybody’s.”
“But his life and all the stories about him,” adds Giuliano (his father), “belong just to us and his friends.”
And to his sister, Elena, who’s nearly thirty and lives in Milan with her boyfriend, Fabrizio. She was six when her brother was born and spent a lot of time with him when their mother was out at work.
The talk with Haidi and Giuliano is about facts, remembering what happened (just over a year ago) and being tenacious. Their desperation has turned into a sense of commitment: other young people have to be warned, so that these things don’t happen again. They say that nothing more can be done for Carlo, but for the others it can. For the Giulianis this year has been a year of work and putting together evidence and so, rather than dwelling on Carlo and his life, the talk centres on the year without him, about the right to the truth, about the law and justice: so that the killing of a young person in this way can never happen again. “And this,” Haidi and Giuliano tell me, “is what we’re prepared to use our son’s memory for, in the hope that it will be worthwhile.”

Hours and hours of words, emotions suppressed. Looking out of the window now and again at the same piece of Genoese skyline on a summer’s day, buffeted by wind and rain. The words of Haidi and Giuliano in your head, cautiously trying to feel your way in a family scene which, up to a year ago, was like many others, with its own particular complexities and traditions. A meeting where you have no choice but to “join in”, entering and exiting the maze of personal experiences, following the paths of Carlo’s life: the suffering, the generation gap, politics, chosen lifestyles, the family, everyday life, chance…

There’s a black and white photo with Carlo at the front of the march, in the midst of all the turmoil and clouds of tear gas, just before going into Piazza Alimonda. He appears to be in a state of suspended animation and yet moving. He’s standing still looking in front of him, as if pondering over all this madness. This is Carlo’s existential state: like a baton passed on into the hands of his family, which then takes over his race for a fairer world, rebelling against injustice and fighting for the real truth; because nobody can “justify” the death of a 23- year-old boy. A stone is not a bullet, a street skirmish is not a war and institutions can’t expect to be respected – especially if you’re in your twenties – if they don’t respect the most basic human rights. If you really think the State should have the right to decide over life and death, and if you really think somebody taking part in a street demonstration and throwing stones deserves everything he gets, then you should take it to its logical conclusion and argue that all the men and women condemned to death all over the world have decided to commit suicide. Haidi and Giuliano still believe that the State couldn’t have come about without the Resistance. They say it without rhetoric, proudly, pushing back the fogginess that clouds over events with the passing of time.

Time. A year has gone by since the 20th of July…

Time. A year has gone by since the 20th of July 2001. A year of people, work and thoughts: thinking about what happened, trying to understand Carlo’s reasons. Haidi still says that since his death she has learnt many things. She understands.
And so the “journey” around Italy began, in Carlo’s name. Giuliano, a consummate trade unionist, goes to conferences and trade union meetings. Now 63, he joined the Communist Party in 1960. He always thought Giorgio Amendola was right and will never stray from that line. He believes in gradual processes and conciliation, working out the pros and cons and grasping what you can in order to get what you want. He goes to conferences and speaks of how his rebellious son voted for the Ulivo Centre-Left coalition on the 13th of May 2001, to stop the Right. The point of this anecdote is not to show how in the end Carlo went and voted Ulivo like a good boy, but quite simply that Carlo went to vote at all (after two elections in which he didn’t). Young as he was, he understood what unity meant and how the slow old Left needed his help, ideals and generosity. Elena, his sister, voted in Milan. Giuliano voted “for” because he has another way of reading the facts of politics and is convinced about it, but, as Haidi says: “Carlo and I had agreed to vote “against”, to try to stop the Right winning the election”.
The Right won the election and life continued, despite the disappointment. Giuliano had retired and was working part-time with a cooperative. Carlo went to live with his girlfriend, Cristina, and her little baby daughter, Morgana. At the end of May, Haidi set off with her daughter Elena and her boyfriend Fabrizio for Senegal, where the family of a friend she met in Genoa lives. They met by chance in the street, became friends, and she gave him help when he needed it. When he went back home on holiday Haidi went to see him. She stayed in Africa for over a month and it was already July when she got back. Genoa was getting ready to host the G8 conference, divided up into red and yellow zones. The media were fuelling people’s anxiety by faithfully reporting fiendish plots and deadly weapons which, according to the Secret Services, the anti-globalisation extremists were busily preparing for the summit: bombs, balloons full of infected blood and assaults by sea, land and air.

“And then there was the 20th of July”. The voices of Haidi and Giuliano come together as they remember. “When they took him to the mortuary, when we knew he was really gone, our search for the truth started then.” They went to Piazza Alimonda: they wanted to try and understand things by being there, in the last place he was alive. They wanted to meet people. Lots of telephone calls, lots of people coming to the house, all of a sudden.
Their house is right under Righi hill, a dark green wood with squirrels and pine martens that overlooks a large area of the city. From this hill, on the 20th of July, Haidi looked out at the sky and land. “It’s like being at war,” she said to her brother on the telephone. “An unreal silence, all those helicopters … and there are already columns of smoke rising over the city. You can hear the shots, and it’s not just tear gas.” At 5:27 pm, when somebody fired from a carabinieri Land Rover and killed Carlo, she was in the vegetable garden. The house is full of books, plants and flowers. It’s beautiful here. “It used to be beautiful here,” Haidi corrects me.

People came from all over Italy, including some cousins from England and an uncle from Central America. “When they came away from Piazza Alimonda there was the problem of how to cook enough pasta to feed them all.” There was the emotional need to know about all the little bits of Carlo’s life, bringing together friends that they, the parents, had never met. Meanwhile, Piazza Alimonda was coming to bloom, with the railings next to the church - chosen as the symbolic spot where people paid homage - getting covered with little gifts and tokens. There was a red “Che” T-shirt and a rosary, a T-shirt with CCCP and Ave Maria forming a cross, notes, poems, letters and little hats. These were good, caring people, saying things like “but he was only a boy, they had no right to kill him like that”; the young anti-globalisation anarchist, the woman from the church, the man just out for a walk, the foreigner who was there because he knew what had happened in that square, and many more. “Nobody wants to make my son into a hero, a martyr, but he’s already a symbol in this country, and not just in this country. Lots of people can identify with him.” And the people who identify with him most are the weak, the defenceless, immigrants who, even before the Bossi-Fini immigration law, were already being treated in a way you wouldn’t think possible in a civilised country. He’s become a symbol for all those people we don’t even know about who are victims of injustice in their everyday life. “I didn’t know. I thought I knew, but I didn’t think it was quite like this”, says Haidi. This world is becoming impossible and the youth are rebelling against it. They’re looking for another world, probably the same one their fathers were looking for in ’68 and the one their elder cousins were looking for but certainly didn’t find in ’77.
But Carlo didn’t pick up the fire extinguisher for all these reasons. Carlo picked up the fire extinguisher because he saw a gun and he wanted to stop it. And he was killed not for this reason but with this excuse. He was killed because the decision to kill had already been taken. They were already shooting in Via Tolemaide, and in Piazza Alimonda they succeeded.” Fifteen spent firearm cartridges were found around Via Tolemaide, a kind of “tunnel” without a roof, closed off on one side by the railway wall and on the other by a row of big houses intersected by narrow alleyways.

A year has gone by but people are still going to Piazza Alimonda: those who can and want to are going every day, but the “official” date is the 20th of every month. Some bring a flower, others a beer and others a joint. At 5:27 pm there’s clapping, kissing and embracing and then everyone goes home. A group of close friends wanted to put a memorial stone in the little park in the square. The idea was to have an open book in marble, with Carlo’s name and dates of birth and death on one of the pages and a quote from Ghandi engraved in copper on the other. The local right-wing Alleanza Nazionale councillors protested: they couldn’t allow a monument to be erected (especially not with taxpayers’ money) to an assailant of carabinieri Land Rovers. But it wasn’t a monument and it wouldn’t have been funded by public money because the group of young friends had already organised a collection and everything had been done: all the local council had to do was agree to it. But the mayor decided to wait until things cooled down. No problem: Piazza Alimonda is there with its railings covered with gifts and this means much more than any memorial or monument. To forget would be to pardon the people who wanted those things to happen in Genoa and to remember means remembering not just for Carlo, but for everybody that was mistreated and had their bodies and souls violated in those two days. Because that is exactly what happened, even if they’re trying to erase it from our memories. Just like they want to erase the fact that, for the first time in years, all the different generations took to the streets and not just the youth. This seems like a mere detail, but it isn’t. What’s vitally important is to get it out of everybody’s heads, once and for all, that the demonstration was just a gathering of young daredevils looking for trouble or a kind of freaky fashion parade.

Headlines, reports and news leaks….

Headlines, reports and news leaks. No, relations with the media haven’t been good. Giuliano knows full well that headlines are often imposed from above and concepts over-simplified, but he’s a trusting person and will talk to anybody, because he wants the people to know. Haidi too wants to get to the truth and make it known, but doesn’t want things to be distorted and taken out of context, “first of all out of respect for Carlo, who would never have wanted so much exposure anyway, and then because it was me who so desperately wanted to know what actually happened. I’m absolutely sure, no matter what the newspapers say, that Carlo was neither delinquent nor violent. The only reason why he could have acted like he did was because he was faced with a great injustice, and that’s probably what he was thinking just then when there was a man in front of him pointing a gun.” And it was because of this, the impossibility of being able to believe anything, the glaring lies in what they wrote (Carlo the tramp, Carlo the bastard father, Carlo the drug addict, Carlo the “punk”, etc.), that at first Haidi couldn’t bring herself to read a single article, so disgusted was she by the headlines and TV reporting. After a couple of months she started looking through the pile of accumulated papers and saw just how different the reports were. Basically, the individual writer is responsible for what he or she writes and that’s why the reports differed so much, as did the conclusions and analyses, even in the same newspaper. “I never really expected people to see things entirely the way we do and it’s absolutely right and important that everyone expresses their own opinion, but it would be better if they checked some of their facts and got all the information before expressing it. Some newspapers wrote shameful, thoughtless things with a total disregard for the facts.”
To quote an example, not about Carlo, but about Edoardo, one his closest friends. They’d known each other since high school, where Edo was a few years behind because he was younger and because Carlo started school a year early. It was when the school sit-ins and occupations were going on. Together, they organised a demonstration with lots of kids: five hundred out of a school of nine hundred. A great success. Then, as often happens in life, they went their separate ways, but after Carlo was killed Edo was always at his side: first he went to see Carlo as he lay in the mortuary, then he would go often to Piazza Alimonda and then, when he couldn’t bring himself to go through Piazza Alimonda any more he went up to Staglieno, the cemetery, his face always swollen with crying.
On the 2nd of February 2002 Edoardo set off for Zurich, to demonstrate against the WTO. He had a passion for politics and, unlike Carlo, had always been member of the Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation) party. On his way back he wanted to go to Como where his other great passion, Genoa Football Club, were playing away. He was travelling with a friend from Bellinzona and decided to stop off there, at the friend’s house. Edo was tired and dropped off to sleep on the settee. He never woke up. The Swiss police checked everything and, on the strength of the doctors’ report, wrote in their statement that Edoardo died of natural causes, seeing as nobody had killed him and he hadn’t killed himself. It might have been an aneurysm. The Italian police told his family that he died of a drugs overdose. The day after, on the local Genoa pages of a national daily, there was an article headlined Young Genoese dies of overdose in Switzerland. The boy’s mother was furious, understandably in a situation like this, and phoned the editor: “why are you saying these things: my son never took heroin in his life and everybody knows this”. The articles continued for a few days, now talking about the mysterious death of a young man. But the photo next to the headlines and articles was always the same: Carlo, Carlo with the fire extinguisher in his hands. The message was crystal clear: this is what Carlo and his friends are really like. They’re a bad bunch.
How can they be so thoughtless? Do they have no professional self-respect or respect for other people’s grief? Another example, apart from Piazza Alimonda, was Cogne: will we ever be able to forget all those things they said and wrote? Those harrowing interviews, the people besieged and bombarded with questions? Pages and pages of it, with TV reporters stuck in that little village for days on end amidst such a terrible scene: a baby had died, such an immense loss. Why don’t they show some respect? They say this is what the people want. “But how can they be so sure? Some might want it, but there are certainly lots of people who don’t.” Every time a baby dies it’s a tragedy, anywhere, and in those parts of the world where they die every day it never gets a mention in the papers.
“What has become of ethics?” Haidi asks. At least a Catholic education, with all its inbuilt conservatism, guaranteed us a kind of morality. The security of a religious lifestyle has vanished and nothing has replaced it. Deep down, this is what all those people on what we vaguely call “the Left” feel: they’re looking for values, hope and honesty. But these questions have been abandoned, or rather, left to live on the rich fruits of the post-war period with its great cultural commitment to things like schools and workers’ literacy classes and the consequent growth of a highly creative group of intellectuals, writers and artists. But this resource has dried up over the last twenty years and the Left has discarded any idea it ever had of ‘educating’ by the wayside on the road to power.

The photos hurt too, as well as the reports, because of what they mean and their inevitable way of showing everything, including negative things. There’s that Reuter’s photo, the one they always use, that and that alone, where Carlo seems right next to the carabinieri Land Rover, just over a metre away, with the fire extinguisher in his hands and the Land Rover apparently right up against the wall of the building opposite, with no way of escape for the vehicle. This photo was taken with a powerful zoom lens that squashes everything together. It was taken by an excellent press photographer, Dylan Martinez, using a very high-powered repeater camera. Unfortunately, Martinez says he hasn’t got any other photos: neither from a moment before, nor a moment after and nor when the shot is actually fired. And that’s a shame, because these photos could have provided important evidence in the reconstruction of the facts, also because you can see clearly from his photo that the pistol isn’t pointing upwards.
But another photo, taken by Marco D’Auria from a little further away and to the side, showing Carlo at least three metres from the Land Rover, is never used. Why? “The newspapers have used it at most ten times, and only when we wrote to them or phoned.” It’s an important photo, and very clear: it shows Carlo a few hundredths of a second before he was shot. You can see the same thing clearly in lots of other photos that have been posted on the Internet for a long time, available for all to see, study and interpret, just like in the numerous professional and amateur films that were made. Equally clear, in Haidi and Giuliano’s opinion, is Giulietto Chiesa’s account of what he saw on the 20th of July. They think his reconstruction of events in those days makes everything clearer, even for people who weren’t actually on the demonstration. “Lots of books have been written on the subject, some good, others a bit hazy and others taking it for granted that what was published in the newspapers was true,” i.e. without double-checking the news: just putting it together.

Work has always been a very important thing to the Giulianis …

Work has always been a very important thing to the Giulianis, and this has complicated their relations with press reporters, because the methods the reporters use actually devalue the work they do, with everything being sacrificed in the name of sensationalism. “I always tried to do my work honestly and was even accused of being a “Stakanovist” when I was at school, and I gave up teaching when I thought I was no longer able to do my job the way I wanted to. I ask myself, how is it that journalists can tolerate working in this way? Why have they so little respect for their profession?” When his mother and father used to talk, Carlo would hear them approving or disapproving of the way other people worked according to certain standards. At school he was always alert enough to know whether or not a teacher was doing his or her job properly. He was a sharp boy, but never rude. He never had much respect for teachers who didn’t question things, and the teachers he didn’t respect had problems with him. His sister Elena was luckier in this respect, as she kept the same small and stimulating group of teachers all the way through her school. This wasn’t the case for Carlo, according to Giuliano. He had some good teachers and others not so good. One of the teachers who thought a lot of Carlo was his history and philosophy teacher, Peppino Coscione, now chairman of the piazzacarlogiuliani (“Piazza Carlo Giuliani”) committee.
Perhaps the family demanded a maturity of Carlo that was beyond him: they told him to respect the teacher and that he had no right to interfere with matters that didn’t concern him directly, even if he thought they were unfair. It was difficult for his parents to explain to Carlo why he shouldn’t do this, quite simply because they themselves were doing it all the time in their work and to expect their son not to do so just seemed hypocritical. Carlo used to hear his father getting angry with trade union officials who didn’t do their job properly and his mother with teachers who didn’t do theirs properly and so he didn’t understand why he, as a boy, couldn’t argue with teachers whom he thought unfair or who didn’t have the right approach to the job. “The teacher is always right, obviously”.
This led to him having quite a rebellious attitude, and complaints from the teachers came thick and fast. “Even if the reality was actually quite different,” says Haidi. “When I went to talk to the teachers there was always one of them who would say: your son is son is very intelligent and capable, but he’s badly behaved. He’s disruptive. In what way? He answers back, talks out of turn and tells his classmates the answers if they don’t know them. He should be punished. Then I would go to another one and start saying: I know my son is too high-spirited, and the teacher would say: what do you mean? Well, I would say, they told me he was a disruptive influence in class, and this other teacher would answer: absolutely not, not according to me.” These divergences backed up a theory of Haidi’s that she had developed years earlier when she herself was working as a teacher: the fault lies with the teacher, not the pupil. It’s the teacher that has to make things interesting. There are such things as particularly “difficult” classes, of course, with rowdy sets of kids who don’t allow the work to proceed normally, but this is an exception, and the teacher can’t blame the students for his or her own shortcomings. It’s the old difference between being authoritarian and having authority. Many teachers are authoritarian just because their position allows them to be so, but that doesn’t mean their position gives them “real” authority, which comes from mutual respect and acceptance. Students should be seen not just as minds to “indoctrinate” but as thinking beings with their own imagination and ideas and their own existential certainties and uncertainties. Carlo knew all this very well and rejected the sterile authoritarianism of those who chose to impose their way of seeing things without trying to explain.

And so, his school life was a series of ups and downs, with marks fluctuating from excellent to abysmal. And then there was his concept of the student’s role in society, in which even the idea of getting good marks at school was completely ruled out. He hardly ever studied and swotted for his final school exams in just three days. He passed them.
When he decided to quit university, where he had started an undergraduate course in history (because there was no Cultural Heritage course at Genoa) and got excellent marks in his first three exams, his parents were obviously upset: “You’ve got the intelligence and the ability, so why don’t you use it?” “Because I don’t care about all that stuff,” he would answer. “Bits of paper don’t interest me.” He dropped out, but, “like lots of other kids he might have changed his mind later on, or carried on studying by himself, as us parents did. The problem is that nowadays, unlike in our times, if you don’t have a degree you’ve got much less freedom of choice. But, he was very young and could have changed his mind fifty times over, given the chance”.

As an alternative to military service, Carlo did community service with Amnesty International: a very disappointing experience, according to his parents. He was left in a room by himself to answer the telephone, write a few letters and surf on the Internet: not an ideal situation for somebody like Carlo who loved people and life. And here too, as far as human relations were concerned, the situation was like at school, with those who knew him well speaking highly of him and others talking about him as if he were a totally different person. Quite simply, it was he who decided who was going to be allowed to get to know him, and in what way, just as it was he who wanted to decide about his own life, without preset schemes. And he decided that the only people who were going to get to know him were ones he respected, whom he deemed humanly and intellectually worthy.

Friends started arriving in Piazza Alimonda...

Friends started arriving in Piazza Alimonda, bringing with them lots of other little bits of Carlo’s life, together with the first eyewitness accounts, people who were there and who’d seen it. And not just young anti-globalisation protesters: there was somebody from the block nearby who told us how, on the day it happened, he came out of his street door, looked up and saw a tear gas canister coming straight towards him and dashed back in again. And so the search began. Photos, images, contacts: nobody in the family was convinced by the official account of what happened. The actual facts were different and they had to be proved.

Haidi hasn’t become a public figure. Even at the funeral she managed to keep out of the way of the television cameras. Nobody knew who the little, kind-hearted woman was, with a brusque manner and yet both reserved and sociable. She was born in San Ambrogio, Verona, fifty-eight years ago and was christened Adelaide Gaggio because the priest refused to give her the name Haidi. He thought it was funny and sounded like the name of a dog. But her mother was Swiss and wanted her to be called Haidi, and that’s what she always went by. “I didn’t find out my real name was Adelaide until I was 18 when I applied for my identity card.” She left classical high school in the last year and went to take her nursery school teaching certificate. She loved her job at school and had a great passion for that magical age known as infancy, when children have such powerful imaginations and such a great capacity for learning – when learning is a joy, with no limits, compulsion or fears and unrestricted by many of the constraints that school often brings – an incredible capacity, that rubs off on anybody lucky enough to work with children of that age. “There was nobody to teach me my job. I learnt it by actually working with the children and the other teachers, who were very skilled and helped me a lot. I was lucky enough to work in the Cooperative Education Movement and the union.” By the time she was working in Milan, the school issue had become a kind of focal point on which the hopes of building a fairer and freer society were pinned. She joined the Italian Communist Party in 1967 and was in it in 1968, although emotionally and politically very close to the student movement and that wing of the party that recognised the vital force of students and workers as they united in the struggle to change the system. “In those days too, the movement was basically fighting against injustice and I, like many others in the Italian Communist Party (which later changed its mind), felt a great sympathy for those young people who were driven by the same ideas.” She hasn’t renewed her membership card since 1984, when Berlinguer died. Now, twenty years later, she’s convinced that the current youth movement against the free market economy is a kind of “concretisation” of Berlinguer’s idea of the historic compromise: i.e. catholic and “communist” masses united behind the single banner of defeating injustice in the world.
When she was teaching at the school in Gratoscoglio, a Milan dormitory suburb, Haidi was one of the first teachers to introduce the all-day timetable (as opposed to the traditional morning-only school). She was also one of the first sixty teachers in Italy to refuse to use set textbooks and give marks, and was involved in the occupations to prevent areas of schools being taken over and turned into shops, in the struggle against “classroom sharing”. It’s a hard life for women who put so much energy into their work, who see work as an important expression of their existence and yet don’t want to give up their family or the idea of having home-baked cakes on the table at home for their children. Carlo’s father is sure that his son never broke a window at Macdonald’s, just as he’s sure that he never ate there. That kind of trash wasn’t for him. He would be more likely to go down to the port or the old town to one of his Magrheb friends for cous-cous or a kebab. Their children were brought up to eat healthily; Haidi always saw this as very important. Their home was bright and cheery, always full of people and with politics at the centre of things. “At school meetings I could never bring myself to speak, not even in ordinary teachers’ meetings”, she said, when talking of her shyness in public. She retired about three years ago, disillusioned after thirty-five years of teaching. Thirty-two of them were happy years but the last three less so, because school was no longer being taken seriously. It was being turned against the children.

And so she didn’t become a personality, unlike Carlo’s father, who was giving interviews and appearing on television. In some way there was a tacit division of labour, with Haidi involved in the search for evidence and witnesses and Giuliano facing the public.
From then on all information was taken as good and worth following up, even though, as well as genuine eyewitnesses there were also phoney ones and people just trying to take advantage of the situation in the hope of revealing some kind of secret: “I’ve got nothing to lose any more and my time is of no importance. So even if just one useful clue comes out of it, it’s been worthwhile. And if they’re phoney, so what? All I’ve wasted is a bit of my time”. For a few months this was the “new” pattern of life in the Giuliani household: chaotic gatherings, hosts of theories put forward by friends, both old and new, and crazy people just trying to make a name for themselves. There was a painter who claimed to have been a great friend of Carlo’s, even though he actually wasn’t and had never even met him, and who wanted to erect a monument in his honour in Porto Alegre. And then there were two young aspiring writers who wanted Carlo to be remembered through their literary works: they came up with a series of lame tales dealing with just about everything under the sun apart from Carlo himself, according to his family. They have yet to rise to fame the world of literature.
But, amidst all these comings and goings, the fact that things didn’t go the way the authorities would have us believe was confirmed time and time again. After a very short time, Haidi was talking to people that the police hadn’t yet been able to contact. There was an eyewitness who said he saw the face of the man that shot Carlo and described his build and physical features, and it was from accounts like this that doubts began to arise right from the start about the police and carabinieri’s reconstruction of events. Too many things didn’t fit. Carlo’s face, they say, was all smashed up, but Carlo didn’t actually fall on his face when he was shot and when he was run over by the Land Rover he was still alive. And even though the Land Rover crushed his hips when it went over him backwards and his shins when it went over him forwards, it didn’t touch his face. Carlo’s face was a mask of blood, much more so than from a pistol shot. They’re waiting for the trial and reconstruction of events, so that the doubts and faked evidence can all come to light, like the coroner’s report stating that no fractures were found in Carlo’s body. How is it that a Land Rover can be driven twice over a human body without leaving any trace? How is it there were no scratches on the front of the Land Rover where it had been blocked in? Can that be possible? As yet, nobody has come up with any answers to these questions, says Giuliano, and he’s shocked by this. He’s shocked because never in his long career in politics and the trade union movement has his faith in the Italian democratic state been so shaken, never. And he blames it on this “government of rogues”, to quote veteran journalist Indro Montanelli, who also voted for the Ulivo Centre-Left coalition on that highly depressing 13th of May. Giuliano calms down again, saying that he thinks something is finally moving on the Left and that the CGIL (General Confederation of Italian Workers) and DS (Democrats of the Left party) understand that they’re going to have to approach the young people in this movement in a different kind of way. The CGIL and DS weren’t at Genoa and they were wrong, and now the dialectic is born.
Another Left is possible.

October, Florence: Social Forum national assembly...

October: the Italian Social Forum national conference was being held at the old Leopolda Station in Florence. Haidi was invited. She was ready to face the public. It was Carlo who had helped her overcome her stage fright and aversion to microphones. Normally she would have said no, because of her worry about making too many personal appearances. After Florence, the next plan was to go to Porto Alegre. She had serious doubts: those spotlights were meant for Carlo, not her, and it was an incredible responsibility. But saying no would almost be like not recognising the movement Carlo had died in, and so she agreed to go. Her ideas, as she now knows, were readily identifiable with those of the Social Forum, and not too distant from Carlo’s own. “It was very moving, even though I couldn’t join in with the festival mood because of what I had inside me. It was a beautiful experience, though, as if I was surrounded by a welcoming kind of humanity. How wonderful it would be – and all in all not even too difficult – to live our lives like in those days. There was a definite feeling in the midst of that Babel of culture and politics and different ways of living. It was as if everybody wanted to hug each other. Getting into the PUC, the catholic university where part of the Forum was being held, was quite difficult because of the enormous volume of human traffic, but I never saw an angry gesture. The organisation was perfect. The two thousand young volunteers thought of everything: the toilets were always clean and the throngs of people were kept properly and politely informed of what was going on all the time. I remember the day Chomsky was going to speak. The enormous hall programmed for the meeting wasn’t big enough to hold everybody and so they quickly got another two rooms ready. They put Chomsky in a smaller room and broadcast the conference on screens. Some people were a bit disappointed, but it seemed right to me, especially if you think how quickly it was organised and how well it came out.” There, in southern Brazil, Haidi met lots of people and was amazed by how much they knew about the Italian situation, compared to how ignorant Italians are about what goes on in other countries. Perhaps it was because Carlo was murdered in what was thought to be a civilised and democratic country, and that was really why it made such big news all over the world. In places like Latin America where murders like this are an everyday occurrence, unfortunately, it never makes the news and we never even get to know the full story. One day Haidi was going round the university with Del Rojo, President of the San Paolo Workers’ Library, when they met quite an elderly woman whom Del Rojo introduced as a Bolivian freedom fighter. Haidi was then introduced as the mother of a boy killed in Genoa: “Carlo Giuliani”, the freedom fighter said.

After Porto Alegre the ice broke. “The fact that it’s Carlo’s mother and father talking about it seems really important to people, and once you actually get started, you never stop.” Often, she is invited to speak at Centri Sociali (independently organised young people’s social centres). “Those meetings are good, really splendid. I never worry about what I’m going to say to youngsters. With them, it all comes more easily and spontaneously. Every time I go and talk and report the facts people are shocked. Whenever I think it’s useless going over what happened in Genoa again, because by now everybody must know, I realise how wrong I am. Even people who didn’t really believe the things they’d heard about it are shocked, because although lots has been written about Genoa, people just don’t get to read it.”
Haidi and Giuliano took turns going to school occupations in Genoa to talk to the students. These were often meetings where they tried to put both sides of the case, sometimes with Carlo’s parents and friends on one side and the Deputy Police Commissioner on the other. The meetings were quite informative, in a way: for instance, they told the students they shouldn’t go to demonstrations with their faces covered. But has anybody ever told the police not to spray irritant gas, like they were doing all the time in Genoa? Do they know that if you don’t cover your skin it’ll burn, and that the tear gas, the stuff that was used for the first time in Via Tolemaide, contains CS gas and is a highly dangerous chemical weapon and causes irreversible damage, and that six thousand two hundred canisters were fired in forty-eight hours?
They said you shouldn’t go to demonstrations with a fire extinguisher. But Carlo didn’t go with a fire extinguisher. He went just wearing a vest and a pair of track suit trousers, probably with his swimming trunks on underneath. In one of these meetings a teacher, taking a lead from Carlo’s friends saying what a generous, helpful boy Carlo was, made a point by quoting Horace, saying how easy it was to go from an excess of love to an excess of hatred. “I asked to speak”, Haidi said, “and I told them about the German girl who was sleeping there at the Diaz school. When the police broke in she was frightened and ran off up the stairs. Three of them caught her, caved in her rib cage with their kicks and then dragged her down the stairs like a doormat, by her hair. The girl had perforated lungs and went into a coma. Now she’s out of danger, but what’s all this about excesses of love and hatred?” Three men, three “soldiers”, against a young girl. This is just one of the many, many episodes of gratuitous violence that the Italian state dished out to the young people who came to Genoa, and it’s a kind of violence that can’t be justified in any way. It’s born from hatred and it breeds hatred.

It was during these meetings that something became clearer and clearer in the minds of Haidi and Giuliano: even though there was nothing more to be done for Carlo, for other young people there was. What happened in Piazza Alimonda mustn’t happen again and everybody has a right to know the truth, but most especially young people. “We’ve got to respond to people’s solidarity by telling them what we know.” And Giuliano reminds us how difficult it must be for people who weren’t on the demonstration in Genoa to realise what the Black Bloc were really like, how difficult it is to get away from the idea that there’s a kind of movement that has a kind of “violent fringe” that caused all the devastation in the city. But people who were actually there on the demonstration know that that wasn’t what really happened and that the truth was much worse. At first they were saying that the Social Forum organisers were partly to blame because they weren’t able to contain the violent fringe. This idea made some headway on the Left too, but then, on hearing the eye-witness accounts and on seeing the photos, people began to understand that it wasn’t really like that.
“Were you there?” Haidi asked me.
“I was there with everybody on the 20th of July 2001, the first day, when there was the beautiful Migranti demonstration. I got there early in the morning with two friends from work and we went down to the Piazzale Kennedy rocks on the seafront, where all the bar sunshades and association stands were, to decide what to do, which of the marches to go on, where to meet up again and so on. They went off to the Carlini and I decided to stay behind and go on the “Pink” march, the creative one, all flowing and full of movement, colours and music. We were going to meet up later on, in the “Disobedients’” section. I set off amidst the feathers and drums, but about halfway along the route I saw something. A group of youngsters, two girls and three boys with black hoods and black sweaters, attracted my attention. They were walking alongside us and stopping at every crossroads. I decided to follow them, leaving the bright colours of the first march behind me as it meandered on through the streets of Genoa. I found myself in Piazza Paola da Novi, where the “workers” section of the demonstration was, with the COBAS independent trade unionists and the unemployed. And there I saw lots of these young people dressed in black, hard at work taking the Piazza to pieces with surgical precision: the paving stones, the iron railings around the flower beds. “This is our Piazza, get away from here,” a trade unionist was saying. But they didn’t understand. It seemed like they were all foreigners. I saw this happening several times, and on the following day as well: the Black Bloc were being chased away by everybody except the police.

The new section of the march was just about to set off from the Piazza, moving away from the railings and from the police defending the yellow zone. There were lines of carabinieri down the sides, they too dressed in black. It was as if we were under siege, with the Black Bloc, characteristically dark and menacing, bringing up the rear. The march did a kind of U-turn, at least that’s what it seemed like, and so I found myself back in the little street where I’d entered the square. The first rubbish skip was already burning, the first stones flying at the carabinieri and the first hint of a baton charge. An unnerving series of manoeuvres began involving the police, unarmed demonstrators and groups of Black Bloc as they came and went. Somebody in the crowd was talking about “dispersal baton charges”. You couldn’t understand anything any more. I asked a plainclothes policeman: “Excuse me, why are you sending us back towards the sea?” “You, who are you?” “Press.” “Well get out of the way.” I did – it seemed the best thing to do because the tear gas canisters were already flying. In a short time I was out of Corso Rimassi back in Piazzale Kennedy, on the seafront. It was about one o’clock. Here, the Black Bloc were amusing themselves breaking windows and smashing up cars and cash dispensers. All around there were isolated groups of demonstrators, with polizia and carabinieri on all sides. At this point part of the COBAS march re-entered the GSF (Genoa Social Forum) section ahead of us. I went towards the Fiera where Viale delle Brigate Partigane starts, a huge street cut across halfway by platoons of police with the way to Brignole station closed off by an enormous “iron wall” of lined-up containers. All around me there were police with all kinds of vehicles, from sports cars to armoured cars. I rang my newspaper: “There’s going to be mayhem here very soon. They’ll baton-charge them and cart them all off,” I said, a bit confused because I didn’t know what was going on and couldn’t understand the “moves”: there must have been about twenty of the Black Bloc, perhaps thirty, and they could have been dragged away by their ears one by one. But I was wrong: no baton charges, no beatings, no arrests. I called my colleagues. At the Carlini the march had just started moving and the news was reassuring, because there, where they expected “big trouble”, nothing was happening. About another half-hour had passed. I went all round the “yellow zone”, looking for news. There were points of “resistance” all over. Brignole station was cordoned off and impregnable (I got through thanks to my press card). I passed more bits of the march but I didn’t know who they were and anyway just after that there was a baton charge and everybody scattered. I decided to wait for the Disobedients (who at that time were coming down Via Tolemaide, according to one of them I met at a roadblock) near the underpass leading into Corso Torino. I stopped for a drink in a bar before the underpass, with lots of polizia outside and full of young people inside, including three kids aged sixteen or seventeen. I came out with them into the street, and they were walking in front of me where they had to pass between the wall and a polizia ambulance parked next to it. As they passed through the narrow gap I could see two or three policemen running after them, blocking off their entrance and exit and dragging them away roughly, as if they were thugs caught in a chase. What for? I asked myself. They hadn’t done anything. What made them do that to them? Why didn’t they get the ones that were smashing everything up, if they really wanted to get somebody? My eyes were burning. The march was arriving, plastic shields and a river of people. It was after three in the afternoon. I could see my colleagues up ahead, trying to keep track of events like good reporters should. “What’s happened?” “I don’t know, I can’t understand a thing”, and I tell them about my morning with its running, fumes and, above all, uncertainties. While we were there talking all pandemonium broke loose. A tear gas canister flew in low, almost hitting my colleague on the head. We cleared a space with difficulty, amidst the general panic. We were in a bottleneck. I was frightened. The rest of what happened is history, and you know it better than me. It was the first baton charge on the Carlini march.
And then the farce of the Black Bloc became clear to everyone, at least everyone who wanted to see it. According to Giuliano: “The violent ones were produced by the State.” And Haidi: “The Black Bloc, I mean the real ones, the Casseurs, smash shop windows and not heads. In this consumer society of ours we tend to get our scale of values wrong: a burnt car isn’t worth a person’s life, not even his teeth or ribs”. It’s not by chance that the six-monthly report of the security services talks about neo-nazi and extreme right wing activists dressed up as members of the Black Bloc. So, why wasn’t a single one of them arrested? “I’ve got an answer to that”, says Giuliano. “They didn’t arrest them because it would have been too embarrassing for them when they recognised each other”.
There were lots of TV cameras around, and some of them filmed sequences like this: a young male dressed in black throws first one stone and then another at a window, stops to talk to the police and then carries on with his demolition work without anybody stopping him. And then there were strange coincidences. Why were Fini and other Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance party) leaders at San Giuliano barracks, the operational headquarters? “To express our solidarity,” they told the Commission of Enquiry. But solidarity with who and why at nine o’clock in the morning? Solidarity with what was about to happen? So they knew? And even if the presence of the Deputy Prime Minister might be justifiable in constitutional terms, what were the other Alleanza Nazionale people doing there?”
It’s important that as many people as possible are aware of all this. For instance, how many people know that the “Disobedients’” march, the one attacked in Via Tolemaide entirely without warning, was an authorised march going along an authorised route and still a long way from the red zone? Why was it attacked with tear gas and fire hoses? The answer to questions like this lies in the actual make-up of the movement itself. “This movement,” Giuliano explains, “even though it’s full of contradictions, naïve and verbally extremist, is actually frightening people in the corridors of power, because of its composition, openness, plurality and strong catholic presence. And it’s a movement capable of organising very big peaceful demonstrations, like it did the day before.” Why didn’t anything happen on the 19th of July? Quite simply because they hadn’t organised the agents provocateurs for that day. Why, people ask, did they bring nineteen thousand people to Genoa and two hundred and fifty body bags? Why did they empty the hospitals and the prisons? It wasn’t just because they were expecting a street party, was it? “This was why they did what they did that morning and activated the Black Bloc. Of this I am convinced. It probably won’t come out in the open very soon, but my hope is that this will be yet another Italian mystery unveiled.”

The journey continued...

The journey continued: schools, centri sociali and party and trade union meetings. Everywhere, people listened attentively and respectfully to the things they said. Even the 11th of September didn’t suppress the desire, frequently expressed in the meetings and in the many articles written on the subject, to find out what actually happened and hold the perpetrators responsible. If anybody criticised Giuliano for being too moderate he would reply: “Moderation, you know, has its own great strength”. He admits, though, that being in direct contact with so many young people has taught him how stupid it is to judge by appearances and opened his eyes to a whole new world, a world of great substance. “What strikes you most is the great generosity.” Giuliano argues that here in Italy, which, despite its pockets of poverty, can be considered as an affluent country, the youth are the sons and daughters of widespread affluence: the houses they live in, the clothes they wear, the food they eat and the possibility of buying records and books. Unlike previous generations, these young people, with this great generosity of theirs, are actually in a position to bring their own situation and primary needs into play when trying to do things for others. This is the high point of solidarity.
The accusations continued to be made, strengthened in the meantime by repeated TV images of the beatings in Naples which, although they happened some time before Genoa, were just as inevitable, according to Haidi. “Here in Genoa they were better prepared: they’d had time to brief the Black Bloc. Naples was a dress rehearsal”. The centre-left government can’t really be blamed for what happened, but they should have said something, condemned it more forcefully, that’s for sure. “If they had, those uniformed thugs wouldn’t have had such a free hand in Genoa and the ones that organised the violence would perhaps have been a bit more cautious and perhaps my son would still be alive.” Giuliano stamps his foot. He doesn’t agree: Naples was an ordinary street battle and not something carefully planned on the drawing board like Genoa. He’s just talking about what happened in the streets, obviously, not what went on afterwards. And although he doesn’t particularly want to defend the Centre-Left government he reminds us that the tragic events in Naples happened just ten days before the parliamentary recess, with a government virtually no longer in power. Haidi continues: the real responsibility belongs to those who organised Naples and Genoa, and the fault lies in the structure and the way certain orders were given and the way public opinion was led to believe that these people were simply violent youth. Giuliano agrees entirely with this.

Day after day and night after night looking at videos, film clips, photos. “Nobody else could have looked at, studied and put together the material like we did, with the same attention to detail and with the same feeling,” says Giuliano. “Even if the enquiry into the events of Piazza Alimonda is separate from the others, you’ve got to look at it all together, taking into account, for example, that an act of indiscriminate violence has been committed against people who were demonstrating peacefully. Who wouldn’t get indignant? Who wouldn’t rebel?”

On that day Carlo was undecided whether or not to go to the sea with a friend. He went out at midday and headed off towards Sant’Agata with his friend. They went round to various places. At two in the afternoon they were photographed in Corso Torino, worried-looking but above all indignant, when they saw the mess left by the Black Bloc and the police. They went through the underpass under the railway, heading for Sant’Agata, and it was here that Carlo found the roll of sticky tape that can be seen on his arm right to the end. The two of them walked towards Piazza Manin, the assembly point for the Lilliput Network, the catholic ManiTese association and the “white hand” pacifists, all of whom were baton charged without warning, pitilessly and for no reason: a great injustice against defenceless people. An old former partisan from the Veneto region, on one of the many 25th of April commemorations (“that very few people go to now,” says Haidi, “because this country is forgetting all those who gave their lives in the struggle for the new Constitution”), referred to Carlo as a partisan and talked about the need to resist. Anybody who knew Carlo knows that he wouldn’t have remained undecided for very long about what to do. On the one hand he could have chosen a day by the sea – a day in the sun after a trying period – but on the other hand he could not ignore the incredible acts of bullying and arrogance by the state, acts that demanded a response.
His father rang him, when he was still in Piazza Manin. “Be careful.” “Don’t worry, Dad”. A group of the Black Bloc go past, completely unhindered. And the police baton charged the pacifists sitting on the ground. Carlo escaped from the tear gas and flailing truncheons. The two friends parted company. Carlo met another friend and they went past his house, where the friend’s father greeted him. He stopped with his friend in Via Tommaso Pendola to eat some farinata (Genoan pizza) at the “Genoano” café. It was about four-thirty. Then, at about five o’clock his friend lost sight of him: Carlo was already heading up to Corso Gastaldi and had already joined the march from the Carlini. He’d made his mind up.

Carlo, a boy who decided...

Carlo, a boy who decided to stay and defy an abuse of power rather than go down to the rocks for a swim. His own well being was less important than being with the others: people with the same ideas as him who had come a long way (some a very long way) to demonstrate and who had now been savagely beaten by a horde of crazed policemen. Carlo wasn’t a member of the Genoa Social Forum, although he definitely shared its spirit and ideals. His participation in the demonstrations organised against the G8 conference had been quite marginal: he didn’t have any flag or banner to march behind and he hadn’t been actively involved in the meetings. He went on the Migranti march on Thursday, 19th of June – an exuberant, multi-coloured, peaceful affair - and then he went to the Manu Chao concert in the evening. On the 20th he decided to face up to the reality of the situation with lots of other young people he’d never met before. They tried to keep him away from the front ranks of the march to protect him, because he was wearing just a vest and trousers, but, as his parents well knew, Carlo would never allow himself to be pushed into the background.

And so, when the second, more violent, baton charge happened, he was there. They charged in from Corso Torino, Via Casaregis and Via Caffa. Carlo was there defending a barrier that was meant to protect the flanks of the march. The group of carabinieri was repelled and the two vehicles with them were forced back. There are lots of photos and films of this chaotic corner of Piazza Alimonda that very few people have seen. The two Land Rovers crossing each other’s path, one of them being driven away and stopping against a skip. But you can see many other things in these films and photos: how far the Land Rover is from the wall, or rather how far the skip is from the wall, and how near the police are in Via Caffa: very near, near enough to have stones thrown at them. There are about a dozen youths around the Land Rover. Carlo is nowhere to be seen until the very last minute and when he appears the gun is already out and the fire extinguisher is on the ground. The fire extinguisher had already been thrown against the vehicle once, bouncing off its side and ending up back on the ground. Carlo picked it up, more than three metres from the Land Rover. He picked it up because he “wanted to hit the gun”. Of this the family is sure. The carabiniere with the gun took aim and the space behind the Land Rover cleared, with everybody ducking down and scattering. The bullet hit Carlo full in the face, in his left cheekbone. The blow was mortal and he died in about 30 seconds. A kick would have been enough to knock the fire extinguisher to the ground.

A generous boy, they all say, even people who’ve never actually met him but have heard about him. A characteristic of his was to materialise all of a sudden in situations where help might be needed, with a few words to try and calm things down. And this was just how he materialised behind the Land Rover in Piazza Alimonda: in all the images and footage of the incident, Carlo was nowhere to be seen before the shot was fired. But then he appears, all of a sudden, because somebody was pointing a gun at people and this was definitely a situation where help was needed, perhaps a few strong words.

Carlo did community service as a conscientious objector with Amnesty International and voluntary work with AIDS sufferers. He left university after just three exams, all of them passed with good marks. What good is a degree in a world like this? Carlo was always wanting to forge friendships with people, Giuliano recalls. “The simple and yet very difficult thing we always asked of him was to be happy, even if his choices in life may have seemed mistaken to us. But out of respect for his independence, all we tried to get him to aim for was happiness. We did what we could and often asked him what he intended to do with his life.” He wanted to get know the world.
His sister Elena, on the other hand, graduated in information technology. She found a job in Milan, where she lives with Fabrizio, who was also a great friend of Carlo’s. Fabrizio has been like one of the family for eight years, almost a brother to Carlo. The two of them got on really well, even though they appeared to be very different types, almost opposites, you could say. Carlo made some choices in his life that Fabrizio would never have agreed with, but he knew what lay behind Carlo’s thoughts, and never had any doubt that his choices were made honestly and sincerely. They had a brotherly relationship, and Fabrizio says with great tenderness that, for him, Carlo was like the brother he never had. When they were together it was like a well-rehearsed comedy act, with the same funny gestures and a natural flow of jokes. They enjoyed themselves and made other people enjoy themselves. They both had a great love of music. They were always writing little notes to each other, leaving them in all sorts of places, like under pillows: poems, rhymes, jokes.

Elena, even though she’s a long way away in Milan, still continues to be a great support for her mother and everyone involved in the situation, including in the launching of the “piazzacarlogiuliani” committee. Her pain and grief have been masked by her natural reserve. She’s always been like this, her parents say: quite aloof and yet kind and sociable, but at the same time needing her own space. Elena and Carlo are very physically alike and have always been very close but with different ways of relating to the outside world. “We once had two kittens, a male and a female. The male was always roaming around, being a daredevil in the garden, eager to get picked up and cuddled by anybody and everybody. The female hardly ever went out though, never beyond the garden, and if there were people around she kept out of the way. We always used to say that those two kittens were like our children.” Carlo may have been shy in his own way, but Elena was incredibly so, and, everybody, not just her parents, used to comment on how reserved she was.

“You can’t talk about a year without Carlo without knowing who Carlo is and what our relationship is. Carlo’s my brother. He’s been that ever since I first saw him, ever since I first knew he was going to be born. Carlo’s my brother, my friend, my baby. Carlo’s my life. And it’s been the same for Fabrizio, who’s got no brothers and found one in Carlo. With Carlo, when we were little, it was always us first and the rest of the world next. Even though we were different ages, we were always together, with my friends or his. But it was always him who found new friends, even the ones of my age. He was aware of this, he knew how to socialise, and it was him who made me get to know new people.”
“One summer, when he’d just passed his driving test, he went to Corsica in mother’s little Fiat Panda with some friends we’d got to know the summer before on holiday with our parents. Fabrizio and I went to Sardinia for our holiday. We got as far as Santa Margherita di Pula, right down in the south, and our car was stolen. We rang my father and Fabrizio’s father but they didn’t know what to do. How could they get us back home? Could we get the ferry from Sardinia? And what about the tent? Would we have to leave it there and could we pick it up afterwards? Carlo heard of the theft from my parents in the afternoon and said to tell us he’d be there tomorrow. And there he was, my little big brother, crossing the whole of Corsica and Sardinia to come and get me.”
“Just a while before, Carlo had moved in with a girlfriend and her baby daughter, but every Friday afternoon he would drop whatever he was doing with his friends because I, his sister was coming from Milan.”
“Growing up, we went our different ways. I got tied up in my daily life, in the few friendships I had outside the family, university, work.”
“Carlo chose humanity. He wasn’t afraid of what was coming next, of new situations. He made friends with everybody, the only common denominator being tolerance and respect. It came naturally to Carlo.”
“I think this is what politics meant to Carlo: life and people. He would never go along with people being put into categories or labelled and he had friends who were Franciscan friars, Moroccans, lawyers, tramps, kids in the street and university students alike. We’re often afraid of opening up to other people in case it brings out our weaknesses and limitations, but Carlo lived his life through other people, because all life is one, and sharing our experiences with others is like living more richly or deeply. Day by day as we get older we build arid prisons all around ourselves protected by all kinds of defences. Carlo wanted to do without all these things. He wanted to share his feelings.”
“He was always criticising me for this. He used to say that because I was young I should understand (and I used to say, but Carlo, you know a steady job is the best thing….). He worked in thousands of places (in England, too), knew hundreds of people, swapped viewpoints and dreams. What’s marvellous about youth is that it has this incredible potential energy that should be used for building a better world, and that doesn’t mean just waiting for it to be handed down from above, but actually building it, bit by bit, all together. This is what my brother used to say to me, and this is what he made me understand, but too late.”
“And for a whole year now Carlo has been bringing me new or rediscovered friendships, even though he’s not here any more. And each one of them brings me joy. But there’s pain in all this joy because I can’t share it with him. And there’s anger with people who carry on planning deaths day after day, people who see life as less important than money and stocks and shares. Anger with everybody (everybody, not just the one) who killed him and keep on killing him. A year without Carlo: a year of crying and cramming your life with things to do to try and stop thinking about it. Sometimes you think: soon all this confusion will end and he’ll come home. Then you remember the empty space, and you cling desperately to your memories: his kiss when you used to meet him, his hello, to his warmth you cuddled up next to him on the sofa. I lived twenty-three years with Carlo. How many will I have to live without him?”

On the 20th of July Elena and Fabrizio were in Milan

On the 20th of July Elena and Fabrizio were in Milan. This happened quite rarely. Ever since they’d moved they’d been coming back to see their families in Genoa every Friday evening, but the news over the last few days of heavy traffic and people “escaping” from the fortified city of Genoa had put them off coming. They were in constant telephone contact, though.
Fabrizio remembers:
“I switched the television on at about 6:30 – 7:00 pm. They were talking about Genoa, about the fighting. They showed the image of the demonstrator with the fire extinguisher. I didn’t want to believe my eyes, but I was sure the boy in the vest and balaclava was Carlo. I recognised his tattoo as well. I didn’t say anything. Elena came up and said: that looks like my brother. No, I say, how can you say that? But inside myself I already had a bad feeling.”
Elena continued:
“I couldn’t keep calm. I started ringing Carlo. His mobile was switched off. I rang my parents, but they didn’t know anything. My mother had seen the footage but thought it was a Spanish boy. “Just think of that poor mother this evening” she said. We started our dinner, but we’d lost our appetite and we kept on trying to call Carlo on his mobile. Finally, at nine o’clock Fabrizio got the ringing tone. He passed me the phone. A man’s voice answered and you could hear clearly that he was talking in a room, with his voice echoing. He asked me who I was, I asked to speak to Carlo and he told me he was a friend and that Carlo had lent him his mobile but that I couldn’t speak to him because he’d gone on ahead, because here in Genoa (“can you hear me, Miss?”) there’d been a bit of trouble. He asked me to leave my number and told me that when he caught up with Carlo he’d get him to ring me. The call lasted two minutes, two minutes of incredible lies. By that time, even though we suspected it earlier, we were absolutely sure it was Carlo. They waited until eleven o’clock to tell my parents.”
The news was announced first of all on the Bruno Vespa programme and then later on with a special live report in Porta a porta (by then it was 10:30 pm). They gave his full name and said he was a boy with a criminal record who slept rough, a “punk”. Fini, the Deputy Prime Minister, was in the studio that evening and was in no doubt. He passed sentence like a true lover of democracy, saying it was most certainly self-defence. A fire extinguisher against a gun. “I would like to put it to the test one day” Haidi whispered, “and challenge somebody to a duel: me with a pistol and him with a fire extinguisher. Then perhaps people would realise the difference, seeing it with their own eyes rather than just hearing it talked about.”
Carlo couldn’t have spoken to his sister on the phone. He’d been shot three and a half hours earlier. He didn’t die straight away, though, as they would have us believe. When two GSF nurses got there ten minutes after the shooting Carlo’s heart was still beating, the blood gushing out of the hole in his face. They made a desperate attempt to resuscitate him. After about half an hour the ambulance arrived with the doctor. The carabinieri Land Rover, on the other hand, the one so blocked in that it couldn’t move, took about 4 seconds to disappear after running over the boy’s body once and then twice. It was a trap. Piazza Alimonda was a trap. The first to say it –on the day after, the 21st of July – was Don Gallo. “He realised it a long time before we did. We’re saying it now on the strength of the eyewitness accounts and films.”
Lots of people came to see the Giulianis in the days after the 20th of July, but very few public figures: only two, in fact. One of the first to come was Nando Della Chiesa. “If you’re here as a member of parliament Carlo doesn’t want you, but if you’re here as a man you’re welcome”, Haidi told him. The mayor, Pericu, came to the mortuary every morning, asking if he could stay by the door. He showed great respect and dignity, worthy of a public representative in a democratic country, the same dignity he showed when deprived of his authority in those July days by people taking over his city. Many comrades came, some well known and others less so, to both the funeral and their home. There was a beautiful letter from Cardinal Tettamanzi. Lots of people wrote: hundreds of letters that can’t be replied to, some properly addressed and others not addressed at all, because the only address they knew was Genoa: “Carlo Giuliani’s parents, Genoa”, or “Carlo Giuliani Genoa”, or “Piazza Carlo Giuliani, Genoa”. And this last address became the name of the committee, now an established association, formed by a group of people who believe that human life must be respected, that the right to express your opinion and demonstrate as embodied in the Italian Constitution must be defended, that the true facts about what happened in Genoa in July 2001 must be made known and that all misreporting, censorship, and omissions in the information given out about Genoa must be denounced. The original group, the “hard core” of Carlo’s friends who wanted the memorial stone, is gradually growing to include friends and supporters from other places as well as Genoa. Haidi, together with some of the young people from the committee, went to a meeting of the Genoa Social Forum. She had been to meetings before as an individual but this time she was asking a specific question on behalf of the committee: what are we going to do about Carlo? Now that the initial disorientation and confusion had passed, the Genoa Social Forum had to take a clear position on Carlo. Was he a violent member of the Black Bloc or simply a boy who found himself in a trap and reacted to provocation, like many other people in those few days? And so, together, they organised a big demonstration in Genoa on the 20th of January, six months after Carlo’s death. The committee asked everybody to come as individuals, without placards, and everybody agreed. The banners bore the slogans decided by the organisers: “no future without remembering” and “truth and justice”. It was an orderly, solemn and peaceful demonstration, with its own stewards. The idea was to “carry” Carlo from Piazza Alimonda to the heart of the red zone, were a stage was erected. Ten thousand people came, despite the scaremongering in the media about the return of the Black Bloc. “It was even a bit too solemn for my liking,” said Haidi. “I would have preferred a much more cheerful, light-hearted demonstration in Carlo’s name, but probably that wasn’t yet possible at the time”. Giuliano was somewhat sceptical at first. He’d been asked to make a speech, but he didn’t think many people would come, indeed, he thought it would be a ridiculous flop. As the date drew near, it became increasingly evident that there was a lot of interest. “I fully admit that I was wrong. It was a beautiful demonstration. I would never have expected so many people.” Not only did he make his speech but, as reported in the local newspapers, he also played a vital role in preventing the possibility of an attack on McDonalds, together with the other stewards.
The committee is determined not to give up or lower its guard and is structured so that it can carry on its work without wasting time and energy unnecessarily. It became an ONLUS non-profit organisation and decided to make a CD with songs for Carlo donated by the artists or written specially for him. “We sell the CDs to boost the committee’s funds, which are very low.” Another thing the committee will have to deal with is all the suggestions and ideas coming in about how to commemorate the 20th of July, a year on, with performances, concerts, exhibitions, etc.

Many things have been written about Carlo

Many things have been written about Carlo. Very few of them true, according to the people who knew him. The neighbours talked of a kind, polite boy who always spoke to everybody, but the newspapers and TV weren’t too interested in Carlo’s positive aspects. This brings us back to the thorny question of news reporting, with its insinuations, lurid exposure of details and shock headlines. What makes it even worse is that these tactics are used not just by one or two newspapers, but virtually all of them. Counteracting misreporting is impossible, as we saw with the coverage of the forensic reports, with all the leaked information from uncorroborated sources, partial truths and sensationalism. Giuliano gives an example: “Take just one case: the distance between Carlo and the Land Rover. In order to bear out their theory that Carlo was just a metre, or rather one metre ten centimetres, away, they matched his height to the Land Rover’s height (two metres ten centimetres) in such a way that the carabiniere would have had to have been on the roof of the vehicle. And then, in an attempt to explain the ricochet, some newspapers printed diagrams that would lead you to believe the shot was fired from under the Land Rover. In short, just dirty tricks, typical of the outlandish way information is disseminated by newspapers, even the more important ones. Just what kind of news and details is public opinion fed with? News is used to express a political viewpoint and things are never just reported the way they actually happen. For this reason, I believe, we’ve got to find a new platform for divulging information, given the very limited means at our disposal. A newspaper sells thousands and thousands of copies, whereas at meetings the maximum number of people you can expect is a few hundred, perhaps even a thousand, but still very few. On the other hand, we don’t have any alternative.” Giuliano agreed to go on the Costanzo show for this very reason, to reach a wider audience than the usual meetings where they were always “preaching to the converted”. Haidi and Elena had many doubts, not about Giuliano’s intentions and sincerity of course, but about the way studio audiences were specially selected to elicit a certain kind of reaction, with the intention not of getting to the bottom of what happened, but rather of conveying much more subtle and underhand messages: see how even a good father like that can have a delinquent son! a son who, according to the papers, went round begging, was a “punk” and a drug addict who attacked police vans. The underlying purpose behind this approach can be quite reassuring to viewers, there being so many parents with problem children: it’s what the people want and it helps ease their conscience. Haidi and Elena were also doubtful because the things that Giuliano said and did were often deliberately misinterpreted or over-simplified: that nonexistent hug with the new Police Chief of Genoa, the headlines of the first interviews, that famous “I don’t agree with what my son did”, quoted out of context from a more complex line of reasoning. Above all, going on the Costanzo show was like entering a false world and may not have helped at all in throwing light on what actually happened in Genoa. But it wasn’t just this. It was also because Haidi was protective and didn’t want to see Carlo being presented in a certain way on a certain kind of television programme.
Giuliano replied: “I’d been given a number of assurances on how the thing was going to be conducted and they were as good as their word. I was able to talk and say what I thought. If something wasn’t said then it was my fault for forgetting it. I’m convinced there would have been no other way of reaching that kind of audience.” Why hold back, then, and run the risk of appearing uncommunicative or giving the impression that you don’t want to face up to the discussion? What kind of impression do people get if you don’t want to talk about something? Perhaps they think you’ve got doubts? “As if I could have doubts about this affair. Apart from the actual tragedy itself and finding out who was responsible on an individual level, I’m convinced that the real responsibility lies elsewhere, with those who gave the police the job of criminalising a movement and authorising a kind of repression previously unheard of in the history of the Italian Republic. Certainly, there have been other episodes more dramatic in terms of the number of victims, but they weren’t like this, so deliberate, premeditated and orchestrated. And, as unjustifiable as these other incidents were before the 20th of July 2001, they have, in a certain way, always been the outcome of clashes between demonstrators and police that actually started there in the streets. The new and terrifying factor about Genoa is that it was planned, coldly and calculatingly, on the drawing board. Of this I am convinced. And it’s this premeditation that distinguishes Genoa from everything that went before it.” Coldly calculated, predetermined and unparalleled. The demonstration on the 21st, a peaceful march without even the “provocative” foam rubber and plastic armour that had been seen the day before, met the same fate and was savagely attacked by the carabinieri, polizia and finanzieri. And then there was the evening at Diaz school, where they took four sledge hammers from a nearby building site and left them in the school just to try and cover the fact that the only arms they found were two Swiss army knives and a few mobile phones. What a disgrace for a democratic state like ours, one of the most democratic in the world, to sink to the same level as the British army that killed thirteen demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1972, as they marched peacefully for civil rights. This was the 30th of January, Bloody Sunday, the day that U2 wrote a song about in 1983 and that Paul Greengrass made a magnificent film about in 2001.

A glimmer of hope for Giuliano...

A glimmer of hope for Giuliano in this hard, bitter year: the elections on the 26th and 27th of May. His satisfaction is evident: the election campaign that defended what happened in Piazza Alimonda and tried to persuade the citizens of Genoa to “punish” the anti-globalisation mayor and his “gang of criminals” was soundly defeated, losing the vote in a city that had witnessed what really happened with its own eyes. The people saw through all the lies. “It didn’t go so well in many other places, but here, at least, here we proved that, if we stand united, we can beat this incompetent, arrogant Right.” The question of the police, however, with their unrestrained anger and violence there for all to see in the numerous films, remains unresolved. Even though the individual perpetrators must be held responsible (and some were undoubtedly more violent than others), there was a definite impression that the individual officers were acting collectively, as if under orders to vent their emotional, sexual and political frustrations. It seemed as though their actions were based on ignorance: a kind of self-image of the super-tough TV cop fighting single-handed against a murderous gang in some American suburb. Not all of the officers, but many of them. “In the police force there are honest people who do their jobs with great courage. And then there are the thugs, the kind of mercenaries we saw in action in Genoa and Naples. But they’re a minority.” Of this Giuliano is sure, but Haidi isn’t.
“So why don’t the honest ones talk?” she asks.
“It’s not that easy,” he answers. “Things are very different from the inside and democratisation is a slow and difficult process. Take the financial police, for instance, the finanzieri. They have two images: one, of a respectable public service urging people to do things like report tax evaders, and the second, on the streets of Genoa on the 21st of July, acting with incredible brutality and unjustifiable violence against defenceless people, many of them down on the ground, already injured. These scenes were on TV for everybody to see. Why did they do it? Was it to try and impress the extremist, fascist right in various parts of the police force? to prove that they too, not just the polizia and carabinieri, know how to give a good beating? If the first image is to predominate - and it’s a recognised image, it does exist – then the thugs we see in the second image have to be punished internally, within the structure, but it’s not easy.”
“Have they no conscience? I lost my son, other young people were seriously injured and yet not a single one of them has got the courage to speak out about what really happened?”
“You can go along with that on an emotive level,” says Giuliano, “but it doesn’t actually get you anywhere. It doesn’t help solve the problem in any way. The question is, what do you do about it? And the answer lies in politics: a slow and difficult process based on the growth of a shared civil and democratic conscience throughout the country, and everybody knows that this is always a harder option than looking for easy, useless shortcuts.”
“The rot isn’t just in a few apples,” retorts Haidi “and, quite frankly, the argument that Giuliano and others like him put forward is just naïve, downright naïve. It’s the whole framework that’s rotten.”
“This is just criticising. And then what? It’s not enough just to criticise; you’ve got to think how to move forward, and the Left has moved forward. The DS (Democrats of the Left party) and the CGIL (General Confederation of Italian Workers) weren’t even there on the marches in July (not even on the one after Carlo’s death on the 21st).”
“And look at the situation now. The CGIL, the whole of it and not just a part, has started a constructive dialogue with the Movement. The biggest party is starting to move, slowly (but big parties are notoriously slow), “and yet it moves”, as Galileo would say. Here too they’re rethinking many things, including the need to relate to the Movement. And perhaps the tragedy of Carlo may have contributed to all this, just as us going around talking about our experience may have done.”
Giuliano adds: “There was a little bit of Carlo in that incredible demonstration in Rome on the 23rd of March, I could feel it. I could feel the indignation of those many people who hadn’t forgotten Genoa.”
At this point Haidi remembers an episode at the Bolzaneto barracks described to her by one of the many eyewitnesses she’s in contact with. It was already evening. The boy in question, who didn’t know Genoa very well, was somewhere near Brignole station and, not being sure which road to take to get home, stopped to ask a group of young people. All of a sudden several police cars turned up, rounded them up and took them off to the Bolzaneto barracks. Here they were put in a room from where they could hear clearly all the goings-on and shouting from the other rooms. They were held there with their arms raised, legs spread and faces against the wall. They didn’t understand what was happening or where they’d been taken. They were frightened. At a certain point a man in plain clothes, who seemed quite high-ranking, came in and started asking questions: who are you, why were you brought in? After listening to their answers he told them to wait there and that he would be back soon. When he came back he told them to follow him and he took them out of the barracks. At this point the boy got very frightened, because he remembered that in lots of films it happens like this: they take you out and shoot you in the back, saying you were trying to escape. But this policeman was chatting away to everyone, and whenever other officers rushed up asking where he was taking them he would say “they’re with me, I’ll deal with them”. He led them out of the yard and into the street. At this point the boy asked: “What happens now?” “Oh, you can go home.” “Really?” and somebody with a mobile phone called a taxi. When the taxi arrived the boy asked the policeman “Why are you letting us go?” “Because I don’t agree with what they’re doing in there” answered the policeman. And so it’s true that they didn’t all agree with it. But why didn’t he report his colleagues? Because he was frightened, there might be reprisals. But if he had enough of a conscience to say he didn’t agree with his colleagues, then he should have had the courage to report them.

A year without Carlo....

A year without Carlo. A hard, painful year in which Carlo’s parents have been accompanied and carried along by an ever-growing nucleus of people into new, unexpected situations and new ways of thinking. The year has also had its blank spaces, such as the total lack of assistance at institutional level, as revealed unwittingly by some foreign reporters when they asked in what way the state had helped the family in legal proceedings and other such matters.
The whole world is in a process of movement, with different sections of society constantly wanting to act, talk and be listened to. Giuliano, weighing it all up, mentions issues like the struggle for the right to water and the need for a cure for AIDS, vitally important themes that young people, just like Carlo, have adopted as their own. But he thinks it’s still just a matter of time before everybody’s aspirations for a fairer world will come together: “Young people, quite rightly, want things more in a hurry, because of their exuberance and generosity, and because they don’t sit back and think about it: they haven’t got time. The older generation, on the other hand, has got used to change being long and drawn out. We’ll have to see if we can get the youngsters to slow down a bit and the adults to speed up. Perhaps we could get everybody to agree that things have to be done in a reasonable time”. This discussion about timing, though, runs the risk of turning into a theoretical red herring, unless we act immediately, as and from tomorrow morning. And this Giuliano knows only too well from his administrative experience, in the voluntary sector and cooperatives, where, even though there are books to balance and rules to abide by, the most important aspect by far is caring for people, and to do this effectively you’ve always got to try and act quickly and avoid putting things off. These principles have been clear to Haidi and Giuliano right from the start, in a relationship that was formed and developed in an atmosphere of activism, social commitment and work. They’ve lived in three big cities: first of all Milan, then Rome from 1975 to 1980 (Haidi and Elena joined Giuliano there in 1977 and Carlo was born there on the 14th of March 1978) and, finally, Genoa, as Giuliano progressed through his career in the trade union movement. In Milan and Rome he was responsible for hospital workers and then, in Genoa, he became regional secretary of the Liguria Region Public Sector in the union, which was formed round about that time. In the last few years before retirement he worked in the Press Office, a kind of return to former times when, before getting involved with the union, he used to work in publishing: at the “Calendario del Popolo”, “Stasera” (edited by Fortebraccio) and then with “l’Unità” and “il Giorno” before going into the actual publishing industry. In 1972 he was proposed for secondment as a full-time union official.

Some of Carlo’s friends were from the bar near home where he played table football, but he had lots of other friends his parents had never met, or whom they got to know only afterwards. These were many and varied, not only in character but also in social background. Carlo must have been round every centro sociale in the town. Perhaps he slept in them, says Haidi, but without being shocked about it, knowing that her son had never harmed anybody, apart from himself.
His closest circle of friends had been drug users who attended, or had attended, drug addiction centres. Carlo had also volunteered to work with an association offering assistance to AIDS sufferers, something that his family found out about only after his death, from these very friends.
“In the time following Carlo’s death, the friends of his we got to know included a boy who was lost and homeless, another one who had gone out of his mind, a friar, a respectable Catholic volunteer from St. Egidio’s, a Moroccan who brought a flower each time he came to Piazza Alimonda because he’d known Carlo well and a teacher with health problems who said he’d spent a lot of time with Carlo.” A varied slice of humanity, all with stories to tell in the frequent meetings. Not many of them had photos of Carlo as Carlo never liked being photographed. The only photo that the family allowed to be published was the one that was enlarged and taken to the G8 exhibition in Porto Alegre. In the evenings, after an intense day of talks and conferences, Haidi used to sit on a bench at the foot of the Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul under that gigantic photograph. It was taken at Christmas, the year before: Carlo with a glass of wine in his hand by the fireplace at home. Next to him (but cut off in the photo), was his sister Elena. “I’ve never wanted to give out photos of Carlo. Porto Alegre was an exception. There aren’t all that many pictures where you can see his face clearly. Often when I tried to photograph him he would turn the other way, and he was always very quick. And then he would go away.
But on the 20th of July he stayed put, and the photos are there for everybody to see, thousands of times, always the same ones, his body run over and run over again by that “defenceless” Land Rover, his shoulders bare and the fire extinguisher in his hands. How familiar those photos have become to us. So familiar that when we see photos from other angles and perspectives we can’t even understand what’s going on. Even the most acute observers can’t remember seeing other photos: the “defenceless Land Rover”, the famous plank of wood on the right, the only thing, amongst all those objects and people, to get so near to the carabinieri vehicle. You can see boys throwing stones at the policemen lined up just a few metres from the “defenceless” Land Rover, policemen who, with the merest hint of a baton charge, could have made everybody scatter and set their colleagues free. Just a while before this, in Corso Torino, a similar thing had happened. A carabinieri vehicle had got trapped, really trapped. There were demonstrators and police all around it. The occupants of the vehicle got out and went away, without being attacked, with a minimum of protection from their colleagues. Why couldn’t they have done this in Piazza Alimonda? Why did nobody come when a policeman – clearly visible in a photo – beckoned his colleagues? Why didn’t they fire in the air from the Land Rover to stop the attack by the demonstrators? You don’t see anybody coming near enough to actually hit Placanica, the young carabiniere in the Land Rover, with a stone, and nor do you see anybody putting their hand in to try and open the holster and take the gun. And this is why Placanica’s words sounded so sinister when he was interviewed on Channel 5 at the end of May: someone was pulling him by his feet, he added, as if all the other things they were doing to him weren’t enough. “Repeat the same lie often enough and it becomes the truth. Berlusconi’s been giving lessons”, says Haidi.

The world of solidarity that has burst into the Giulianis’ home...

The world of solidarity that has burst into the Giulianis’ home in this year without Carlo has got a lot to do with young people. Haidi and Giuliano have been meeting so many young people, in all kinds of different places and situations. Giuliano, affected by their great warmth and generosity, gets into heated political discussions with them as he tells them the truth about Genoa and argues for the need for gradual change in the world. He feels that the common ground is close at hand and that it won’t take much to work out a common approach and face the way ahead together. This is what he’s been wanting to do since the 20th of July 2001, a day that has forced him to think about many other things beyond his normal world of work.
Haidi too has been pushed into contact with a younger generation of women and men, and, true to form, has thrown herself wholeheartedly into this new social sphere. She has of course mixed with people of this age before, but never quite so much as in this year, right through from the mixed bag of Carlo’s Genoese acquaintances in Piazza Alimonda to those on the campsite in Porto Alegre, and she has never been so closely involved with them. Contacts in the past have always been fleeting, through her daughter and son. This generation has been a great new discovery for her and she has come to love the complexity of these young people, much more difficult than small children, in her opinion. She has, in fact, grown to be as much at ease with them as with people of her own age. “”Perhaps because they’re so affectionate towards me, or perhaps because I can see a little bit of Carlo in each of them.”

A year without Carlo, with so many memories concentrated into a single day, as recounted in the film made by Francesca Comencini, a “non-competing entry” at Cannes, with Haidi, despite her reluctance, becoming the key figure in this documentary about that last day of Carlo’s. A film about Carlo the young man, his meeting with the “Disobedients” march, his last hours, and the delicate poetry of an extrovert, sensitive twenty-year-old. At first Haidi didn’t take to the idea too well. Her first meeting with the director was in Genoa on the 20th of January, after the demonstration called by the “piazzacarlogiuliani” committee. In the evening there was a performance by a theatre group from Vittorio Veneto. The director, Francesca Comencini was there to film the performance and it was there that she first said she wanted to make a film about Carlo. They met again in Porto Alegre and talked about it in more detail. The filming started and interviews were arranged with some of Carlo’s friends and Haidi herself, as the film was to be based on Haidi’s commentary. The film is called Carlo Giuliani, raggazo (Carlo Giuliano, a boy). This is what was written on the street sign when the name of the square, Piazza Alimonda, after Cardinal Gaetano Alimonda of Turin, was crossed out in anger immediately after Carlo’s death. The film was proposed for a Cannes showing and immediately accepted. “When Francesca phoned with her suggestion I was sceptical, not having actually seen the edited version of the film” says Haidi. “I trusted her, though. She’s a wonderful person and I’m very glad to have known her.” But as soon as she saw a tape of the film she said no. No, she wanted a film about Carlo and this was too full of Carlo’s mother. Giuliano liked the film, though, and so did Lello Voce, “one of the many friends we found through Carlo.” Lello saw the film when Haidi was in Piazza Alimonda with a group of experts and the Public Prosecutor and others, because the famous Land Rover was going to be there and Haidi wanted to see it at all costs, even though it was likely be an unpleasant experience. Lello convinced her with just a few telling points: “He said to me, firstly: if you want to make the film you’ve got in your head about Carlo then you’ll have to make it yourself, but you can’t do this because you’re not a film director. Secondly: you wanted a political film and this is an ethical film of great force. Thirdly: you’re always going around telling as many people as possible what happened in Piazza Alimonda, and with this film you can get through to many more people than just by staying at home.” Haidi, obviously, didn’t go to Cannes for the first showing because she thought she was already too visible in the film itself. Giuliano went instead.

They’re different, Haidi and Giuliano...

They’re different, Haidi and Giuliano, but this is nothing unusual. They’re human beings and have always had strong ideas, both thinking out things in their own way, and, as often happens in deep relationships, they’re less ready to forgive each other over things they would forgive other people for. An example was the Gulf War in 1991. For Haidi, Giuliano’s position on this was totally unacceptable: how could her comrade, the father of her children, ever be in favour of an “invented” war and the murder of innocent civilian victims? For Giuliano, though, who sincerely believed in the humanitarian and defensive role of the war, Haidi’s opinions were too radical and extreme. And it was on this political rock that some of the apparently solid shared feelings in the couple foundered, causing cracks to appear in the certainty of being able to understand and make themselves understood. This is why, on the 20th of July, the dividing of their roles was a natural thing: in this way, the abilities of both people and the political “splits” born from their different analyses and nurtured by their different life experiences, were consolidated. When Carlo was murdered they both reacted instinctively on the basis of their similarities and differences: he related immediately to the press and she didn’t. Giuliano was the front man while she worked behind the scenes. “Perhaps this gave me a kind of advantage over Giuliano, in so far as I feel very much the reciprocated love from other people, like a kind of daily lifeline.” Haidi tells no lie when she says that everything she does, she does for Carlo. She does it in Carlo’s name: even if he no longer needs truth and justice, other young people do. She doesn’t want the tragedy that happened to happen again. She doesn’t believe in God, and so the fact that Carlo’s no longer here means that he no longer needs anything. She was deeply convinced, right from the start, that in that moment her son was doing the right thing, regardless of what they say. All she needs to do is put a solid framework around this sure image, to understand why, to understand what was happening around him, to understand the connections. Being interviewed doesn’t help her, but avoiding being photographed does, because it helps her contact people who perhaps wouldn’t have appreciated her excessive media presence, fearing that they, in turn, would be sucked back in by the system.
Giuliano is clever, a good talker, good at facing up to the public side of society, because it’s something he’s always done, in his work, going out to meetings and conferences. He has also been good at handling relations with the press, coming over as a wise person with a balanced way of doing things. “There’s no doubt that the 20th of July changed my life profoundly. Up to then I was doing the things I’d always done: politics and a lot of work in the cooperative, which I’ve certainly put less energy into since the 20th. Now I’ve got to try and achieve the impossible and use my time in the best way, but at the same time I’ve got to carry on working at the cooperative because it’s my job and it gives me a lot of satisfaction. Keeping something going that gives work to sixty people, and independence and dignity to many of them, is something that makes you feel worthwhile. Certainly, now I’m asked to do many things, but, banal as it may sound, it wasn’t of my choosing.

Haidi had her school, her children to look after, her friends. She’s never been a feminist in the strict sense of the word: her feminism has all been inside the walls of her home. “It’s never been a primary need for me, because it seemed right to struggle for a different humanity in its entirety, even though it’s true that women are one of the weaker components of this humanity.” But, as she says, she hasn’t renounced politics, in the sense of living your life taking an interest in other people, discussing rights and wrongs, working for a better society. And this is why she should have gone to the demonstration on the 20th of July, and staying away, as many people of her age did, was really wrong. She admires people who haven’t stopped working for a collective “militancy” rather than just a personal one, even though she may not agree with all their ideas. It was her age that put her off. What kept Haidi in her vegetable garden was the idea that she’d already done a lot, and that at her time of life, she deserved a rest.

But now she knows that there are certain things you can never retire from.

I wish you a good morning my dear friends…

Thursday 12th of July 2001, 12:57 am

I wish you a good morning
my dear friends,
I hope you slept
sweetly
and that your sleep
was not disturbed
by noises,
cars or voices.
I must ask you (alas)
If you are able
to wake me tomorrow
- what a thankless task! –
although everyone
has their cross to bear
and this is yours,
it’s written in your destiny.
I put my trust in you,
in your compassion,
my hands praying:
now I go to sleep
and place in you
my only hope
of being awakened,
soon, and of being able
to do those things
that are so important
- that, just for their sake,
I’ve got to say all this crap. -
	Carlo





(Note left on the kitchen table in Cristina’s house)

A MIDSUMMER DAY’S BIBLIOGRAPHY

“I saw bunches of lemon-yellow dreams
I saw the crooked dark mouth of the cannon
and on the branches the twisted thorns of all wrongs
the sharp points on the evils, the lies and the short steps
the dead and the leaves that no one gathers
I saw the dark tunnel, the grief and its birth pains
bitter as lemon juice on a wound
thin as wolf trails, long as a lifetime…”


from I limoni di Utopia by Lello Voce (Sololimoni, bitter fruits and words on the facts of Genoa, Shake Edizioni Underground, p. 59)

Genoa, Friday 20th of July 2001

Carlo isn’t a member of the Genoa Social Forum.
He definitely shares its spirit and ideals.
You could almost say that Carlo and the GSF are alike: they’re both young, unselfish and big-hearted. They don’t see eye-to-eye with the world of politics and have got their sights set on distant horizons. They can be funny and tender at the same time. They’re naïve.
And yet Carlo’s participation in the demonstrations organised against G8 was quite marginal. He couldn’t really identify with any of the groups. He listened to the discussions without joining in. He went to the Manu Chao concert and took part in the exuberant Migranti demo on the Thursday.
On Friday he should have been going to the sea with a friend. He was just coming out of a gloomy period. He wanted sun, to get physically well again, to leap into the salty water from the rocks, the way he loved to do.

But Carlo was also inquisitive, and when, on Friday morning, he came out of his house– where he lived with his girlfriend and her baby daughter – he wanted to know what was going on in his city.
He met G., one of his many friends, and they set off together down to Sant’Agata. This was confirmed not only by the eyewitness account of another boy but also by a photo taken in Corso Torino at about two in the afternoon.

It’s plain to see from the way Carlo and his friend were dressed (Carlo in a vest, with his denim jacket tied around his waist and his friend with a headscarf and beach shoes) that neither of them wanted to be “urban guerrillas”: they were quite shocked by the devastation left in the wake of the so-called Black Bloc, bothered by the tear gas and disoriented by the behaviour of the police, as the other boy was to say later on.

“…It was like the stuff nightmares are made of: this was what the area looked like to the people of Genoa from early in the morning on Black Friday, the 20th of July 2001. The streets all around the sacred G8 precinct were still wet with rain and full of containers that had been put there during the night.”
(from Zona Gialla, by C. Antonini, published by Fratelli Frilli Editori

There are no photos of the next few hours, up to about five in the afternoon, only eyewitness accounts.
As they were going through the railway underpass to get back to Sant’Agata, Carlo’s friend saw a roll of sticky tape and started kicking it along. Carlo, who never wasted anything, said “No, it might come in handy” and put it on his arm. The two friends parted on the corner of Corso Sardegna, where Carlo met another boy, M,. and walked back to his house with him where he said hello to M.’s father. Going up the Montaldo stairway, a boy with a banner asked to borrow the sticky tape. “Thank you,” “You’re welcome”.

In Piazza Manin there were the women’s section and the Mani Tese and Lilliput associations.

“People from both “inside” and “outside” the new movement went to Genoa for thousands of different reasons. Some to express their support, others to join the struggle and others because it just seemed normal to be there. For me there was nothing normal about it: I’d never seen such a big demonstration. I was part of that great mass of peaceful, self-assured people who’d basically never needed to struggle for their security and rights, things which, because of a certain twist of that bizarre and predominantly random thing called fate, seemed to be ours by right and somehow untouchable. We were there because it was right t be there…”

(from La torre di Babele, by M. Ventrino, published by Asti, p. 9)

“…At a certain point, though, something strange happened. All of a sudden I saw an enraged mob, about thirty strong, armed with iron bars and hooded and dressed in black, appear at the bottom of the square and come towards us. Many of them were shouting in German, at least that’s what it sounded like, and somebody managed to pick out a Roman accent. Why didn’t the police stop them?
The Mani Tese kids had all stopped in front of Via Assarotti to try to stop the black-clad mob from getting to the entrance to Corvetto Square. But I had the definite impression that these terrifying and threatening madmen didn’t have the slightest intention of reaching the square. They were busy attacking peaceful demonstrators and breaking video cameras and equipment. And they were throwing tear gas, or something similar. The police didn’t intervene. We ran off towards Corso Monte Grappa…”

(from Marea, Erga Edizioni, special edition, III 2001, p. 122)

“As the presumed BB went off into Corso Armellini, tear gas canisters started raining down on the group of non-violent demonstrators who had intervened. Immediately afterwards about fifty state polizia charged into the Piazza, furiously attacking the stands and hitting out at the eco-pacifists and feminists with their truncheons. The result was at least ten young people with head wounds and a girl with a fractured hand…”

(from La sfida al G8, 2001 Manifestolibri, p.212)

“... The Black Bloc came and went, and then the police. We got there after the baton charges. People were counting to see if anybody was missing, looking at each other and trying to work out what had happened. They directed us towards a shortish woman in her fifties. She had a deep wound on her head and her t-shirt was soaked in blood. She’d been hit with a truncheon. She was asking where her two children were. We headed towards the middle of the square, where the stands were all overturned and the people were still looking shocked, terrified and angry. A thin, distinguished looking woman (diagnosis: fracture of metacarpus IV, probably a month in plaster, possible operation) wanted to make a statement immediately and needed a medical report before she went back to Milan. With great difficulty we convince her that she should avoid going to the Accident and Emergency department in the local hospital. A girl sits crying on some stairs. The truncheon marks seemed carved in a pattern on her back. In that square all the people we treated were women…”

(from Obbligo di referto, published by Fratelli Frilli, p.73)

At about a quarter past three Giuliano phoned his son.
“Where are you? Be careful”.
“Don’t worry, Dad.”
Carlo was in Piazza Manin, where he was seen by another two friends, A and M. He received and made some phone calls and probably saw a group of the so-called Black Bloc go past, overturning the demonstrators’ stands. He saw his first baton charge by the police who, instead of stopping the marauders, went for the totally peaceable young women and men and teenagers, as has been widely reported.

There are also the eyewitness accounts recorded by Radio Popolare.

(Genoa/July 2001 reports ERREPI – Radio Popolare
CD 2, n°13: Piazza Manin: “Sangue?” “Sangue, sangue”)


Did he get angry? Very likely, knowing him.
Escaping the tear gas and truncheon blows like everyone else, Carlo went down Corso Monte Grappa, back over the S. Agata bridge and then stopped off with a friend to eat a farinata at the “Genoano” café, in Via Tommaso Pendola, between Piazzas Martinez and Teralba.
It was about half-past four.

“I came out of work on my moped and drove along all the top part of the ring road. I could see the signs of all the devastation and I carried on until the road crossed over Corso Italia. I came down off the ring road and when I got near Piazzale Kennedy I saw a cordon of carabinieri blocking the road. Ahead of me somebody on a moped just like me went through the cordon, which opened up and closed again after him. I went up to the cordon, stopped and asked if I could go through. I was dressed completely in black, like I nearly always am. A carabiniere turned round, really agitated, and shouted at me – ARE YOU ONE OF OURS? – I didn’t know what the f*** he was talking about.

(from Genova G8 un vertice nel sangue,
edited by the Collettivo Antagonista Savonese, p.52)

It’s not difficult to remember how, in the meantime, “….the Civil Disobedience march, fully authorised to go as far as Piazza Verdi…” was “…baton charged suddenly and cold-bloodedly in Via Tolemaide, for no reason at all. The reconstruction of the facts here is particularly important, and the question is still being asked whether, if things had been different at the start, perhaps it would never have escalated like it did.”

(from Genova per noi, by G. Mascia: Minority Document presented to the Parliamentary Constitutional Affairs Commission)



“… the polizia continued with their repressive action in the bottleneck of Via Tolemaide. The police had launched a surprise attack on the march with their armoured cars, and the marchers tried to defend themselves as best they could, but obviously the forces on the two sides weren’t evenly balanced.”

(from Otto contro tutti, by . Barrecca, published by Città del sole, p. 43)

“My mistake in Genoa was to get up on a wall. I was trying to get a better view of the battle between the demonstrators and the police who were trying to stop the demonstrators getting near the major world leaders in the G8 conference. I was watching this infernal scene, with water cannon and clouds of tear gas, when I felt a really hard bang on the back of my neck. For a second my vision went cloudy.
I had been hit by a policeman’s truncheon.”

(from I giorni di Genova, published by Indice Internazionale, p. 51)

“…We were going down Corso Gastaldi and we were all quite calm. At a certain point, all of a sudden, there was a police baton charge. For no reason. The front of the march, which had already reached the tunnel under the railway line, was pushed on into the tunnel by the tear gas and, once they were in there, the police continued to fire tear gas canisters into the tunnel. Have you any idea what it’s like being showered with tear gas canisters in a closed environment? We were still stuck in Corso Europa, with the police in front of us baton charging and the unscaleable wall of the railway line behind us. The only way to escape was by turning back, but it’s not easy to turn a march of eight to ten thousand people around. There were some side streets for sheltering from the baton charge, but very few, very narrow and twenty or thirty yards apart. While I was trying to work out how to get back to avoid being caught in the baton charge, five or six tear gas canisters, fired at exactly the height of a person’s head, smashed into the wall behind me. Was it by mistake? I don’t think so. The police didn’t want to disperse the people on the march with those canisters: they wanted to hurt them. I don’t know if they wanted to kill. I don’t think so, but it would be crazy to think that the possibility of people being killed hadn’t been taken into account…”

(Dal ’68 ai No-Global, by P. Sansonetti, published by Baldini&Castoldi, p. 56)

By the time Carlo’s friend had lost sight of him at about five o‘clock, he was already heading back up to Corso Gastaldi and had joined the march coming from Carlini.

“Immobile. That’s how Carlo Giuliani is in the photo taken just before he entered Piazza Alimonda where the unexpected awaited him. Carlo Giuliani is immobile, at the head of the first line of Disobedients. There is chaos all around him, with tear gas, water cannon, gunshots and flying stones. Carlo Giuliani, immobile, waiting for the death that will soon come to him from the back of a Land Rover…”

These are the words of Luciano Ferrara (Un altro mondo è possibile, published by Intra Moenia, p. 77), who took the photograph above, giving us one of the last images of Carlo alive, even though, like many others, he made a mistake when describing Carlo’s clothing: the track suit trousers are in fact blue, the jacket is grey with two white stripes down the sleeves and the balaclava is blue, as written in the “found and sequestered” report made out at Genoa Police Station.
No, Carlo wasn’t expecting death. Those who know him well know that at that moment he is calmly thinking. He wants to understand, to weigh up the situation.

It’s at this point that Danillo Mollicone sees him (as written in a letter to the special edition of Diario, 3rd of August 2001). He also thinks, mistakenly, that he’d already met him at the start of the march, at the Carlini, all padded up and decked out like the other boys. But then, when he sees him like this, small and unprotected in the front line, he sends him further back.

The violence of the baton charges: the beating of isolated people, or worse, people who had already fallen down, pursued as they tried to escape down side streets, into doorways or up the stairs in buildings, and the vehicles, including armoured cars, driving into the people… this has all been reported in the films, the letters to the press and the eyewitness accounts by demonstrators, photographers and ordinary citizens.

…there are also eyewitness accounts recorded by Radio Popolare.

(Genoa/July 2001 reports, ERREPI – Radio Popolare, 2nd edition n° 10 onwards)

…There is also a highly accurate and reasoned account by Giulietto Chiesa in his book. His description of the movements of the Black Bloc and police groups around Piazza Paolo da Novi, starting from the morning, is quite illuminating.

(from G8/Genova, published by Einaudi in the ”Gli struzzi” series)

“The second baton charge started, but this time the carabinieri came from different points: they attacked the front of the demonstration from Via Torino and the sides from Via Casaregis and Via Caffa.
Moments of real panic. A mass of people crowded together like in the underground in the rush hour. There was nowhere to get away. The comrades at the front of the march (not having any escape route) were forced to bear the brunt of the carabinieri charge. Tear gas canisters were raining down on the middle of the march, and many comrades were knocked down. A boy next to me got hit in the face. The blood gushed out, splashing onto the clothes of all of us around him. He fainted but didn’t fall, held up by the crowd.

(from Guerra civile globale, tornando a Genova in volo da New York, by F. Gallerano, published by Odradeck, p. 47)


Attacked from the front, closed in from behind by the rest of the march and the railway on one side, attacked on the other side from the adjoining streets, some of the demonstrators tried to make defensive barriers with rubbish bins and glass and plastic bottle banks.

Is it not legitimate, here, to talk about legitimate self-defence?

“… no more running away, getting gassed and then beaten. We were all saying it and thinking it: enough is enough, we’ve got to defend ourselves… The residents in the Tommaseo district must have been saying ‘that’s enough’ as well, seeing us running away from the gas and getting beaten up by the riot squad for no reason at all … at least we could get our breath back in their doorways or go into their shops …
Then we separated; I saw you from behind going into Piazza Alimonda while some of us went to pick up the boys and girls lying wounded on the ground. You and some others made a desperate attempt to hold back a new baton charge, even if just for a minute, to give us a chance to get away …”
(from Le Quattro giornate di Genova, published by Fratelli Frilli Editori, p.35

“... It was almost always impossible to get the names of the people arriving at the hospital. Barriers, restrictions, aggression. Two names you knew straight away, though. There was Timoty Ormezzano, aged 26, son of the journalist Gian Paolo, all swollen. There was Federico Pesciarelli, aged 20, Red Cross volunteer, son of the Dean of the Economics department at the University of Ancona. His face was purple with truncheon blows, his right eye bloodshot, his jaw broken. Afterwards his father Enzo, the Dean, wrote a letter to the papers saying “it was the carabinieri of the Lombardy battalion that performed these heroic acts against entirely defenceless young people. Later on a prison guard in Pavia told me that ‘they didn’t arrest a single one of the violent ones: they just got the stupid ones or the ones who tripped and fell over’. The method is simple and effective in its own perverted way: you launch tear gas as a kind of deterrent, before any possible acts of violence can start, gassing and blinding people and knocking them down and then – like in a seal cull – the cudgel-wielders arrive. Don’t try telling me that these depraved acts are a kind of emotive reaction. My son was beaten and wounded before the skirmishes that led to the death of Carlo Giuliani had even started. The ferocious and cowardly way that he was treated shows that the violence was premeditated. The fighting was started deliberately to raise the level of provocation and retaliation. Civil rights and guarantees were torn to shreds.”

(Non lavate questo sangue. I giorni di Genova, by C. De Gregorio, published by Laterza, p. 46 and 47)

“.... The carabinieri report, issued by Colonel Tesser on the 10th of December 2001, says that three carabinieris fired two, five and eight pistol shots into the air on the 20th. The fifth of these episodes, which was filmed by TV cameras and confirmed both in Inspector Cernetig’s report and by Police Chief Gianni De Gennaro himself, refers to a policeman wearing a “press” jacket and holding a pistol in his hand.”

(Report by Ulivo Centre-Left coalition parliamentary groups, I fatti di Genova”, published by Editori Riuniti, p. 43

We can’t see Carlo in the films of the famous “assault” on the Land Rover.
The assault comes exclusively from the right: the Land Rover is neither surrounded nor isolated, as can be seen clearly in the ample footage of Reuters itself.
Above all, it’s not “blocked in”.
For no apparent reason, the vehicle is parked against a rubbish bin that was already overturned.


It’s not true what the carabinieri say afterwards. It’s not true that they were “blocked in from behind by another carabinieri Land Rover”, and nor can you see a demonstrator pulling somebody in the vehicle “by the leg”, although in some films you can clearly see a boot kicking the rear windscreen…

It’s not against the wall of the Lino Bar, and nor is it against the footpath. The street in front of it (Via Caffa) is clear: in fact, it’s occupied by a group of polizia, and it’s at them that the stones are actually being thrown at by the demonstrators.

At this point Carlo arrives. You can see the gun being pointed and you can see the fire extinguisher …

He bends down to pick it up, keeping his eye on the gun, as can be clearly seen from the fact that he keeps leaning slightly backwards.

He lifts it up and moves as if to take a step….

The Reuters photo, taken by Dylan Martinez with a 70/200 millimetre telephoto lens that squashes everything together: the bin against the wall, the carabinieri vehicle against the bin, the demonstrators against the vehicle and Carlo against the gun that’s about to shoot him.
These photos were shown on TV and in lots of newspapers and magazines in Italy and all over the world. By comparing them with the photos taken at the same time by Marco D’Auria you can see how things (including the distances) really were.

The boot poking out of the Land Rover window would have been enough to stop the fire extinguisher…

But the gun, that was pointed first of all at another boy, moves to him …
… and fires.

“…Democracy guarantees freedom of expression. Violence is unjustifiable. Young people like Carlo Giuliani have the right to grow and see a better world. It is the right to live.”

“Jornal do Brasil” Brazil (from I giorni di Genova) published by Indice Internazionale, Sept. 2001)

When you too cry
the grief of existence
and you’re ready to feel bad
with those who feel bad
you will finally be
armies of nothing
tools of no one
and you’ll see, in the Genoa sea
the baby face
of Carlo, who is there.

(from Carlo non c’è by Virginio Giovanni Bertini,
Libro Bianco, accounts of the events of Genoa by people from Lucca)

