ABSTRACT
Social and political violence had remained endemic in Italy during the post-war period, reflecting a deep-seated tradition on both the left and the right of politics. In the 1950s and 1960s there was news almost weekly of protests and strikes, in both town and country, and on numerous occasions, as the cynical Italian phrase would have it, ‘out popped a corpse’. Normally the dead and wounded were among the strikers and protesters, shot down, or deliberately run over, by the riot police created by Scelba to deal with such threats to ‘law and order’ with heavy-handed decisiveness. There was also a low-level running war, with its own tally of casualties, between militant followers of the Italian Social Movement and their counterparts on the extreme left who believed the Communists had betrayed the Resistance and surrendered the revolution. In Sardinia, Calabria and the Abruzzi, the tradition of sheep-rustling, kidnapping and social banditry was by no means extinguished.
