ABSTRACT
General Dalla Chiesa had spent his entire life in the Carabinieri, one of the oldest police forces in the world, and had led Italy's successful battle against the most efficient political terrorists in Europe, the Red Brigades. He was perhaps the first popular policeman in Italian history, already being mentioned as a candidate for the presidency of the Republic, despite his well-known dislike for the country's leading political party. By and large, Carabiniere officers come from the ranks of the older bourgeoisie and sometimes even the aristocracy, tending to be stylish and well-dressed, while the Interior Ministry men are more frequently recruited from the new and generally urban middle class, and can sometimes seem drab and colourless in contrast. The basic operational philosophy for both police forces in the nineteenth century was a deeply-rooted notion that perfection in police work consisted in preventing crime from happening rather than merely arresting criminals after a breach of the law had taken place.
