ABSTRACT
The circumstances surrounding the murder of the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) President Aldo Moro in 1978 have dominated the public memory of his life; and the near-exclusive focus of the analyses of those circumstances has been on their allegedly inexplicable elements. Moro's letters were of course much more than a valuable source of evidence as to what had happened. Increasingly divided by the contrasting responses its members made to Moro's successive appeals, the community of remembrance was therefore made up of several hostile clusters whose antagonistic relations were entrenched by the outcome. The discovery in 1990 of the complete copy of the 'memoir' in Moro's handwriting provided a new resource for interpretation. In some respects that failure adds the Moro kidnapping to the list of cases of 'divided memory' that have occupied Italian historians and social scientists in recent years. As a focus for public memory in democracies, acts of lethal political violence have a special salience.
