46 years ago the death of Aldo Moro, killed after 55 days of imprisonment on 9 May 1978

"I'm from the Red Brigades, I can't spend much time on the phone": thus begins the phone call in which Morucci announced where Aldo Moro's body was located, i.e. in the red Renault in via Caetani

ROME – Forty-six years old. Of questions, of non-answers, of half-truths, of imaginative or plausible hypotheses. But it is evidently still ‘too early’ to know the whole truth. May 9, 1978 is a tragic date but at the same time a piece of Italian history.

Franco Tritto, born Francesco, was an Italian jurist and academic, assistant to Aldo Moro. It was he who received the phone call from the Red Brigades announcing the death of the then president of the DC. The dialogue between the two, recorded, brings together two inevitably diametrically opposed states of mind: the coldness and decision of Red Brigade member Valerio Morucci, the apparent calm mixed with emotion of Tritto.

THE PHONE CALL

The interview immediately gives you chills. “I’m from the Red Brigades, do you understand? I can’t spend much time on the phone”, Morucci’s words. Who bluntly tells Tritto to go and tell the family, “in person”, where to find “the body of Aldo Moro”, he tells a moved Tritto. “We are fulfilling the president’s last wishes by telling the family where to find his body”, says Morucci again.

PRISON

Moro was kidnapped on March 16, 1978. During the 55 days of imprisonment, the president of the DC was subjected to long interrogations by the Red Brigade member Mario Moretti and for each topic Moro wrote a ‘minute report’ in his own hand on squared sheets of paper, filling in several blocks. These documents, personally written by Moro and then typewritten by the BR during his imprisonment, constituted the so-called Moro Memorial.

THE FINDING OF THE BODY

The interrogations were recorded on a normal tape recorder, but the reels containing Moretti’s questions and Moro’s answers were never found. After then the images of the crowd flocking to Via Caetani, in Rome, the body of Aldo Moro in the red Renault 4: an indelible passage in the history of Italy.&nbsp ;Moro, who was 61 years old, was buried in the municipality of Torrita Tiberina, a small town in the Roman province where the statesman loved to stay. He was 61 years old.

In the world of politics Aldo Moro was everything: academic and jurist, political secretary and president of the national council of the Christian Democrats. Among the founders of the Christian Democracy and its representative in the Constituent Assembly, he became its secretary (1959) and president (1976). He was a minister several times; five times President of the Council of Ministers, he led centre-left governments (1963/68), promoting in the 1974/76 period what was the so-called strategy of attention towards the Communist Party.