Seven letters, two places, and a bizarre misunderstanding in the story of Aldo Moro's murder. Gradoli: the name that still sends chills down the spine nearly fifty years after one of the most ferocious attacks on the postwar state. In a town in northern Lazio, a futile search is underway for the Christian Democrat president kidnapped by the Red Brigades on March 16, 1978, while in Rome, on the street of the same name that leads to the Via Cassia, Mario Moretti, the man in charge of the terrorist operation, is hiding. Making everything even more surreal during the days of the kidnapping is a sinister twist: the word Gradoli, according to the protagonists' accounts, was not suggested by an informant. Instead, it was the spirits speaking.
The spirits speak
On Sunday, April 2, 1978, Moro had been held prisoner for seventeen days. In Zappolino, in the Bologna countryside, a group of friends was gathered in the home of Alberto Clò, a young professor at the university of the Emilian capital and a minister in the Dini government in the 1990s. Among them was Romano Prodi, the future prime minister and leader of the Ulivo party, also a professor at the University of Bologna. Also among them was economist Mario Baldassarri, later a member of parliament with the National Alliance (AN-PDL). Outside, the weather was foul; inside, someone was proposing the "saucer game": letters were arranged on a table and an object moved under the players' fingers. They were searching for answers from the afterlife. The testimonies also evoked figures from Christian Democrat history, such as Don Luigi Sturzo, Alcide De Gasperi, and Giorgio La Pira (who had died a few months earlier). The question was the one that haunted Italy: where is Moro? Among the confusing indications, Bolsena appears, then there is the key name: Gradoli.
The wrong track
It could have remained just a slightly macabre Sunday pastime. Instead, Prodi became alarmed and reported the incident to Umberto Cavina, an aide to DC secretary Benigno Zaccagnini. The tip reached the Interior Ministry, led by Francesco Cossiga. On April 6, investigators searched houses and land in the Gradoli area, in the province of Viterbo, near Lake Bolsena. No results. The name was correct, the location was wrong. In Rome, at Via Gradoli 96, there was a Red Brigades base used by Moretti and his partner Barbara Balzerani, another key figure in the terrorist attack. It's unclear whether it was one of Moro's prisons, but it was certainly an operations center for the kidnapping. And the investigators had already arrived at that door: on March 18, two days after the Via Fani ambush (in which five men—three police officers and two Carabinieri—members of the DC leader's bodyguard were killed), officers entered the building to conduct checks, as was happening on almost every street in northern Rome. They knocked on the apartment and left, without searching it. The failed raid was based on information from a resident: she spoke of strange ticking sounds at night, similar to Morse code signals—a detail not always reconciled. Some would later associate them with the clicking of the typewriter used to prepare the Red Brigades' communiqués, or even the letters Moro sent to DC leaders, his family, and the Pope.
Cazzullo's story
The absurd geography of Gradoli has returned to the forefront with "Una giornata particolare," Aldo Cazzullo's program, which aired on November 11th on La7. The episode, dedicated to Moro's kidnapping and murder, also recounts the story of the séance, alongside other shadows from the Apulian politician's fifty-five days of captivity. Many questions remain: why take a sign attributed to spirits so seriously? Why not verify the existence of a Gradoli street in Rome? Why did that name appear on that particular house in the hills outside Bologna? There is another related episode, no less disturbing: Eleonora Chiavarelli, the statesman's wife, informed of the Gradoli case, reported the existence of the Roman street to a police officer. She was told it wasn't listed in any telephone directory, particularly the Yellow Pages. The subsequent parliamentary commission was unable to clarify the circumstances, much less identify the woman's interlocutor. It has also been speculated that Cossiga personally received the report, but the then Interior Minister and later President of the Republic has always denied this.
Water and the Br refuge
On April 18, the hideout was discovered. Not thanks to Gradoli's lead, but due to water leaking into the apartment downstairs. Firefighters arrived, entered the apartment, and found weapons and Red Brigades documents. But it was already too late; Moretti and Balzerani were far away. A shower left running, with the water strangely directed toward a crack in the wall, caused the flooding. Was it an accident or a ruse to dislodge the location? A rift among the Red Brigades commando? The investigations have yielded no definitive answers. The story of the séance remains: the participants have always maintained it was just a game. According to the reconstructions of the parliamentary commissions, this version was intended to protect a source of information, perhaps associated with Autonomy circles in Bologna, but no evidence has ever been found to support this reconstruction.
The tragic epilogue
On May 9, Moro was found dead in the trunk of a Renault 4 ("maroon, not red," emphasizes Cazzullo, who brings the original car back to center stage in his television investigation) on Via Caetani, in the heart of Rome. Not a random location, but a symbolic one, halfway between Piazza del Gesù, the headquarters of the Christian Democrats, and Botteghe Oscure, the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party. It was a choice with strong symbolic value, harking back to the dialogue between Moro and PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer and the plan to bring the country's two main political forces closer together. An almost revolutionary change of scene, the so-called Historic Compromise, which frightened many circles, both in Italy and abroad, during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. It all ended in the worst possible way: the State lost the race against terrorists in the symbolic case of the Years of Lead. Gradoli remained the pinnacle of a chain of missed opportunities: a name, a village turned upside down, a door left closed. Perhaps the biggest mystery is not who moved Zappolino's saucer, but why the men in charge of searching for Moro were unable (or unwilling) to connect the clues they had before their eyes.