A Temporal Ecology of Events: Piazza Fontana as a Case Study

• In Event: 234 - Regular Session. Collective Memory: Contesting the Meanings of the Past

Abstract

The paper uses the Italian case of Piazza Fontana as a case-study to shed light on how different narratives of a controversial event are produced within an institutional setting, the Italian Judiciary system, and how they related to each other over time. The case is a milestone in the collective memory of Italy, and the paper proposes an innovative method to map its evolution over time. On December 12 1969 an extensively planned attack, with five simultaneous bombs in Rome and Milan, marked the starting point of over fifteen years of political violence in Italy. The bomb located in Piazza Fontana, Milan, caused several causalities among the civilian population and thus the event went down in history under this name. No group ever claimed responsibility for the attack and actors of different ideologies were blamed. Juridical materials, composed by the inquiries and the trials for the case, constitute the data of this study. They cover a time period from 1969 to 2005, when the last sentence was pronounced. During this time several jurisdictions were involved in the inquiries. I focus on the narratives produced by these jurisdictions from 1969 to 1987, using the notion of “event” as unit of analysis. I apply network analysis techniques to narrative texts to create a temporal network in which events are treated as vertices connected through causal or/and meaningful ties that emerge from the data. This approach allows capturing how the different narratives interacted and changed over time, and to visualize their structural properties.

Author

• Sabrina Nardin, University of Arizona