Bologna massacre, Meloni: 'Grave to say that bombing roots are in the right-wing government'. Mattarella: "irremediable wound".

"With profound feelings of solidarity, forty-four years after the attack, we join the families of the victims and the city of Bologna, the scene of a ruthless neo-fascist subversive strategy nourished by complicity nested in subversive syndicates that attempted to attack the freedom won by the Italians. One of the most tragic events in our republican history took place in Bologna'. This is how the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella recalled the massacre at Bologna station on 2 August 1980 that caused 85 deaths and injured over two hundred people.

On the anniversary of the massacre, however, there is a controversy between the government and the president of the Assovittime del 2 agosto, Paolo Bolognesi, who, speaking from the stage at the station, said: 'The roots' of the attack 'as the last two appeal sentences in the trials against Gilberto Cavallini and Paolo Bellini are also confirming, lie in the history of Italian post-fascism, in those organisations born from the Italian Social Movement in the 1950s: Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale today figure fully within the Italian right-wing government'.

Words to which Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni responded: "I am deeply and personally shocked by the unjustified and out-of-proportion attacks that have been directed, on this day of commemoration, at the undersigned and at the government. To claim that the "roots of that attack are now fully in the right-wing government", or that the justice reform passed by this government is inspired by the projects of the P2 Masonic lodge, is very serious. And it is dangerous, even for the personal safety of those who, democratically elected by the citizens, are only trying to do their best for the good of this nation'.

"The deaths, the images of the devastated Bologna Station, the ferocious attack on the coexistence of Italians," the Head of State emphasised, "on 2 August 1980, they left an indelible mark on the identity of the Republic and the conscience of the Italian people. Remembrance is not only a duty but is the conscious expression of that citizenship expressed in the constitutional values that terrorist violence wanted to strike down and demolish'. In Bologna, Mattarella said, 'one of the most tragic events in our republican history took place. It was an irremediable wound, a permanent warning to be handed down to the younger generations together with the values of the democratic response of our Homeland, which allowed the redemption and, in the unity of our community, the safeguard of the common good'.