“The time of the keys”, Rao recounts the Ramelli murder and the years of intolerance

In Milan, in 1975, in a leaden city wrapped in a grip of extremism, Sergio Ramelli – an eighteen-year-old right-wing student – was attacked with a wrench by a group of militants of the extra-parliamentary left, dying after 47 days of agony . A full-scale ambush ended in tragedy. With a cinematic style reminiscent of the films of Elio Petri, Nicola Rao, in “The time of the keys – The Ramelli murder and the time of intolerance” (just released by Piemme, 224 pages) reconstructs the days, the weeks, months, years of clashes, demonstrations, street wars, punitive expeditions in the city of Milan; of the hundreds of attacks with wrenches, organized by ultra-left groups; of the wounded, the dead and the trials following bloody events; many documents archived and discovered for the first time, unpublished testimonies, from yesterday and today, from more or less well-known protagonists, from those who were there and remember.

“The Time of the Keys” is a “courageous book which, after fifty years, investigates and denounces not only the guilty and conniving people, but the great process of removal that a large part of Italian society consciously or unconsciously implemented”, yes reads on the back cover. “Many in the city knew who those responsible for the Ramelli murder were – writes magistrate Guido Salvini in the afterword – but, at the same time, those responsible knew that, by remaining respectful of the ideological and cultural conformism of the environment, this would have them, as has been always protected.”

Nicola Rao, now director of Rai Communications, was director of Tg2 and deputy director of Tg1. A professional journalist since 1989, for over sixteen years he worked at Adnkronos first as a judicial reporter and then as a parliamentary journalist. He has created several scoops for the Adn: from the exclusive interview with Mario Tuti, in which he announced that he wanted to end the armed struggle, to the one carried out in Ali Agca prison, ten years after the attack on John Paul II. For many years he has dealt with black and red terrorism, themes on which he has written several books, including the three bestsellers that tell “the true story of Italian neo-fascism”, later reunited in the “Celtic Trilogy” (Sperling & Cupfer, 2014).