European Championship Stories: 1968, Rhapsody in Blue

Italy's Euro win in 1968 came against a backdrop of increasing corruption and increasing political violence.

In December of 1970, the Italian playwright Dario Fo released a play entitled “Morte Accidentale Di Un Anarchico” (“The Accidental Death Of An Anarchist”). Based on the aftermath of the 1969 Piazza Fontana Bombing in Milan, which killed seventeen people, it was a play that shone a light upon the subsequent death of Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist activist and railway worker who fell from the fourth floor window of a Milan police station under suspicious circumstances after having already been held for longer than Italian law specified was legal without being granted by a judge. Pinelli was later posthumously absolved of any responsibility for the bombing.

Just over two years earlier in 1968, Fo had formed Nuova Scena, a theatre collective which, it declared, would be ‘at the service of the revolutionary forces not so as to reform the bourgeois state, but to favour the growth of a real revolutionary process which could bring the working class to power’. Although Fo was a Communist, he had been an outspoken critic of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which ended the Prague Spring of that year but, as protests of various sorts reached a worldwide head in 1968, the protests of Fo some Western European Communist groups against this invasion fell on deaf ears – one hundred and eight Czechs and Slovaks were killed, and the reforms of First Secretary Alexander Dubček, which sought to liberalise Czechoslovakia through implementing “socialism with a human face”, were over.