ROME – The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, was joined by other politicians at the Quirinale to remember the death of the Italian statesman Aldo Moro, who was murdered 40 years ago.

 Mattarella laid a wreath of white roses by the plaque that commemorates the former Prime Minister in Via Caetani – the place where his body was found – before heading to the Quirinale for the rest of the ceremony.

 Moro was a member of the centre-right Christian Democrats, and was killed by the Red Brigades 55 days after being kidnapped on 16 March 1978. His body was found inside the boot of a red Renault in Via Caetani, a “symbolic” street equidistant from the DC’s headquarters in Piazza del Gesù and the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) base in Via delle Botteghe Oscure.

 The ceremony in the Quirinale was also held in memory of other victims of terrorism, such as the activitst Peppino Impastato.

 Mattarella said: "Today is a day of remembrance and solidarity. We remember all those who have paid for the cruelty of terrorism with their lives, those who have served our institutions and our society without yielding to blackmail and fear, those who have maintained their dignity, becoming a testimony to the freedom of each one of us.”

 “Our country has been bloodied since the end of the 1960s, by terrorist attacks of all kinds, by subversive strategies sometimes implemented by complicit subjects who betrayed their roles as members of state, by political violence caused by ideological degeneration, even by the association and intermingling with criminal organizations and armed bands”.

 “Many, too many people have been barbarously and vilely murdered. Many of our fellow citizens have been hit, wounded, and have brought and still bear the signs of that senseless brutality: men and women in our security forces, professors, students, magistrates, journalists, politicians, businessmen, traders, workers, trade unionists, soldiers, public administrators. They’ve become targets because they’re identified as symbols, or perhaps because hatred has manifested itself into this desire to kill, this transversal message of death.”

 Mattarella concluded saying: "...not forgetting also means reckoning with this story that has passed through the life of the Republic and has greatly tested its democratic construction, which the Italian people managed to build after Liberation Day, and that the constitution made into a heritage of values as well as juridical norms".

 The ceremony at the Quirinale was attended by the Mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, and a delegation of the Democratic Party including Maurizio Martina, Andrea Marcucci and Graziano Delrio. 

 The President of the Lazio Region, Nicola Zingaretti and the former Secretary of the Popular Party, Pierluigi Castagnetti, were also present.

 The former president of the Senate, Pietro Grasso, chose to pay tribute to the statesman with Facebook post that ended with an appeal: "The figure of Aldo Moro has certainly continued to enlighten us. This is what great men leave behind: a legacy of actions and thoughts capable of inspiring us even after decades have passed, even when time seems to cloud its memory. Since May 9, 1978, when his body was found in Via Caetani, Italy is missing something.

 Moro's kidnap and murder marked the pinnacle of the "years of lead", a period of political violence that started at the end of the 1960s and ended at the beginning of the 1980s.

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