Dario Fo looks back in anger on era when Italy's rulers had his wife beaten and raped

The Nobel laureate is demanding that the state apologises for conniving at the trauma of his partner, Franca Rame, writes Andrew Gumbel

IT TOOK nearly five years for Franca Rame - the Italian actress and wife of the playwright Dario Fo - to start talking about the day in 1973 when she was snatched by neo-fascists in broad daylight and gang- raped in the streets of Milan.

And it has taken 25 years for the horrific reasons behind the attack to come to public attention. An investigating magistrate still working on the terrorist outrages of the period has just revealed what the Fos suspected all along: the gang-rape was carried out on the orders of senior police officers infuriated by the couple's constant digs at the establishment, on stage and off.

The full story may not end there. New testimony suggests the commander of the Carabinieri's Pastrengo division in Milan was taking orders from the upper echelons of government, the idea being to deliver a blow against a left-wing movement that was organising protests against the ruling Christian Democrats almost daily.

"I remember the day [of the rape] very well. The commander was ecstatic," a captain in the Pastrengo division at the time, Niccolo Bozzo, said. "The news that Franca Rame had been raped was received as though someone had done the division a great favour."

Similar testimony has come from a number of former neo-fascist thugs, who say they frequently joined forces with the Pastrengo division's commander, Giovanni Battista Palumbo, to beat off what they saw as Italy's Communist menace. The neo-fascists did the Carabinieri's dirty work and were guaranteed a blind eye to their activities. A former neo-fascist since caught up in drugs rackets, Biagio Pitarresi, says he was approached about carrying out the rape but turned Gen Palumbo down.

In the early 1970s Milan and indeed the whole country appeared to be on the brink of civil war. Barely a day went by without bombs, or street fights between left-wingers and neo-fascists. A rightist terrorist campaign was in full flight, and the far-left Red Brigades were beginning their remorselessly violent backlash.

The left suspected - with justification, it turned out - that the government, backed by the CIA, was prepared to use any means to prevent the Communist Party from reaching power and had given tacit approval to terrorist outrages such as the bombing of a bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana in 1969 as an excuse to swoop on left-wing activists and toss them in jail.

Since the police and army had never been properly purged after the Fascist period, it was easy to find commanders in the security forces willing to bend the rules in the name of Cold War ideology. For many law officers, beating and torturing left-wingers was a pleasure.

The Fos were actively engaged in lampooning the political corruption and police brutality of the time. Plays by Fo like Accidental Death of an Anarchist (about the "suicide" of a suspect in the Piazza Fontana bombing while in police custody) so incensed the establishment that theatres daring to show them routinely had their licences withdrawn.

Rame organised a volunteer group which sent packages of food and clothing to left-wingers in custody and provided defence lawyers for suspects.

So reviled by polite society were the Fos that they could not find a landlord in Milan willing to rent them an apartment. Their phones were tapped and their home bugged. Fo was arrested in Sardinia once and held for 19 hours but otherwise they stayed out of trouble.

Until the day in March 1973 when Franca Rame had a pistol shoved into the back of her neck, was bundled into a military truck, beaten, cut with razor blades, burned with cigarette butts and gang-raped. "I'm not sure how many they were, though they must have been at least five, one at the wheel, one holding me down and the other three on top of me," she told La Repubblica recently in what she vowed would be her last public telling of the affair. "When they threw me out near the park, my clothes were ripped and I was bleeding everywhere ... They told me: `If you talk, we'll kill you'."

Rame was so traumatised that she did not talk to anyone about it for years. In 1975 she managed to tell her husband about the attack, but only on paper, not verbally. Three years later she surprised everyone - including herself - by describing it all in minute detail during a one-woman show in Lucca. It was so powerful that several young women fainted and Rame herself was taken ill.

Once the Cold War ended, the old Christian Democrat order collapsed and the major figures implicated in the gang-rape were dead or politically finished (Gen Palumbo died in 1984), it became easier to discern the chain of responsibility.

Judge Salvini's most recent discoveries have prompted Dario Fo, basking in the prestige of his recent Nobel Prize for Literature, to write to the President demanding justice, even at this late stage. "How is it possible that nobody wanted to investigate until the statute of limitations for these crimes had expired?" he wrote. Establishing the truth was not a matter of revenge, he added, but an essential tool to allow Italians to recognise the barbarities of the past and move on. "Otherwise the guilty will feel that this country's institutions, and you first of all, Mr President, are there to protect `them', not the rest of us who have undergone things that no human being should have to endure."