Acca Larentia Fascist salutes arouse indignation-Piantedosi

(see related) (ANSA) - ROME, JAN 9 - Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said Tuesday the Fascist salutes made on Sunday by about a thousand participants at a ceremony commemorating the murder of two right-wing militants during Italy's 'Years of Lead' of political violence in the 1970s and 80s is cause for indignation.
    "There is no doubt" that what happened at the demonstration commemorating the 1978 Acca Larentia massacre in Rome "arouses indignation", Piantedosi told a hearing of the Senate's Extraordinary Commission against intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred and violence.
    "It is contrary to our acquired culture," he continued.
    "And the indignation is transversal," said the minister, adding however that "bans and non-observance" of demonstrations "is counterproductive and less fruitful".
    Earlier the centre-left opposition Democratic Party (PD) announced that it had filed a bill to better counter the promotion and glorification of fascist ideology and symbols, which is a crime in Italy.
    "As deputies and senators of the PD, we have filed a bill to make the repression of apology of fascism and neo-fascist subversive phenomena more effective," said PD lawmaker Andrea De Maria on X, formerly Twitter.
    "If the entire parliament supported it, it would clarify the existing legislation and strengthen it," he added.
    The PD on Monday led opposition outrage at Sunday's Fascist salutes episode during a ceremony recalling the Acca Larentia massacre in which two members of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), Franco Bigonzetti and Francesco Ciavatta, aged 13 and 17, were shot dead, allegedly by far left militants, outside the party's Rome headquarters in the street named after a Roman goddess.
    A third MSI youth wing member, Stefano Recchioni, 19, was fatally injured by a stray bullet during ensuing clashes by members of the youth wing, the Fronte della Gioventù, who rioted after the deaths, and police.
    Then Fronte della Gioventù leader Gianfranco Fini, later a foreign minister in Silvio Berlusconi's second government from 2001 to 2006, was wounded by a gas canister. (ANSA).