Snatched from the World:The Phenomenology of Captivity in Italian Ransom Kidnapping Alessandra Montalbano When we think about kidnapping in Italy, the first abduction that comes to mind is that of former prime minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1978 by the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization the Red Brigades. Yet that same year, forty-three private citizens were kidnapped for ransom by criminal organizations identified by the media under the general name of anonima sequestri (anonymous kidnapping), whose roots were Sardinian banditry, the Sicilian mafia, and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta. Unlike terrorists, these criminal syndicates never publicly claimed responsibility for their kidnappings. In 1977, before Moro’s abduction, the number of ransom kidnappings reached its peak: seventy-five in a single year.1 Political kidnapping was predominately linked to the Red Brigades, who between 1972 and 1982 abducted symbolic public figures in order to destabilize democratic institutions, the economic élite, and the media, and to “attack the heart of the state.”2 This group was responsible for eighteen total abductions.3 In roughly the same period (1975–1984), the Sardinian banditry, the mafia, and the ’ndrangheta abducted 489 [End Page 204] people—seventy percent of the ransom kidnapping victims in the history of the Italian Republic. If during the so-called Years of Lead (the years of political violence in Italy) the state was under attack by left-wing political terrorism, civil society was also threatened by the country’s underworld and its terrifying crimes. In the wider period of 1969–1998, nearly 700 people were abducted for ransom in Italy. The targets of the abductions came primarily (but not exclusively) from the ranks of upper and middle-class men and, less frequently, women and children. Their imprisonment lasted anywhere from twenty days to several years, during which time they were held in caves, abandoned houses, and holes in the ground. The conditions of captivity were deeply traumatic, with sudden physical attacks, chained and restricted movements, sensory deprivation, possible mutilation, and a constant threat of death. Victims found no easy path back to normality when rescued or released. When later recounting what had happened to them, some exhibited seemingly incomprehensible behavior, such as denying what they suffered, defending their captors, or wanting to see those men again. Some avoided sharing their stories publically, others did interviews with television shows or newspapers and magazines, and still others printed their memoirs with both prominent and smaller-scale publishing houses. Despite its vast dimensions, ransom kidnapping—unlike political kidnapping—has been relatively understudied. There are no scholarly analyses of the victims’ accounts, a fact that illustrates the lack of attention paid to the abducted as testifiers of an otherwise unimaginable reality. In this article, I explore captivity from a phenomenological perspective through an examination of memoirs written by Luigi Rossi di Montelera, Donatella Tesi Mosca, and Giuseppe Soffiantini. Luigi Rossi di Montelera, from the well-known family that owned the liquor brand Martini&Rossi, was among the victims of the ‘70s crime wave and the second target of the Sicilian Mafia in Northern Italy. Kidnapped at the age of 27 in Piedmont and freed by the police after four hard months of captivity spent practically buried alive, he wrote a memoir entitled Account of a Kidnapping.4 Nine years after Rossi, Donatella Tesi Mosca published her memoir Kidnapping Syndrome.5 She was abducted in 1981 while driving just outside of Florence. Her grueling captivity lasted fifty-four days, which she spent hidden in a hole in the ground in a Tuscan forest. Tesi’s persecutors were amateurs, two criminals who [End Page 205] had come into contact in prison with Sardinian bandits sentenced for ransom kidnapping whom they decided to emulate. Giuseppe Soffiantini, owner of a successful clothing industry in Lombardy, was 62 when two Sardinian bandits kidnapped and held him for 237 days in 1997. He too was hidden in a Tuscan forest, usually in a tent or a ground shelter under the trees. He was released after his family paid a five-billion lire ransom, and in 1999 he published his memoir, My Kidnapping.6 This article is less a literary than a phenomenological analysis of the victims’ accounts...
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Mar 7, 2019
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