Italian Directors to Tackle Country's Terrible Past

According to Daily Variety, Italian studio Cattleya has partnered with Universal to develop a film based on the Piazza Fontana bombing in 1969.

Scribes Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia of The Best of Youth and Crime Novel are penning the fact-based screenplay. A director and cast has not been finalized.

"It's a big, 'JFK' type film with an all star cast," Cattleya head Riccardo Tozzi told Daily Variety. "Most of the main background is finally now known. So the time has come to come to terms with the past and reach some kind of closure."

The film is part of an overall effort by Cattleya to produce high-profile films with Italian talent that could be distributed internationally. The studio is already in talks with Focus Features to co-produce and promote three other films in the pipeline.

The bombing, which was initially blamed on leftist groups, killed 17 and injured 88, ushering in an era in Italian politics known as the "strategy of tension" that lasted from 1969 to 1989. Suspicion later fell on a far right group, the "Ordine Nuovo," or New Order. In 1998, an Italian judge issued an arrest warrant for a US Navy officer, David Carrett, who was alleged to have aided the New Order, as well as officials in NATO's covert operations branch.

Though no claims have been proven, Italians widely suspect the Central Intelligence Agency of having played a role in the bombing, supplying materials--presumably through embassy officials and Carrett--as well as obstructing the flow of the police investigation into the attack.

In the time between the bombings and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, over 1,100 bombings and assassinations by far-left and far-right took place in Italy over a 20 year period.