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Paolo Di Nella was an Italian right-wing militant born in Rome on March 18, 1958. From a young age he had been drawn to the Italian neo-fascist movement and had joined various far-right groups, including the Avanguardia Nazionale group.
In Di Nella's programming, February 2 was an important date for the new political movement of the Youth Front in the Trieste-Salario district. The goal was to promote the collection of signatures and the posting of posters for the cause of Villa Chigi, to make it a socio-cultural center accessible to the public. The posting of the first poster was blocked by an intervention by the Carabinieri, but Di Nella did not give up and decided to try the operation again in the evening of the same day, accompanied by his friend Daniela Bertani.
In the field, during the posting, they noticed the repeated passage of a moped with two occupants and continued their work until they arrived in viale Libia. There, Di Nella got out of the car to hang a poster on a central billboard on the street, leaving Bertani in the car to wait. At that moment, two young men apparently waiting for the "line 38" bus approached. One of the attackers, without saying a word, struck Di Nella on the temple with a blunt object, perhaps a large truncheon or an iron bar. The two attackers then fled on foot, crossing Via Lago Tana and heading into the heart of the African neighborhood.
After Di Nella's death, investigations were conducted and some searches were carried out concerning the circles of the extreme left in the African neighborhood. On 14 February, after an anonymous phone call to 113, a flyer claiming the crime attributed to Autonomia Operaia was found in a telephone booth in Piazza Gondar. Corrado Quarra and Luca Baldassarre, Autonomia Operaia activists in the area, were suspected. Realizing they were being monitored, the two managed to evade arrest by hiding in a house in Vetralla, where they were found still with hot milk from breakfast. Subsequently, Quarra was stopped on August 2 in Piazza Risorgimento in Rome and was identified by Daniela Bertani as the person who allegedly hit Di Nella on the head. This led to his capture and trial, while the investigation into Baldassarre was inconclusive due to an error in recognition by Bertani. The judge held that if Bertani missed the second acknowledgment, he could have missed the first as well. Quarra was released from prison and in 1986 was acquitted by the accusers.
Di Nella's death caused a great controversy and several demonstrations organized by far-right groups against the alleged involvement of the left in the murder
Even today the identity of the killers is not known and the murder of Paolo Di Nella remains one of the darkest and most controversial episodes in the history of political violence in Italy.
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