Angelo Izzo is serving two life sentences in Italy for killings committed thirty years apart. The first was the Circeo case of September 1975, in which Maria Rosaria Lopez died, a second young woman survived, and three men from Rome were tried. Izzo was convicted of murder and other serious crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976. The second was the death of Maria Carmela Linciano and her 14-year-old daughter, Valentina Maiorano, at Ferrazzano, near Campobasso, in April 2005. Izzo committed it while on semi-liberty, a regime that let him leave prison by day to work. He was convicted of murder, with other charges, and again sentenced to life.
The two cases are separate events with separate courts and separate final judgments. Between them lay a prison career marked by escape attempts, a period as a state witness, a flight abroad in 1993 and an arrest in France. The 2005 killings led to a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights against Italy, to a disciplinary warning for two supervisory judges, and to a long argument about who had decided that he was fit to be released by day. In later years Izzo told magistrates that he knew of another killing from 1975. That claim has never produced a charge.
Izzo was born in Rome on August 23, 1955, the first of four children. His father ran a construction business and his mother had given up university studies in letters to raise the family, according to a profile published by Fanpage. He grew up in a comfortable household in the Trieste district of Rome, a background the writer Ilaria Amenta, author of a 2023 book on Izzo, describes as one he rejected.
By his early teens he was in trouble. At 14 he came close to being sent to a reformatory, Fanpage reported. By the age of about 20 he had joined the armed far right that was active in Rome in the 1970s, and by the middle of the decade he was known to the police for theft, robbery and violence. The European Court of Human Rights, in its 2009 judgment on his later release, listed convictions that go back to this period. A 1975 judgment of a Rome court, final in February 1978, gave him two years and six months for violent offences and unlawful detention committed in 1974. A later Rome Assize Court judgment, delivered in May 1994 and final in July 1995, sentenced him to six years for an attempted murder dated October 31, 1974. Il Fatto Quotidiano, in a 2023 account, added that two years before the Circeo case he and Andrea Ghira had been jailed for 20 months at Rebibbia after an armed robbery.
Gianni Guido and Andrea Ghira were the two men tried with him in 1976. ANSA noted in 2018 that the three came from well-off Roman families and avoided justice for several years, some by fleeing abroad.
At the end of September 1975, in the seaside town of San Felice Circeo, about 100 kilometers south of Rome, two young women were attacked by Izzo, Guido and Ghira. Maria Rosaria Lopez, who was 19, died. The second young woman survived. She later testified against all three men and became a public voice on the case. Izzo and Guido were arrested within hours, according to Il Post. Ghira left before he could be arrested; prosecutors suspected that he had been warned and helped to leave Italy.
Guido, once in custody, gave a statement that named the other two, Panorama reported.
The case went to trial in the spring and summer of 1976 before the Latina Assize Court. On July 29, 1976, Izzo, Guido and Ghira, the last in his absence, were each sentenced at first instance to life imprisonment, ANSA reported, for the murder of Maria Rosaria Lopez and the attempted murder of the second woman. The European Court of Human Rights, which recorded Izzo's judgment in its own terms, describes it as a life sentence for murder and other serious crimes committed on September 30, 1975.
On appeal the outcomes differed. Izzo's life sentence was confirmed in October 1980, Il Fatto Quotidiano reported, and the Court of Cassation confirmed it in September 1983. The European Court gives the date on which the sentence became final as September 30, 1983.
For Guido the appeal court cut the sentence to 30 years on October 28, 1980. Avvenire, reporting on his release in 2009, said the reduction followed his declaration of repentance and the victim's family accepting compensation. Panorama reported that the compensation was 100 million lire and that the decision drew heavy criticism. Guido escaped from the San Gimignano prison in January 1981 and was arrested in Buenos Aires about two years later. In April 1985 he escaped again while awaiting extradition. He was recaptured in Panama in June 1994 and extradited to Italy. After 14 years in Rebibbia prison he was placed in social services on April 11, 2008. Il Post reported that an eight-year reduction under a pardon ended his sentence in 2009.
Ghira was sentenced in his absence to life imprisonment and never served any of it. Il Post reported that he spent months on a kibbutz in Israel and in June 1976 enlisted in the Spanish Foreign Legion under a false name. He was discharged about 18 years later as unfit and reportedly died in Melilla on September 2, 1994. His own family said ten years afterward that the man who had died was Andrea Ghira, and, according to Il Post, a DNA test dated November 26, 2005 confirmed that the man who died in Melilla was Ghira. Relatives of the victims had doubted that the death was real, Il Fatto Quotidiano noted in 2023.
Izzo's prison years were not quiet. A court in Latina sentenced him on March 3, 1977 to six years for an escape attempt, a term the Rome Court of Appeal reduced to four years in October 1981, the European Court recorded. Fanpage said that he and Guido tried to escape in January 1977 and that it failed. Over the following years there were disciplinary incidents. The European Court's account of his file records a disciplinary finding in 1983, convictions dating to 1978 and a false-testimony conviction in Pisa for statements made in October 1981.
The same file records a change of direction. Izzo dissociated himself from armed political struggle and in May 1992 became a state witness, a collaborator of justice in Italian terms. Sky TG24 reported that in prison he gave statements about the bombings and killings of the 1970s, among them Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, the Bologna station bombing and the killing of Giorgiana Masi. Investigators were not always convinced by what he said, the broadcaster noted, but the cooperation brought him some benefits in prison. One of his statements led to a conviction of his own: a Palermo Assize Court sentenced him on April 12, 1995 to four years for calumny, and the judgment became final on May 3, 1999.
In August 1993 Izzo did not return from a prison leave. The European Court records that he was arrested in France on September 15, 1993, and Fanpage reported that he was held in Paris and extradited. He lost his early-release credits as a result. In 1995 a Milan judge gave him one year and ten months for weapons offences from that period, with ten months for the escape itself.
In prison he also met Giovanni Maiorano, a former member of the Sacra Corona Unita, an organized crime group of Puglia, who had become a state witness. Fanpage reported that Izzo made an agreement with him. The connection between the two men would lead to the 2005 case. In 1998, according to the same profile, he gave a television interview to Franca Leosini for the programme Storie Maledette, in which he said his views had changed.
Under Italian law a prisoner serving a life sentence can in some circumstances be admitted to semi-liberty, which allows him to spend the day outside prison for work or study and to return at night. The European Court's judgment records the path that led Izzo to it. After a leave violation in November 2003 he was moved from the prison at Campobasso to Palermo. The supervisory court of Palermo then decided on November 9, 2004 to grant him semi-liberty; the order was filed on November 15 and became enforceable on December 20. A treatment program was approved on December 23, and semi-liberty began on December 27, 2004. Il Post, Fanpage and the other accounts place his daytime work at a cooperative in the Campobasso area.
The decision drew criticism within months. In a commentary dated May 19, 2005, Massimo Niro, a supervisory judge in Florence, wrote that the courts of Campobasso and Palermo had traded public statements over the decision, and argued that supervisory judges make prognoses that are by nature fallible. He added that the justice minister of the time, Roberto Castelli, had spoken to the supervisory judiciary in a "soft, prudent and conciliatory" tone. On May 9, 2005 several members of parliament had put written questions to the minister of justice about the case, among them whether Izzo had been given a favorable status as a collaborator in the 1990s.
Maria Carmela Linciano and her daughter Valentina Maiorano were the wife and daughter of Giovanni Maiorano. By 2005 they were living at Ferrazzano, in the province of Campobasso, in Molise, and, according to Sky TG24 and Primonumero, they were under protection as the family of a former Sacra Corona Unita member turned state witness. Izzo had met the father in prison and, through the arrangement with him, had become close to the family while on semi-liberty. The European Court's judgment gives April 28, 2005 as the date both were killed.
Maria Carmela Linciano was 48 or 49, depending on the account. Her daughter Valentina was 14.
The case came to light on April 30, 2005, two days later. Two men, Guido Palladino and Luca Palaia, who had been arrested on charges of illegal arms trafficking, told investigators what they knew, Primonumero reported. Izzo was also arrested on arms-trafficking charges, according to Panorama. According to the European Court's account, Izzo confessed twice, on May 3 and May 12, 2005, to all but one of the charges brought against him. His semi-liberty was revoked on April 30, 2005.
The case against Izzo went before the preliminary hearing judge at Campobasso under an abbreviated procedure. On January 12, 2007, with the reasons filed on March 24, 2007, the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment, finding premeditation and the aggravating factor of abject or futile motives. Provisional damages were awarded to the civil parties, who included the father and husband. Tgcom24 reported on November 20, 2008 that the Court of Cassation had made the second life sentence final. Primonumero described the verdict as upheld on two later levels of appeal.
Two other men were prosecuted. Guido Palladino pleaded guilty to a concealment offence and received three years and two months. Luca Palaia was convicted of complicity in murder and related concealment offences and was sentenced to 24 years. On appeal his sentence was raised to 30 years: the Assize Court of Appeal at Campobasso decided on November 27, 2008, and the First Criminal Section of the Court of Cassation confirmed it, Piazza Rossetti reported in April 2009. Neither was convicted of carrying out the killings.
The judgment against Izzo covers the murder of both women, with other charges.
The family brought a complaint to Strasbourg. The husband and father and other relatives filed their application in July 2006, Sky TG24 reported, with Stefano Chiriatti as their lawyer. On December 15, 2009, in Maiorano and Others v. Italy, the European Court of Human Rights found a violation of Article 2 of the Convention, the right to life, on both its substantive and procedural sides. On the substance, it held that the state had not shown the diligence it owed when it granted Izzo semi-liberty without adequate consideration and when it did not tell the supervisory court that he had resumed criminal activity. On procedure, it found that the disciplinary action taken against the Palermo judges, which ended in a warning from the Supreme Judicial Council on March 14, 2008, covered only specific aspects of the file and did not fully establish the responsibility of the state's agents.
The Court rejected the claim for material damages for lack of a causal link. For non-pecuniary damage the Camera dei Deputati's copy of the judgment records an award of 10,000 euros to the husband and father and 5,000 euros to each of the other applicants. Blitzquotidiano and Sky TG24 reported a total of 45,000 euros. Italy did not appeal the ruling, Blitzquotidiano wrote, which made it final.
A complaint from the family against the prosecutors of Campobasso and Bari was dismissed by the judge for preliminary investigations at Bari on January 28, 2008.
In September 2016 Izzo wrote to Rome prosecutors offering information, and he gave statements in late 2016 to the prosecutors Eugenio Albamonte and Michele Prestipino, Il Fatto Quotidiano reported. In May 2018 the press reported that he had spoken of the unsolved 1975 case of Rossella Corazzin, 17, of San Vito al Tagliamento, in the province of Pordenone. Izzo did not name her in 2016, but the details he gave pointed to her. Sky TG24 reported that a prosecutor at Belluno, Paolo Luca, said Izzo's account was vague but that the date and place fit her case.
None of this has produced a charge or a finding. Belluno held that the other offenses were time-barred and that only a homicide inquiry was still possible, and sent the file to Perugia for jurisdiction. Perugia had already archived an earlier inquiry, finding Izzo's statements not credible and not verifiable. Rome prosecutors had separately reported him for calumny and self-incrimination over other claims. A court at Pordenone declared Corazzin legally dead in 2010. Quotidiano.net reported that an anti-mafia parliamentary commission examined the lead before its work ended with the early dissolution of Parliament in 2022, and that the family and a member of parliament have asked for the case to be reopened.
Gianni Guido's lawyer, Massimo Ciardullo, called the report baseless. Izzo's former lawyer said he had never heard of it from Izzo. His lawyer in 2018, Rolando Iorio, said Izzo had described the matter to him in 2016 and that some of Izzo's earlier statements had been corroborated by investigators. Fanpage reported in 2023 that even with the case reopened he would not be considered responsible. His statement is an admission of involvement that no court has examined or found, and it is not a conviction.
In 2010 Izzo married a journalist in prison. They divorced the following year, Il Post reported. In 2023 Rai Libri published a book on his life, Io sono l'uomo nero, dal Circeo a Ferrazzano, by the Rai Radio journalist Ilaria Amenta. She wrote that he had begun setting down his own account in 2016, that the manuscripts reached her through an intermediary, and that he showed no remorse.
In May 2025, for a podcast made by Tgr Molise about the Circeo case, Izzo answered questions in writing through his lawyer. Open reported that he said he would not repeat what he had done. On October 14, 2025 he graduated in law at Roma Tre University with 92 out of 110 points, in a session held at Velletri prison. The thesis was titled "Il lato oscuro dell'illuminismo giuridico." His lawyer called the degree a form of social reintegration and personal redemption.
In October 2025 Izzo was held at Velletri, near Rome, serving two life sentences, one for the Circeo case and one for the Ferrazzano killings. He was 70.
August 23, 1955: Izzo is born in Rome.
Late September 1975: the Circeo case; Izzo and Guido are arrested within hours.
July 29, 1976: Izzo, Guido and Ghira are sentenced to life imprisonment at first instance.
October 1980: Izzo's life sentence is confirmed on appeal; Guido's is reduced to 30 years on October 28.
September 30, 1983: Izzo's sentence is final.
May 1992: Izzo becomes a state witness.
August and September 1993: Izzo leaves Italy during a leave; arrested in France on September 15.
November 9, 2004: the supervisory court of Palermo grants semi-liberty; it begins December 27.
April 28, 2005: Maria Carmela Linciano and Valentina Maiorano are killed at Ferrazzano.
April 30, 2005: the case comes to light; semi-liberty is revoked.
May 3 and 12, 2005: Izzo confesses.
January 12, 2007: Izzo is sentenced to life imprisonment.
November 2008: the Court of Cassation makes the sentence final.
December 15, 2009: the European Court of Human Rights finds a violation of Article 2.
2010: Izzo marries in prison; the couple divorce in 2011.
2016 to 2018: Izzo's statements about the Corazzin case reach prosecutors and the press.
October 14, 2025: Izzo graduates in law.