Valerio Fioravanti was a leader of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR), an armed neo-fascist group that operated in Rome and elsewhere in Italy from 1977 until the early 1980s. Italian courts sentenced him to life imprisonment for the massacre at Bologna on August 2, 1980, in which 85 people died and about 200 were injured, and in separate proceedings for a series of killings committed between 1978 and 1981. The Court of Cassation made the Bologna conviction final on November 23, 1995, together with that of Francesca Mambro, his co-defendant. Fioravanti has always denied any part in the Bologna massacre. Of the other killings he has said that he feels like a murderer.
The Bologna case ran for more than four decades. A first conviction in 1988 was followed by an acquittal on appeal in 1990, an annulment of that acquittal in 1992 and a final judgment in 1995. Further defendants were tried in the same case, and the last of the final judgments came in 2025. Fioravanti left detention on conditional release in 2004 and in August 2009 his sentence was declared extinguished.
Fioravanti was 18 in 1977, the year the NAR took shape in Rome. The group grew out of young members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano who rejected the discipline of their party. Fioravanti was among its founders. Fioravanti had worked as a child actor on Italian television before he became a political militant.
The NAR set itself apart from the older neo-fascist organizations of the 1970s. It did not aim at a coup, as those groups had, and it had no formal structure: any militant could act under its name. It favored undermining the State through widespread violence. Between 1979 and February 1981 Fioravanti was its main leader. Francesca Mambro, who joined the group after 1978, was a member and later a co-defendant with Fioravanti in the Bologna case.
The NAR's violence was not confined to Bologna. Fioravanti took part in the killing of Roberto Scialabba in Rome on February 28, 1978, and he was present at the killing of Francesco Evangelista in Rome. On June 23, 1980 members of the group killed Mario Amato in Rome.
Fioravanti and Mambro have admitted to several murders and terrorist attacks committed as members of the NAR. In a 2009 interview he said that he felt like a murderer and that these acts "cannot go into the archive". The sentences for the killings were handed down in separate proceedings. He received eight life sentences and a further 134 years and eight months in total, after six rulings on appeal.
On August 2, 1980 a massacre took place at Bologna's central railway station. The first count of the dead was 76; as injured people died, the toll rose to 85, and about 200 more were injured. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the Italian republic, and it fell near the end of the years of political violence that Italians call the Years of Lead.
On August 26, 1980 the prosecutor in Bologna issued 28 arrest warrants, among them warrants for Fioravanti and Mambro. Fioravanti was arrested in 1981 in the area of Padua. Mambro was arrested in 1982. They were held on charges that included the massacre itself. The convictions rested heavily on the testimony of a convicted associate of the group, who was the principal prosecution witness, and on the lack of a verifiable alibi for the two defendants. No clear motive was established.
The trial opened before the Corte d'assise of Bologna, with Mario Antonacci presiding. The charges included massacre, armed band, subversive association and false accusation. The prosecutor asked for six life sentences. On July 11, 1988 the court gave life sentences to Fioravanti, Mambro and two other defendants as the material perpetrators of the massacre, and it found the massacre to be neo-fascist in character. Other defendants were convicted of armed band, and some received sentences of between six and thirteen years.
Fioravanti and Mambro declared themselves innocent of the massacre then, as they have since.
On July 18, 1990 the Bologna appeal court reversed the verdict on the massacre. It acquitted all the defendants of that charge, including Fioravanti and Mambro, and kept the armed-band convictions against them. On February 12, 1992 the Court of Cassation annulled the acquittals. It called the appeal judgment illogical, lacking in coherence and poorly reasoned, and it sent the case back for a new appeal trial. On May 16, 1994 the second appeal court sentenced Fioravanti and Mambro to life imprisonment again, this time as the perpetrators of the massacre.
On November 23, 1995 the united sections of the Court of Cassation confirmed the life sentences of Fioravanti and Mambro, and the judgment became final. Of the two other defendants sentenced to life in 1988, one was finally acquitted and the other had the case against him sent back for a new trial that ended in an acquittal in June 1996.
Fioravanti had been in custody since 1981. Throughout the proceedings he and Mambro maintained that they had nothing to do with Bologna, while admitting the killings in Rome and elsewhere. In 2007, in connection with a book, Fioravanti said that he was not seeking a pardon but wanted the trial reviewed, and that the Bologna charge was a "half page" in his record that he did not accept. He has also said that no one has ever placed him in Bologna before, during or after the massacre, and he disputes the description of himself as the material executor of it, saying the courts found that he and Mambro belonged to the group that organized it.
A third member of the NAR, Luigi Ciavardini, was a minor in 1980, so his case followed a separate path before the juvenile courts. He was acquitted of the massacre in January 2000 and sentenced to three years for armed band. In March 2002 the juvenile appeal court sentenced him to 30 years as a perpetrator. The Court of Cassation annulled that sentence in December 2003, a new appeal court imposed 30 years again in December 2004, and on April 11, 2007 the Court of Cassation declared his appeal inadmissible, which made the sentence final. He has maintained his innocence. He was granted semi-liberty in 2009.
Fioravanti's path out of detention was gradual. He was in semi-liberty from April 2004, and in the same year he was granted conditional release, a measure that requires conduct showing that rehabilitation can be regarded as certain. The conditional release carried five years of probation, during which he could not leave the municipality where he lived. He had spent 26 years in custody, and good-conduct credits of three months for each year reduced the time he had to serve. At the end of the five years, in August 2009, his sentence was declared extinguished under the law.
He did not receive the reductions that Italian law gives to former terrorists who repent or dissociate themselves from their group. His lawyer said that his release followed from the law and involved no concession. The president of the association of the victims' families protested the 2004 decision at the time, arguing that Fioravanti did not deserve conditional release. At his release, Fioravanti said that he had "no proclamations to make", that the Bologna case still left room for investigation, and that more competent and neutral people than he should conduct it, since he was a party to it. He also described working for the volunteer association Nessuno tocchi Caino, which campaigns against the death penalty and which had given him his first job outside detention about ten years earlier.
In November 2014 the Tribunale civile di Bologna, Judge Francesca Neri, ordered Fioravanti and Mambro, jointly, to pay damages to the State of just over 2.1 billion euros. The suit had been brought by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of the Interior. The sum included one billion euros for non-pecuniary harm to the identity and image of the State and 59 million euros for the costs the State had borne. The court rejected the defendants' argument that the claim had expired under the statute of limitations. Their lawyers said they would appeal.
In September 2018 the order was described as final, with a payment notice for about 2.35 billion euros, the figure then including interest, to be paid by September 21 of that year. Fioravanti and Mambro were then receiving a modest salary from Nessuno tocchi Caino.
The Bologna investigation did not end with the 1995 judgment. A trial of Gilberto Cavallini ran from 2017 to 2020. Cavallini, a former member of the NAR, was already serving life sentences for armed band and for killings committed between 1979 and 1981. On January 9, 2020 the Corte d'assise of Bologna, presided over by Judge Michele Leoni, found him guilty of complicity in the massacre and sentenced him to life imprisonment, after about six and a half hours of deliberation. The court found that he had given logistical help to Fioravanti, Mambro and Ciavardini before the massacre. The Bologna appeal court upheld the sentence on September 27, 2023, and the Court of Cassation confirmed it in January 2025.
The court of first instance wrote in its reasons, published in January 2021, that the massacre was a political one, or more exactly "a State massacre", and it rejected the idea of a group of four acting alone. It nonetheless classified the offense as a common massacre, under article 422 of the penal code, rather than a massacre against the security of the State under article 285, because the indictment had described the NAR as spontaneous. The appeal court of September 2023 reversed that classification.
In a second line of proceedings, Paolo Bellini, a former member of Avanguardia Nazionale, was sentenced to life imprisonment on April 6, 2022 as a fifth participant alongside the four NAR members. The sentence was upheld on appeal in July 2024 and confirmed by the Court of Cassation on July 1, 2025. The judgments name Fioravanti, Mambro and Ciavardini as the convicted perpetrators.
The years from about 1969 to the early 1980s are known in Italy as the Years of Lead. Most of the violence was attributed to left-wing groups such as the Red Brigades, but Italy also saw the most developed wave of radical-right terrorism of any Western democracy of its time. Neo-fascist groups began a so-called strategy of tension after the revolts of 1968 and the strikes of 1969: mass attacks meant to be blamed on the communists and to move public opinion toward an authoritarian government. By 1975 the main groups, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale, had been prosecuted and dissolved. The NAR grew out of the youth circles around the Movimento Sociale Italiano in Rome after that strategy had been judged a failure.
The Bologna case was tried before the Corte d'assise of Bologna and reviewed by appeal courts and by the Court of Cassation, which in 1992 annulled an acquittal and sent the case back for a new appeal trial. Ciavardini, a minor in 1980, was tried by the juvenile court. The massacre could be charged as a common offense under article 422 of the penal code or as a massacre against the security of the State under article 285, a distinction that decided how the 2020 and 2023 judgments differed. A life sentence can be followed by conditional release, with a period of probation at the end of which the sentence is declared extinguished, as happened in Fioravanti's case.
Fioravanti and Mambro have never accepted the Bologna verdict. Fioravanti says that no one has placed him in the city before, during or after the massacre, and he disputes the description of himself as its material executor. The final judgments name both of them as perpetrators.
As of 2010 no clear motive had been established and those who ordered the massacre had not been identified. Later proceedings found that the lodge P2 and officers of the military secret services played active roles, and the prosecutors' office has named four men as instigators or financiers who died before they could be tried. These findings concern the question of who ordered the massacre, not who carried it out.
Fioravanti has pointed to other lines of inquiry. An inquiry into two German suspects, opened in 2011, was shelved by Bologna prosecutors on July 31, 2014 for lack of evidence.
1977: The NAR forms in Rome; Fioravanti is 18.
February 28, 1978: Roberto Scialabba is killed in Rome.
1979 to February 1981: Fioravanti is the main leader of the NAR.
June 23, 1980: The magistrate Mario Amato is killed in Rome.
August 2, 1980: Massacre at Bologna station; 85 people die, about 200 are injured.
August 26, 1980: The Bologna prosecutor issues 28 arrest warrants, including for Fioravanti and Mambro.
1981: Fioravanti is arrested in the area of Padua.
1982: Mambro is arrested.
July 11, 1988: The Bologna Corte d'assise sentences Fioravanti and Mambro to life imprisonment.
July 18, 1990: The appeal court acquits all defendants of the massacre; armed-band convictions stand.
February 12, 1992: The Court of Cassation annuls the acquittals.
May 16, 1994: The second appeal court again sentences Fioravanti and Mambro to life imprisonment.
November 23, 1995: The Court of Cassation confirms; the conviction is final.
April 2004: Fioravanti enters semi-liberty and is granted conditional release.
April 11, 2007: Ciavardini's sentence of 30 years becomes final.
August 2009: His sentence is declared extinguished.
November 2014: The Tribunale civile di Bologna orders Fioravanti and Mambro to pay damages of just over 2.1 billion euros.
September 2018: The order is described as final.
January 9, 2020: Gilberto Cavallini is sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the massacre.
April 6, 2022: Paolo Bellini is sentenced to life imprisonment.
September 27, 2023: The appeal court upholds the Cavallini sentence.
January 2025: The Court of Cassation confirms the Cavallini sentence.
July 1, 2025: The Court of Cassation confirms the Bellini sentence.