Rapido 904

December 23rd, 1984: memories from a forgotten massacre, the first Mafia bomb in Italy

The 1984 December 23rd massacre on the 904 express train, one of the worst terrorist attacks in Italian history, is almost a forgotten story. A bomb placed in a second class train car was remotely detonated when the train was running through a twenty kilometres long tunnel: sixteen people died and hundreds were wounded. It is considered the first of the Mafia’s massacres, indicating a change in the organization strategy and a prelude to the attacks that would take place in the 1990s. Some of the men responsible for the bombing received life sentences: Mafia boss Pippo Calò, his aides Guido Cercola and Franco Di Agostino, and the German bomb disposal expert, Friederich Schaudinn. According to the Prosecutor’s Office of Florence, Mafia boss Totò Riina, ordered, planned and instigated the massacre. On 25 November 2014, thirty years after the massacre, the trial against the Mafia boss for the bombing began. I am interested in building a relationship between the private memories of the survivors and the public domain where the process takes place.

I decided to combine photographs I made with images from two different archives: the Italian Railway society photographic archive and L'Unità archive. The first contains pictures taken inside the tunnel immediately after the bomb, when the rescuers came in. The second contains news pictures of the arrest of Pippo Calò, considered the main responsible for this event.