The Circeo massacre

The Circeo massacre is one of the best-known crimes in Italy: the kidnapping, rape and torture of two girls aged 17 and 19 by three young neo-fascists, who killed one of them while the other miraculously survived by pretending to be dead.

The torturers’ records

Those responsible for the massacre were Gianni Guido, 19, an architecture student, Angelo Izzo, 20, a medical student, and Andrea Ghira, 22. All three came from wealthy Roman families and were active in neo-fascist movements. At the time of the massacre Gianni Guido was the only one with a clean record, while Izzo and Ghira had already been in trouble with the law.

Andrea Ghira was the son of construction entrepreneur and Olympic water polo champion Aldo Ghira. His trouble with the law began at 16, when he took part in a far-right demonstration and was convicted of seditious demonstration. He proclaimed himself an admirer of Jacques Berenguer, the boss of the Marseilles clan.

Two years before the massacre Ghira and Izzo committed an armed robbery together, for which Ghira served twenty months in Rebibbia prison, while Izzo was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Izzo too was a wealthy young man and from a young age frequented right-wing student groups, using politics as an excuse to vent his violence. In 1974, together with two friends, he had raped two girls and was sentenced to two and a half years, which he never served thanks to a suspended sentence.

Meeting the torturers

Rosaria Lopez was a 19-year-old barista and Donatella Colasanti a 17-year-old student, both from the working-class neighborhood of Montagnola. A few days before the massacre an acquaintance, later found to have no part in the crime, introduced them to Guido and Izzo at the bar of the Torre Fungo in EUR. The two young men were polite and well-mannered and invited Rosaria and Donatella to a party a few days later, at this friend’s villa in Lavinio.

A third girl had also been invited, but at the last minute decided not to go.

On September 29, 1975 the girls met only Izzo and Guido. On the way Guido stopped at a bar to make a phone call and came back saying their friend had gone to the beach but would meet them later. In fact the call was fake and, at 6:20 pm, the four arrived at Villa Moresca, in Circeo, a villa belonging to Andrea Ghira’s family.

For a few hours they chatted and listened to music, then the two young men made advances to the girls, who rejected them. At that point they dropped the mask.

Guido pulled out a gun and said he belonged to the Marseilles gang, ordering the girls to obey him. He also said their boss, Jacques Berenguer, was about to arrive and that they would have no way out.

The Circeo massacre

The girls were beaten and locked in the bathroom. When “Jacques” arrived, who was in fact Ghira, hell began for Donatella and Rosaria.

For more than a day and a night the two girls were raped, tortured, beaten and insulted by the three. In the middle of the torture Guido even went to Rome to have dinner with his family and then returned to Circeo.

The girls were drugged with injections. Then Rosaria was dragged into the upstairs bathroom, where she was beaten again and finally drowned in the bathtub. Donatella heard her crying and screaming for several minutes, then suddenly silence.

Then it was Donatella’s turn. The three tried to strangle her with a belt and kept hitting her. In a moment of distraction the girl managed to reach a telephone to call for help, but was discovered and struck on the head with an iron bar. She passed out, came to and heard one of them say:

This one really doesn’t want to die.

At that point she realized the only way to save herself was to pretend to be dead. The three fell for it and locked her, together with Rosaria’s body, in the trunk of a white Fiat 127. Then they set off for Rome to get rid of the bodies. During the journey Donatella heard them laughing, listening to music and joking:

Look how well these two are sleeping.

Near Guido’s home, the three left the car in Viale Pola and went to dinner at a restaurant, where they even got into a fight with two young communists. As soon as they had gone, Donatella began screaming and banging on the walls of the trunk. At 10:50 pm a night watchman heard her and alerted the carabinieri.

Photojournalist Antonio Monteforte intercepted the radio message, guessed what was happening and rushed to Viale Pola, where he photographed the opening of the trunk, with Donatella alive and Rosaria’s body. Those photos went around Italy.

The legal case

Izzo and Guido were arrested a few hours later, while Ghira, tipped off, managed to escape. Donatella was hospitalized with serious injuries and a broken nose, but the psychological wounds were even deeper and she never fully recovered. Months later Ghira wrote to his friends threatening to kill Donatella if she testified. She did so anyway, represented by lawyer Tina Lagostena Bassi, and several feminist associations joined the case as civil parties.

On July 29, 1976 the Latina court sentenced Izzo, Guido and, in absentia, Ghira to life imprisonment. In prison Izzo and Guido hung a stadium banner in their cell and in January 1977 tried to escape by taking a guard hostage, without success.

Ghira had fled to Spain, where under the false name Massimo Testa de Andres he joined the Spanish Foreign Legion, from which he was expelled in 1994 for drug abuse. He died the same year of an overdose in Melilla, the Spanish exclave in Africa, and was buried under his false name.

In December 2005 the body was exhumed and identified through DNA. Donatella and some of the victims’ relatives, however, never accepted the result, partly because of a photo taken by the carabinieri in Rome in 1995 showing a man very similar to Ghira. In 2016 a new analysis confirmed the remains were his.

On appeal in 1980 Guido’s sentence was reduced to 30 years, after his repentance and the compensation accepted by Rosaria’s family. On January 25, 1981 he escaped from San Gimignano prison and fled to Argentina, where he was arrested in 1983 but escaped again in 1985. He was finally caught in Panama in 1994. Izzo also took advantage of a prison leave in 1993 to flee to France, but was caught in Paris.

Izzo’s new crime

In November 2004, despite a still pending sentence, supervisory judges in Palermo granted Angelo Izzo day release, which he used to kill again.

On April 28, 2005, with an accomplice, he killed Maria Carmela Linciano, 49, and her daughter Valentina Maiorano, only 14, the wife and daughter of a mafia informant Izzo had met in prison. He buried them in the courtyard of a house in Mirabello Sannitico, in Molise.

The case caused fierce controversy and on January 12, 2007 Izzo was again sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence upheld on appeal. Donatella said someone should have paid for granting him day release.

Gianni Guido was released into the care of social services in April 2008, after 14 years in prison. Thanks to a pardon he has been free since August 2009. Letizia, Rosaria’s sister, protested at his long years as a fugitive and his lack of real repentance.

Donatella Colasanti

Throughout her life Donatella told her terrible story in many interviews. She died in Rome on December 30, 2005, aged 47, of breast cancer, still shaken by what she had suffered thirty years earlier. She had wanted to attend the new trial against Izzo. Her last words were:

Let’s fight for the truth.

In 2020 her home became an anti-violence center. Several films have been made about the massacre, including “The Catholic School” by Stefano Mordini (2021), and the TV miniseries “Circeo” (2022).

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Sources

• Circeo massacre – Wikipedia
• Massacro del Circeo – Wikipedia (Italian)
• Angelo Izzo – Wikipedia (Italian)
• Donatella Colasanti – Wikipedia (Italian)