Abstract

The Neapolitan column of the Red Brigades presents a peculiar feature quite different from that of the other homologous articulations of the organization; this particularity is due to a number of factors: the conditioning of the context in which it operates; its belonging to the Movementist current of the organization; its late birth, in the twilight of the BR’s parabola characterized by new theoretical and strategic elaborations; and the influence of the criminologist Giovanni Senzani who saw criminals and marginalised people as the new protagonists in the Revolution, in place of a working class that had lost the centrality traditionally attributed to it by the Red Brigades. The focus on the environment of the lawless, the contiguity with criminality, and the relations, however tenuous and controversial, with the Camorra, transformed the Neapolitan organization into something other than the Brigatist column as conceived in the theoretical documents of the Red Brigades, resulting in a physiognomy unequivocally influenced by the context.