page_title: Kidnapping of Aldo Moro
section_title: The séance
hierarchical_section_title: Kidnapping of Aldo Moro / Subsequent hypotheses, investigations and trials / The séance
caption_attribution_description: English: Romano Prodi in 1978.
context_page_description: The kidnapping of Aldo Moro, also referred in Italy as Moro Case, was a seminal event in Italian political history.
  On the morning of 16 March 1978, the day on which the new cabinet led by Giulio Andreotti was supposed to have undergone a confidence vote in the Italian Parliament, the car of Aldo Moro, former prime minister and then president of Christian Democracy, was assaulted by a group of Red Brigades terrorists in Via Fani in Rome. Firing automatic weapons, the terrorists killed Moro's bodyguards, and kidnapped him.
  On 9 May 1978 Moro's body was found in the trunk of a Renault 4 in Via Caetani after 54 days of imprisonment, during which Moro was submitted to a political trial by the so-called "people's court" set up by the Brigate Rosse and the Italian government was asked for an exchange of prisoners. Despite the common interpretation, the car location in Via Caetani was not halfway between, but was very close to both, the locations of the national offices of DC and of the Italian Communist Party in Rome.
context_section_description: Also connected to via Gradoli is an event which involved Romano Prodi, Mario Baldassarri and Alberto Clò. During an alleged séance in which they participated on 2 April 1978, after asking the soul of Giorgio La Pira about the location of Moro, a Ouija table they were using registered the words Viterbo, Bolsena and Gradoli, three towns north of Rome. The information was trusted and a police group made an armed blitz in the town of Gradoli, 80 km from Rome, on the following day, 6 April though Moro was not found. Prodi spoke to the Italian parliament's commission about the case in 1981. In the notes of the Italian parliament commission on terrorism the séance is described as a fake, used to hide the true source of the information. In 1997 Giulio Andreotti declared that the information came from the Bologna section of Autonomia Operaia, a far-left organization with some ties with the BR, and that Cossiga also knew the true source. Judge Ferdinando Imposimato considered Andreotti's theory as "possible", but accused him of having kept information that could have been valuable in a trial about Moro's murder.
  Moro's widow later declared that she had repeatedly informed the police that a via Gradoli existed in Rome, but the investigators did not consider it — some replied to her that the street did not appear in Rome's maps. This is confirmed by other Moro relatives, but strongly denied by Francesco Cossiga.
  In the 1990s the séance matter was reopened by the Italian parliament's commission on terrorism. While Prodi (then prime minister) declared that he had no time for an interview, both Baldassarri (senator and vice-minister in two Berlusconi cabinets) and Clò (minister of Industry in Lamberto Dini's cabinet and owner of the house where the séance was performed) responded to the call: they confirmed the circumstances of the séance, and that the word "Gradoli" had appeared in several sessions, even if the participants had changed.
caption: Romano Prodi in 1978
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