The "Years of Lead" ("Anni di piombo") were a period of social and political turmoil marked by a wave of both left-wing and right-wing terrorist attacks from the late 1960s through the 1980s. In 1969, the Marxist-Leninist Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), a left-wing revolutionary group, was formed in order to overthrow the democratic system through an armed struggle that would also separate Italy from the Western Alliance. Very active in the 1970s, the Red Brigades were responsible for numerous violent incidents, including assassinations, kidnappings, and robberies. The group's most audacious operation was the kidnapping and assassination of former Prime Minister Ajdo Moro in 1978. In the 1980s, the Red Brigades split into different factions, most notably the Communist Combatant Party (Partito Comunista Combattente) and the Union of Combatant Communists (Unione Comunisti Combattenti). Thanks to the arrests conducted by Italian and French police in 1989, they became largely inactive. However, new cells reappeared a decade later, striking at the heart of Italian institutions. In 1999, the resurgent group killed Massimo D'Antona, labor law professor at Rome's Sapienza University and a government adviser. Then, in 2002, they killed professor Marco Biagi, an economic adviser to then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
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