"Moro is not the imaginary saint depicted in the self-serving official iconography. [...] Moro is the man who emerges from his letters, the letters he wrote while he was a prisoner of the Red Brigades, which are the most painful and humiliating words ever to come out of a prison. The “distinguished statesman” who, when push came to shove, renounced all the principles of the rule of law, seemed to consider the state and its institutions as his own private property, and invited his party friends and the leading representatives of the Republic to do the same. The man who asks for mercy for himself but, in ninety letters, has not a word for the men of his escort, killed for him, and indeed, the only mention he makes of them is coldly bureaucratic, describing them as “administratively inadequate”. He is a politician who confirms the tradition of the Italian ruling class, ready to demand everything, even life, from the humble, but never willing, on the rare occasions when it happens, to pay personally (think of Benito Mussolini fleeing under a German overcoat, or the way in which the king and Pietro Badoglio abandoned Rome). To say these things about a man who died as Moro did may seem, indeed it is, cruel. But it is the truth. And since I wrote these things when Moro was still alive (“Distinguished statesman or poor man?”. Il Lavoro, 4 April 1978), I have no qualms about repeating them now that he is dead and other pieces are coming together to complete the picture."