The trace of terror in time

August 2nd 1980 has been a date defined by terror, in Italy. In one of the worst periods of Italian history, right wing extemists and subversive branches of the government were involved in the organization and execution of one worst terroristic attacks on the state, and, even worse, in mid summer, when families were going to the seaside by train. At 10.25 AM CEST a bomb went off in the waiting room of the train station in Bologna, making 85 victims and around 200 injured. The social impact was terrible and the response from the authorities and the people was strong, and with that response started a chain reaction that slowly got the “anni di piombo” to end, after more than 4500 terrorist attacks done both by right and left wing extremists in 11 years all over the country. The political aspects of the events are still impacting local and national politics today, as many of the people involved in the organization are under process and many analyses are still being done today.

The association of the victims of the terrorist attack collected a lot of the content, photos, radio programs and info in its website, https://www.stragi.it.

With OHM we tried to remember the events and the things that happened, the way we usually try to do: contextualizing the past to help understand the events and their impact. For this reason, we are launching today a small project that is still work in progress but that means a lot to us: OHM Historical Viewer. With it we want to collect and show our users the world from the eyes of the people that were there in that moment, by locating photos and possibly audios and videos of that time and place. In this case, we are basing the visualizaiton on the CC-BY licensed collection made by the association (https://www.stragi.it/archivio/foto).

The Historical Viewer is still a work in progress made possible by a Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant (thank you Rufus Pollock) that enabled us to focus on the various practical aspects that are important in such a project. As said, it is still a work in progress, but being in Bologna, this date meant so much for us and our city that we wanted to give our small contribution to the remembrance of the events of 41 years ago.