Via dei Georgofili Massacre

The via dei Georgofili bombing (Italian: Strage di via dei Georgofili) was carried out by the Sicilian Mafia very early in the morning of 27 May 1993 in Florence, Italy.

The attempt was carried out with a Fiat Fiorino packed full of explosives, parked near the Torre dei Pulci, between the Uffizi museum and the Arno River. The edifice was the seat of the Accademia dei Georgofili. The large explosion caused the death of five people: Angela Fiume (36 years old), employee and caretaker of the Accademia, her husband Fabrizio Nencioni (39 years old), policeman, their daughters Caterina Nencioni (only 50 days old) and Nadia Nencioni (9 years old) and Dario Capolicchio (22 years old), junior student at the architecture class at the university; 48 other people were wounded. The tower and other buildings were destroyed and others damaged, including the Uffizi Gallery, where three paintings were heavily damaged or destroyed, including an Adoration of the Shepherds (1620) by Gerard van Honthorst (later partially recovered).

The massacre was ordered by the Corleonesi mafia clan, led by Totò Riina, in response to the application of the article 41-bis law, by which jailed mafiosi were isolated and put under severe restrictive measures. The bombing was followed by another two: on 27 July, in Rome, near the churches of St. John Lateran and San Giorgio al Velabro and at Milan, in via Palestro, where another car bomb killed five people. The choice to hit cultural and church targets was partly to destabilize the Italian government, but also because the Mafia felt that the Roman Catholic Church had abrogated an unwritten hands-off policy toward traditional organized crime in Southern Italy. Later, pentito Gaspare Spatuzza claimed to have repented for his participation in the incidents.

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