It was May 27, 1993: in a few hours exactly thirty years will have passed. Late at night in Florence, just past one in the morning. In Via dei Georgofili, in the city center, a stone's throw from the Uffizi Museum, there was a great explosion, which resounded throughout the city. The detonation destroyed the Torre dei Pulci, home of the Academy that gives its name to the street.

Under the rubble of the tower died Angela Maria Fiume, custodian of the Institute, and the other members of the Nencioni family: her husband Fabrizio and daughters Nadia (9 years) and Caterina (just 2 months). A building on the same street also caught fire, where Dario Capolicchio, a 22-year-old university student, the fifth victim of the massacre, lived. Forty-eight people were injured.

But, in addition to the dead and wounded, that bomb also caused serious damage to the historical and artistic heritage of the area: the Church of Saints Stephen and Cecilia and the monumental complex of the Uffizi. Some paintings of prestigious value were destroyed and about 25% of the works in the museum were damaged. To cause the detonation, an explosive mixture placed in a car parked under the tower.

This bomb episode is part of the so-called "period of massacres" (which began with Capaci and Via D'Amelio): the bomb of May 27 was followed by that at the pavilion of Contemporary Art in Via Palestro, in Milan (July 27, 1993), and – at a distance of five minutes from each other – the explosions at the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano and the church of San Giorgio al Velabro , in Rome, twenty-four hours after the attack in Milan. Fortunately, not as in Florence, the July bombs did not cause deaths but only the wounding of over twenty people and the damage to the buildings and places of worship involved.

In this wake, we also consider the attack in Via Fauro on May 14 of the same year, shortly before the massacre of the Georgofili, which had as its objective Maurizio Costanzo and in which the journalist was saved by a miracle (but 24 people were injured); and the one (missed) at the Olympic Stadium in Rome: a bomb placed in a car that did not explode only for a mishap. It was January 23, 1994: it was the "tail blow" of the massacre mafia against the State.

According to the truth established during the trial, the instigators and material authors of the massacre in Florence were mafiosi with the aim of creating "a sort of state of war against Italy", to be implemented with the use of a precise terrorist and subversive strategy, which went beyond the methods and purposes of organized crime seen up to that moment. Cosa Nostra, with those bombs, wanted to "force the State to surrender to mafia crime". Compared to the revenge perpetrated against Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, punished the previous year in attacks in which the judges were the only and only targets of the Dome, with those actions the mafia made a kind of "leap".

The sentences also recalled that, after the events of '92, the State had reacted with the rules on hard prison for mafiosi (41-bis), favoring at the same time collaborators of justice and repentants. It was a real turning point in the attitude of the State, which destroyed the "presumption of omnipotence and freedom" of the mafia leaders. Hence the choice to try to "soften" it, threatening its organs with actions that, "persevering in the hard line taken, would have caused the country mourning and destruction to no end".

It was a trafficker of works of art who pushed the mafia to attack the artistic heritage of the nation. In fact, he explained to the mafia leaders: "Once a judge is killed, he is replaced; Killed a policeman, the same thing happens. But once the Tower of Pisa was destroyed, an irreplaceable thing was destroyed, with incalculable damage to the State".

This year's "round" anniversary has a double value: it is the first to be celebrated after the arrest, last January, of Matteo Messina Denaro, the mafia boss sentenced to life imprisonment for that massacre.