Fifty years ago, starting from the night between 26 and 27 February 1971, L'Aquila was upset by a popular uprising in the Reggio Calabria style for the matter of the regional statute of the newly formed Abruzzo Region.
The regions were established in 1970 with the elections that led to the formation of the Regional Councils whose first task was precisely that of designing the institutional form of the instrument envisaged in the Constitution.
Everything was triggered by the assignment to Aquila or Pescara of the institutional seats of the Giunta, Council or departments: in three days the crowd stormed the party seats, those of the DC and the PCI were devastated, houses of politicians were set on fire, many out of fear went into hiding for days.
The events in L'Aquila had been preceded in June 1970 by similar riots in Pescara, resulting from the same claims as the Adriatic capital: street demonstrations, burning tires, arrests, stone-throwing.
The construction of the architecture of the Region was therefore a difficult birth due to what the former president of Rai Claudio Petruccioli, at the time regional secretary of the PCI, defines "the various regional souls - so much so that, like Calabrie and Puglie, school we studied 'the Abruzzi' - they complicated the creation of a regional unit, but I would like to underline that after 50 years the Statute we approved is still the same and is in force, a sign that it was not a mistake ".