Adriano Sofri

In 1988, sixteen years after the murder of the Milan police commissioner Luigi Calabresi, a former militant confessed to the killing and named three others, including Adriano Sofri, the founder and leader of the far-left group Lotta Continua. Sofri always maintained his innocence. Over the following decade a series of trials, acquittals and retrials made the case one of the most bitterly debated in modern Italian justice. In 1997 the country's highest court confirmed his conviction and a sentence of twenty-two years.

He was born on August 1, 1942, in Trieste, in the early hours of the morning, at the time preserved in astrological records. His Sun is in Leo, with Mercury and Pluto also in Leo, all three in his third house, which governs speech, writing and ideas. Leo is proud, charismatic and drawn to leadership, and Pluto adds intensity and power. A Leo cluster in the third house describes a person whose influence comes through words, and Sofri was known first as a magnetic speaker and organizer and later as a prolific writer.

Venus and Jupiter, both in Cancer, sit in his first house, and Gemini is his rising sign. Gemini gives intellectual agility and a love of argument, and Cancer planets in the first house add emotional warmth and a protective, loyal manner. Many who knew Sofri, including political opponents, described him as charming and persuasive.

His Moon is in Aries in the eleventh house of groups, movements and collective causes. An Aries Moon is combative and impatient, and in the eleventh it describes emotional energy invested in political movements. In the late 1960s Sofri led Lotta Continua, one of the most prominent groups of Italy's radical left during the turbulent years of strikes, protests and political violence.

Saturn and Uranus, both in Gemini, fall in his twelfth house, the area associated with confinement, prisons and isolation. Saturn in the twelfth is a classic placement for long periods of enforced seclusion, and Sofri spent about fifteen years serving his sentence, much of it in a prison in Pisa.

He kept writing from prison, becoming a widely read columnist for Italian newspapers including La Repubblica and Il Foglio. Many intellectuals argued that he had been wrongly convicted; the historian Carlo Ginzburg wrote a book questioning the case. In 2005 Sofri suffered a life-threatening rupture of the esophagus, known as Boerhaave syndrome, and was later moved to house arrest on medical grounds. He was released in 2012.

Mars at the very end of Leo and Neptune in Virgo fall in his fourth house. The Leo planets in his third house gave him the voice; the Saturn in his twelfth house gave him the long years of confinement in which he kept using it.