Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week from the 1930s how Italian imperial ambition turned to mass slaughter in Ethiopia.

I could see the piazza, the square, Menelic Square, and there people were running, Italians

were shooting, people killing people, it was a massacre.

Also the fate of Christians persecuted in the Korean War.

We are all scared.

We heard a lot about the persecuting the Christians and they try to persuade them to the communism.

If they do not, they were punished people.

Plus how the human body was plastinated in the 1990s and violent bigotry in

1980s America. I can only describe it as mirroring the Islamophobia that poured

out as a hysteria in America after 9-11 except back then

it was anybody who looked Japanese.

That's all coming up later in the podcast but it's in Italy that we begin with one of the greatest

scandals in that country's post-war history. In June 1982 the body of one of

Italy's most senior bankers was found hanging beneath a bridge in London. It was just the latest

twist in a dramatic tale that had gripped the country for more than a year, and it seemed to

hint that real power in Italy did not lie with the elected government but in a secret

state within a state. Louisit Algo has been speaking to a retired magistrate and to a

journalist who both helped to expose what had been going on.

It was a scandal that had everything, a secret Masonic Lodge whose members included many of the

most powerful men in Italy, the mafia, the Catholic Church. I've been talking to one of the people

...