At just after 8 a.m. last Thursday, Massimo D'Antona (51) walked out the front door of his apartment building in Via Salaria, close to central Rome.
Passers-by would have paid him little attention. With his sober clothes and two briefcases, he looked like just another busy commuter.
He was indeed on his way to work, to teach at Rome's La Sapienza University.
Mr D'Antona, however, also worked as a government consultant, acting as an adviser not only to the governments of Lamberto Dini (1995) amd Romano Prodi (1996-1998) but also to the current centre-left government led by the Prime Minister, Massimo D'Alema.
His area of competence related to labour markets and labour law.
Mr D'Antona followed a habitual routine, turning to walk in the direction of Piazza Fiume. He had walked barely 100 metres when he passed behind a metal advertising hoarding. As he did so, a gunman shot at him, killing him with six bullets fired from a .38 calibre pistol.
Subsequent medical and forensic evidence reveals that while four of the bullets had hit him in the arms, legs and back, he was killed by the sixth bullet fired into his heart as he lay stricken on the pavement.
As Mr D'Antona lay dying, his killer and accomplices made good their escape, disappearing into the noisy, rush-hour morning traffic on mopeds.
When police investigators arrived on the scene, their attention immediately focused on two vans, parked opposite one another on either side of Via Salaria at the point where Mr D'Antona was killed. In all probability, the two vehicles, subsequently revealed to be stolen, served a twin purpose, being used by the killers not only as a reconnaissance base from which to trace Mr D'Antona's everyday movements but also as a hiding place from which they emerged to open fire on him.
Evidence from local residents confirms that the vans had been in position for a number of days prior to the killing.
The careful positioning of the vans as well as the cynical, cold-blooded manner in which Mr D'Antona's assassins finished him off as he fell to the pavement all lead to the inevitable conclusion that there was nothing ad hoc or improvised about his killing but that it was a carefully planned, paramilitary-style operation.
Later on Thursday, the notion that this was a terrorist operation was endorsed when the Rome offices of two national dailies, Il Messaggero and Corriere Della Sera, received communiques claiming responsibility for the assassination from a group that identified itself as the Red Brigades.
In a 28-page document, bearing the Red Brigades' infamous five-point star and containing an analysis of Mr D'Antona's career, his self-declared assassins declared him and other left-wing politicians as traitors to the cause, blaming them for high unemployment and a variety of other social ills while also criticising Italy's involvement in the NATO military action against Yugoslavia.
"With this offensive . . . the Red Brigades take up the initiative of the armed struggle, striking a central point in the struggle to continue the long-term class war towards the conquest of political power and the installation of a proletarian dictatorship," the document said.
The document furthermore castigated Mr D'Antona as someone who was working towards "neo-corporative policies . . . whose social aims coincided with those of the Imperialist bourgeoisie". The killing of Massimo D'Antona provoked an immediate outcry of anger, indignation and consternation right across the political board.
Within three hours of his death, the Minister of the Interior, Rosa Russo Jervolino, had addressed parliament. She was probably speaking for many of her fellow citizens when she said: "I cannot offer any initial theories but this certainly brings back some terrible memories . . . "
Those terrible memories, of course, are linked to that period between the 1970s and early 1980s when the ultra-left Red Brigades carried out a violent terrorist campaign that saw more than 400 people killed and which reached its high point in 1978 with the kidnapping and subsequent assassination of the Christian Democrat leader and former prime minister, Aldo Moro.
The D'Antona killing has inevitably raised a variety of complex questions. Was it the work of a small number of Red Brigade die-hards who simply refuse to acknowledge that their "armed struggle" has long since utterly failed? Much of the Red Brigades' "claimer" document seems jargon-ridden, while many commentators consider its "political analysis" to be outdated, suggesting that it was written by someone locked into a 20-year-old time warp.
What, if any, is the link between the killing of Massimo D'Antona and the series of attacks carried out in the last month on Democratic Left's party buildings in Bologna, Milan and Udine?
What, if any, is the link between the killing and the five-point Red Brigades star spray-painted onto the wall of the Prime Minister's private summer house in Gallipoli, in Puglia, last weekend?
What, if any, are the links between the killing and the many recent anti-NATO incidents that have seen Italy-based US servicemen physically assaulted, their cars burned and even a Verona school attended by US children threatened? What, if any, is the link between this killing and six letter bombs sent to a doctor, a journalist, a magistrate and three left-wing politicians last August?
Until there is clear evidence to the contrary, the suspicion must remain that some of the above events are linked to one another, born out of an anger (experienced by a tiny ultra-left minority) with the "social democratic road" currently being pursued by the governing Democratic Left, the ex-PCI.
Even if those determined to use political violence may be few in number, it is not surprising that the killing of Mr D'Antona has set alarms bells ringing. The historical precedent and memory of such violence are all too fresh in the Italian mind.