A yellow envelope containing a threatening letter headlined“F**k Israel,” with a .40 caliber Smith & Wesson bullet inside, was sent to Pietro Bondetti, the mayor of Varallo in Italy’s Piedmont region, which is located in the Valsesia valley in northern Italy at the foot of the Alps. “This is the only warning before we start shooting,” the letter read. It was signed by an organization calling itself the “Anti-Zionist Movement.”
In recent years, dozens of Israeli families have settled in the town, forming a community. The letter also threatens Ugo Luzzatti, who founded the Baita project in 2023. According to Italian media, the project has already brought about 70 Israeli families to settle in Varallo.
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The threatening letter contained a .40 caliber Smith & Wesson bullet
(Photo: From Italian television)
The letter arrived on Friday in the municipal mailbox together with regular mail. It contains 16 lines of hate-filled text, in which Bondetti, as well as Luzzatti and other mayors, are accused of enabling the “settlement of Nazi-Zionists.” “We will not tolerate the transfer of additional families,” it states.
“This is a very serious and unexpected act,” Bondetti said in response, according to Italian media reports. He immediately filed a complaint with the police, which, according to reports, opened an investigation into the origin of the letter.
The newspaper La Stampa reported that the investigation now also involves prosecution authorities in Turin, with the anti-mafia unit activated, since the mayor is a target of the threats. Investigators are now working to determine who has placed the dozens of Israeli families in the town in their crosshairs.
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About 70 Israeli families have moved to the town of Varallo in the Valescia Valley
(Photo: Shutterstock)
According to La Stampa, until this letter arrived, no one had ever complained about the arrival of the new residents from Israel. However, amid what it described as an increasingly tense atmosphere for Jews and Israelis in Italy, someone appears to have escalated the level of threat and hatred.
“The arrival of Israeli families is a very positive thing for our area,” Bondetti explained. “Those who chose to live in the Valsesia valley bought and renovated abandoned homes and brought life back to parts of the town that had been increasingly deserted. The children attend our schools and personally I have never noticed any tension or problem,” he said, adding that he feels “great bitterness and concern over what has happened.”
According to Bondetti, most of the families include people of all ages, many of whom work remotely and prefer the area, where they can live close to nature.
“In all these years I have never received any threats,” said Luzzatti, the project manager of the Israeli community initiative. Luzzatti, originally from Genoa, lived for many years in Israel before also moving to the Valsesia valley, where Varallo is located. “This is undoubtedly a very disturbing and also absurd letter in its content, since for Zionist Israelis leaving Israel would be considered an act of betrayal, and they would not move anywhere else, certainly not to Valsesia,” he said.
Luzzatti also told La Stampa that “what drives these families to come here and choose Varallo is the search for a place where they can live without tension, without political pressure and without the bloody wars of the Middle East.” He added that around 70 Israeli families live there: “People who integrate into the community and most of them are not even religious.”
Following the uproar over the letter, Italian President Sergio Mattarella called Bondetti to express support and condemn the threat against him. “For the Israelis who chose to seek a new beginning far from wars and terror, no one imagined that hatred against Israel, reignited by the war in Gaza, would reach even here,” the newspaper Corriere della Sera reported.
Italy has in the past two years seen a worrying and dangerous rise in antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents, some of which have escalated into severe physical and verbal violence. The country’s Jewish community reports an unprecedented sense of insecurity and a real threat to its way of life, amid a surge in incitement and open expressions of hatred against Jews and Israel in the media, cultural sphere and Italian politics.