Led Zeppelin

5 July 1971 was supposed to be a historic night. And in a way, it was — just not for the reasons anyone hoped. The only Italian concert by Led Zeppelin, at Milan's Velodromo Vigorelli, went down in history as one of the most notorious disasters in the history of live music in Italy. A story so emblematic that it inspired an entire book, "Led Zeppelin '71" by Giovanni Rossi, which reconstructs in detail a night that became one of rock's darkest legends.

The English band's appearance was part of the Cantagiro-Cantamondo festival, an event that brought together wildly different artists. On the same bill were also expected Gianni Morandi, Lucio Dalla, Ricchi e Poveri and other stars of Italian pop, alongside the band that at the time represented the loudest, most powerful vanguard of international rock. It was an explosive mix. On one side were families with children and the usual crowd of summer-festival regulars. On the other, thousands of young people who had travelled from all over Italy to see Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham. Organisers had been warned against mixing such different crowds, but the warnings were ignored.
As the evening went on, tension rose steadily. The acts taking the stage were met with jeers and heckling. Outside the Vigorelli, groups of "autoriduttori" — young people demanding free access to concerts — gathered alongside militants from the extra-parliamentary far left and onlookers drawn by the growing chaos. Attempts began to force the entrances, while police deployed vans and riot units.

By the time Led Zeppelin decided to take the stage, the situation was already on the verge of collapse. According to tour manager Richard Cole, the decision was made on impulse: "The atmosphere was too tense, so we said: we're not going to sit here waiting all night for you Italians in the middle of this mess! We'll start when we feel like it!" So at 10:40 pm, more than an hour ahead of the planned schedule, the band walked out on stage. What greeted the musicians was a surreal scene. In the stands, many families were trying to leave the velodrome to escape the clashes and the tear gas. On the field, meanwhile, thousands of kids had surged toward the stage.
Pierangelo Corti, one of the fans present that night, recalled: "Inside, the people who wanted Led Zeppelin started demanding them, and whoever went up on stage got hit with beer cans and whatever else people could throw, so they brought Led Zeppelin out earlier than planned to try to calm the crowd down a bit". According to organisers' estimates, more than 15,000 people were inside the Vigorelli. Sirens, chants, explosions, smoke bombs and temperatures above thirty degrees all combined to create a surreal atmosphere.

When Jimmy Page kicked off the riff of "Immigrant Song", the Vigorelli erupted into chaos. The Milan newspaper Il Giorno described the moment as a "savage roar". It was the start of a performance that, musically speaking, left an indelible impression on those who managed to witness it. After opening with "Immigrant Song", the band slipped in a quote from the Yardbirds' "Mr. You're A Better Man Than I", a nod back to Page's own past with the Yardbirds. Then came two more classics, "Heartbreaker" and "Since I've Been Loving You", greeted with uncontainable enthusiasm.
Many witnesses — quoted by Rossi in his book — remember above all the sheer volume of the sound system. "There was this enormous mass of sound coming out of the side speakers," Corti recalled. "We were bombarded by that sound, and that's exactly what we were waiting for. The sound is their image".
Robert Plant, however, realised almost immediately that something was wrong. In an interview given a few weeks later he recalled: "We'd heard rumours of bottles being thrown at the stage in Rome, but we were assured that wouldn't happen to us. So we start playing in this cycling arena, with people who'd kept protesting through all the previous acts, and as soon as we walk on stage I notice smoke coming from the back of the arena... and it kept on smoking, and there was a fireman right behind us and I kept telling him 'Fire! Fire!', but... nothing, he just ignored me".

Meanwhile, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Some members of the crowd lit fires near the stage. Had the flames spread to the wooden structure of the track or the stage, the Vigorelli could have turned into a death trap for thousands of people. Outside, clashes between demonstrators and police intensified. Police began firing tear gas canisters, some of which ended up landing inside the venue.
One of the witnesses quoted in Rossi's book, Enzo Gullino, recalls: "The trouble started outside, because inside we were calm. After a while we started to get worried, because from outside you could hear sirens and we couldn't tell if they were police or ambulances. Then all of a sudden we saw tear gas canisters falling inside the Vigorelli. I don't think you throw a tear gas canister into a stadium by accident — you have to aim!"
Plant repeatedly tried to keep things calm. "Keep quiet, keep cool, please," he kept repeating from the stage. At one point he even tried to make a joke of it: "Blow with me, and we'll make the gas disappear!"

After the opening songs, the band launched into "Black Dog", still unreleased at the time and destined to appear a few months later on "Led Zeppelin IV". But by then the show was already doomed. Tear gas kept drifting into the velodrome, the crowd was pushed back and forth by the crush, and many in the audience were desperately trying to get away from the areas most exposed to the smoke. Even Plant was struggling to carry on. Jimmy Page's eyes were visibly streaming, while the singer was repeatedly forced to stop because of coughing fits. At one point the performance was suspended for around ten minutes. The organizers pushed for the band to go back on stage, fearing that a definitive cancellation might spark even worse unrest.
But it was already too late. After roughly twenty minutes of music in total, the concert was called off for good.

The following day, interpretations of what had happened split along political and ideological lines. Some newspapers laid the blame on the protesters, while others accused the police of making things worse through the indiscriminate use of tear gas. Some witnesses even claimed to have seen officers firing canisters directly at head height into the crowd.
Beyond the controversy, one consequence was immediately clear to everyone: Italy came out of that night with its reputation badly damaged in the eyes of international promoters. Similar incidents would go on to mar concerts by Genesis, Santana and other foreign artists in the years that followed, cementing the country's image as an unreliable place to host major rock events.
For Led Zeppelin, the outcome was even more clear-cut. Despite the band's runaway success throughout the Seventies, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham never performed in Italy again. The Vigorelli show thus remains the band's first and last Italian appearance: roughly twenty minutes of music, four songs and one unreleased track, choked by tear gas, fires and clashes. One of the most controversial chapters in the history of rock in Italy.

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23/06/2026