The man is a former classmate of 19-year-old student Lidia Macchi, who was stabbed to death in January 1987 in a previously unsolved murder.
The suspect was named as Stefano Binda, an unemployed philosophy graduate living with his elderly mother in the town of Brebbia, west of Varese.
Macchi's body was found almost two days after she disappeared on January 5, 1987 in a wood near a local hospital where she had gone to visit a girlfriend who was receiving treatment.
An activist with the conservative Catholic Communion and Liberation movement, Macchi had been stabbed 29 times and had had sexual intercourse before her death, an autopsy found.
She was lying face downwards with her fists clenched and her tights on inside out, her corpse covered by pieces of cardboard and leaves.
Binda was identified from the handwriting in an anonymous letter sent to Macchi's family shortly after the murder and was arrested on the orders of a judge in Varese, investigators said.
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