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                 [ ITALY’S CULTURAL UNDERGROUND ]

 

 

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 “When we wanted to open a social center, we would look for places that are closed down and often places that were owned by the city. For the first month we’d sleep inside, because you don’t know if the police are going to throw you out. Sometimes, you’d get thrown out the next day. One time we occupied this very beautiful place that had been a monastery and a school and had been closed for 12 years. We had a guy who went around to radio stations reading a document explaining why we had occupied the place and inviting people to come down. A few hours later, we had 200 people. This was a real nice period where there was a real movement, but it eventually fell apart because of problems with the police and divisions in the city between various groups.”

Borgioli, the Marilyn Manson fan, is up on what’s currently happening in Bologna, one of Italy’s communist strongholds. “This year for the first time a guy was elected for mayor who belongs to the center-right party and he immediately closed all the social centers and they stayed shut for months and then one by one they started to reopen. To keep them closed, he would have had to keep the police in front of them every day, which would be impossible.”

Compared to how things would go down with the police in any city in the U.S., police in Italy generally show a lot of restraint when it comes to social centers. Other times, they act like the L.A.P.D. on a mildly bad day.

“Sometimes, they just break down the door and smash everything they find inside,” says Costa. “They even write fascist slogans on the walls. One time, they went into a computer room and pissed on all the computers. The things that they don’t ruin, they take away. You can ask for them back, but nobody does because they take down your name and then it’s sure that you’ll be accused of occupying the place.”

One of Italy’s most important social centers, CPA in Florence, is in imminent danger of being bulldozed for a shopping mall. A former factory which has been squatted for 11 years and which contains a large concert hall, a movie house, a sound stage, a skate park, a gym, a basketball court and a darkroom, CPA will be replaced by Coop, a large supermarket chain which was started by the former Communist Party. The politically active punks who run CPA (and publish a fine, monthly newspaper, Communicazione Antagonista) plan to fight their eviction, but they are up against powerful, greedy leftists and communists who could care less about a thriving autonomous community which doesn’t generate profits for them or anyone else.

However, Italy’s social centers, which the French newspaper Le Monde called “the Italian cultural jewel,” continue to expand. Though many European countries have squatters’ movements and some left-leaning governments are tolerant of them, only Germany’s squats, which are not nearly as abundant or diverse, in any way compare to the scene in Italy. Of course, in the U.S. there is no such movement to speak of. There have been squatters’ movements on the East Coast in New York and Philadelphia, but they have been invariably smashed to pieces by the police. Is America tolerant enough to ever let young people have control of public space to do with what they wish? Probably not. But before that ever happens, there will have to be a consensus among young people that they want to have control over their own lives and their own hangouts. And there will have to be an organized movement to achieve those goals.

Until then, go to Italy and check out some real democracy

Zenzibar.com

 

  

 

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