Introduction

Abstract

On 14 December 2010, I participated in a massive demonstration in Rome against the university reform, in the occasion of the vote of confidence towards the Berlusconi government in the senate. After the news that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had unexpectedly managed to obtain the majority (convincing some of the senators who had split from the party in previous weeks to return—with arguments that are still under investigation by the judiciary system), the demonstration escalated into limited but violent clashes with the police that guarded the ‘red zone’ of the city centre. At the end of the demonstration, a friend and fellow activist showed me the webpage of La Repubblica (Italy’s most important—traditionally progressive—newspaper) on his smartphone: the headline can be translated as something like ‘Guerrillas in Rome. It’s the new 1977’, a clear reference to a year that was characterised by radical and sometimes violent protests that, as we will see, have often been connected, in the Italian public memory, to terrorism.