This time, though, it’s all of us being shocked. All we have gone through in the last years, months, weeks is finally coming up. People are finally sick. It took Schettino for us to get indignados. Sicily started already, even though mainstream medias don’t talk about yet. Things might not seem connected, but they are. The reaction is starting. The analogy made by Beppe Grillo in his last post is unbelievably accurate.

The Concordia shrinking and sitting by the coast of the Giglio island symbolized our reaching the bottom. From now on, we can only rise.

I wonder if when people think about Italy’s winters they still suffer of the stereotype created by  anglo-saxons literature of the 800′s.
And then I think of what in Italy we think of the winter; consequences on our social life, the cycle of seasons of our body, the tiredness of the dark months, the imposed fashion styles and those who follow them, seasonal products and dishes, project for the next good season, the grey sea and the abandoned beaches, enel gas’s bill…

Tonight, dinner at home of a Tuscan friend to celebrate the olive harvest and the new oil. Green, stinging, young, thick. Now waiting for the bread to toast, soon will be full and smiling hardcore. Thank you mamma Sforazzini!

Updating my last post,  a few minutes later.

Pommegranade is an emblem of Italian lifestyle.
Around the table, chatting, sharing, eating.
Enjoy.

We aren’t quite there yet; we need less people feeling they NEED plasma televisions, and more cops on our side. 25,000 people for an iPhone or a tv. 200,000 for protesting. There is definitely room for improvement.

After the riots in Rome, we have seen happening exactly what we would expect: the moving of the spotlight from a rightful protest of citizens and their motivations to criminalization of participants by the same ruling class that brought us here and allowed those incidents to happen in order to use them against the protest itself. Should I mention one for all? The mayor of Rome,former neo-fascist Gianni Alemanno, who condemned what happened and banned demonstrations in Rome for a month. (Also this post from another Italian blogger offers a reading of the facts similar to mine)

Meanwhile, Italian medias did their part “informing” tv-watching grandpas, housewives and average Joes that the name of the new scare was actually an old one: Black Blocs. The problem is not sitting in parliament, but it’s in the streets.

Interestingly enough, as I said earlier, as protests continue to take place all over the world, even though the reasons why people got down in the streets might have been slightly different at a first superficial glance, common patterns start to emerge.

People want to participate more in public life, they want more transparent institutions and better economic policies; those who abundantly eat off the actual system and are in power respond with tear gases and truncheons. Nice.

Two days ago in Oakland, California,  24-year-old protester Scott Olsen got his skull fractured during clashes with the police. He is a Marine Corp war-veteran from Iraq. Could he be a Black Bloc too, just like “Er Pelliccia“?

A mix of events came together, and thoughts I had having for the last weeks, the last days, met a stable disposition in my mind this morning, forcing me to change my schedule and organize this post.

Lately I mentioned how Italy is going through an interesting and promising social phase, and meanwhile the whole world and it’s citizens are facing some interesting challenges, that I defined as real clash of civilizations in my last post.

The arising of new sensitivities that makes the period we are living a revolutionary one is the red lines that connects the Italian scenario, on which I want to concentrate today, and the global one.

Made Italy, we are finally making the Italians, we said. Last Saturday, in Rome, hundred of thousands of citizens went down the streets to tell the people in the palace that we are here, and we are coming. Hundred of thousands of citizen of every age, every part of Italy, that came not in buses organized by some party leader or some organization: they mostly all came with their own means, or by train. Spontaneously. I am young, I know, still I have never seen anything like this happen before. In this country, in Italy. The country where people don’t care, everybody turns around, the mafia still proliferates on a culture that often, to live with no problems, doesn’t see, doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak. Here, people form everywhere spontaneously met in Rome last Saturday, because they start to see that there is no choice but to raise the tone.

Together, like this, we have never done it before. Those who still govern us know this, and they are afraid. They know that their power relied substantially on the fact that Italians were always too divided to take action as a real organic entity; on that they thrived, for decades. I want to make clear that I do not simply refer to the government, to Berlusconi: this is something that will overturn the whole “ruling class” of this country. They are all going to go. It feels good to write that !

For these reasons, this soft regime we Italians today live in tried to do all he could to distract the attention from what was really happening: a huge, spontaneous gathering of people that was there to remind them who was the people, and who those who served the people. It is not that hard, when you have a country in which you pretty much have an oligarchy controlling the media, an embarrassing low penetration of the Internet on the territory compared to the rest of western Europe, and a population made for a great part by older people who still think they can still get “informed” by newspapers and news, and have no idea of what alternative sources of information are.

All they had to do, and what they did is allowing violent protesters to organize themselves, take part to the rally, give them chances to create some chaos, have them destroy Rome and let this one be, out of 951 cities in 82 countries in which manifestations were held, one of the only places where things turned violent, and definitely the worst case.

Why? Because by doing so they took away the spotlight from the people, and could even take advantage of the situation to point the finger towards people’s movements and, why not, advance some fascist-like proposals to limit freedom of gathering and demonstration. Nice.

This morning, while going through the news for breakfast, as usual, I came across some video reports of what happened last Saturday in Rome. The website is www.serviziopubblico.it , and it is the new independent initiative of one of Italy’s major old school journalists, Michele Santoro, who recently left, among bitter polemics, the RAI, the Italian public broadcast television, for reasons that can only be considered political. The videos that Santoro’s team offer are not something that you will see in TV news here; they clearly show how things went, from the beginning to the end. They show how only a small group of the protester were actually causing troubles, and how they were let free to do whatever they wanted long enough for the situation to collapse and transform an otherwise pacific demonstration into civil war. Also, not any less important, you see how the great majority of the people Saturday in Rome had nothing to do and wanted nothing to do with that violent phalanx. People wanted the police to intervene, to make the situation safe, to continue pacifically their rally. But the police did not intervene until it was too late. Maybe they were not put into the conditions of being able to do so. Citizens against citizens, workers against workers. Rome burns, and Nero plays the lyre.

These videos were just too good. But they were all in Italian. I spent the whole day adding the English subs, in order for them to be available to a wider public.

These are the 3 videos that I chose; for more refer to the original website, but with no subs, sorry!

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

They last around 12 minutes each.

5.07AM, I’m going to sleep. Tomorrow doesn’t look as a great day for my thesis either .

This is my contribution to our revolution. It is just a matter of time, we have already won.