One thing I've noticed so much since being here is how much more politically aware Italian students are than us Brits. Fair enough, I'm sure the majority of Edinburgh students have at least a basic knowledge of current affairs/politics, and opinions on said topics, but I doubt many would be able to quote Chapter Blah of Article Blah of the New Law concerning Blah, passed last week by Mr Blah. See my point? Here though, it's a completely different story, and for the past few weeks, it's really kicked off.
The main problem at the moment is to do with a huge education reform one of the Italian ministers, MariaStella Gelmini, is bringing in. This seems to involve huge job cuts, budget cuts and lots of related chaos. Suffice to say people are Not Happy - Gelmini is quite possibly the most hated woman in all Italy, and as if Berlusconi wasn't disliked enough as it is, he's now seen as some sort of demonic figure.
So about a month ago, in true Italian fashion, people decided to to take matters into their own hands, and since then it's been a constant run of strikes, protests and disruptions. It began with the schools - students and teachers "occupied" the schools, refusing to go home and sleeping there, this soon spread to the universities, though as you can imagine was handled somewhat differently. Part of the Gelmini proposals which angered people most was the decision that the vast majority of budget cuts would come from arts and humanities departments...so of course the first students to protest were those from the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy. The occupation of the faculty went on for weeks - I'd assumed this would be a miserable sit-in, with lots of angry waving of placards and cries for justice... I couldn't have been more wrong. Yes, there was lots of waving of placards and cries for justice but I hadn't realised that here in Italy, occupying the university basically is a by-word for "massive rave and piss up" - on the first night there were over 600 students in the main courtyard of the department, they set up bars and had a DJ! This carried on for weeks, and soon spread to other departments too. There were also protests, one in particular involved around 30,000 students marching through the streets of Bologna, bringing the entire city to a standstill. This was organised in all the major cities on the same day, luckily most protests were peaceful although a few people we injured here, including a journalist from one of the major national newspapers who got caught in the crossfire between students and police.The students then marched to the train station, which they also occupied - blocking the tracks by sitting on them and refusing to move, and they also occupied the trains themselves. Back at the main square they stopped all traffic on the two main streets by sitting on the floor at the main junction and refusing point blank to move. It was chaos, but impressive nonetheless.
There have been numerous national protests too where hundreds of thousands of students have gone to Rome to protest together. To be honest I'm not entirely sure if this will change anything, although at least it feels as if people are trying. It is definately a bit of a culture shock though - I have friends at other universities whose Unis have just gone on strike, cancelling all lessons for a few weeks,classes being held outside in the piazza as part of the plan to draw public attention to the problem, and others who have had masked students storming into lectures,grabbing the mic from the lecturer and ranting about the new laws. The weirdest thing of all for me is that in that case, the lecturer eventually grabbed the mic back and then gave the students her full support and said she was totally behind all their protests! Here in Bologna Via Zamboni, the main uni street is covered in graffiti, such as this...
So now I guess it's a question of waiting and seeing what happens next...for now it's calmed down a wee bit, after a huge demonstration in Rome last weekend with over 200,000 students from all over Italy...only time will tell!
