The Charge of the Eighty Thousand in Piazza del Popolo

(by John Blackeye) The title can be deceiving as there is no intention of talking about the police charges that occurred on the sidelines of a peaceful demonstration held in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, as much as about the moral charge and personal energy that I saw in people I met during this hot mid-October afternoon. There were groups of peaceful people from Reggio Emilia, Padua, Mantua, Brescia, Verona, Turin, Milan, Bergamo, Pesaro Ancona, Florence, Trieste, Bolzano, Modena, Treviso, Rovereto and Arezzo.  

In situations like these it is preferable to take the Metro so I got off at the "Flaminio" stop and took the exit towards Piazza del Popolo. The presence of hundreds of ordinary people walking with me in the same direction suggested to me that maybe all those people, made up of women, elderly e moms with children who on the subway train chatted with the phone or talked smiling with their travel companion, had a common purpose: demonstrate today against the "Green Pass" in Piazza del Popolo.

Piazza del Popolo - Rome


Out of the Metro I see the Police vans placed just about everywhere as the subway continues to churn out hundreds of very normal people who go to join a square that is now crowded. I say very normal because they are not organized people like when unions take to the streets to demonstrate with a thousand flags all of the same color. These are people who have left what they had to do to express their disappointment with the green pass and its limitations.

Piazza del Popolo - Rome

I push myself through the crowd to understand what the air is like and see signs handwritten by ordinary people. I was struck by one of these who read: "it is easier to deceive people than to convince them that they have been deceived".

I move towards the "Makeshift stage" and I see two groups of participants waving their banners depicting the Virgin Mary need San Micheal. Also present are the religious movements and I understand that that heterogeneous square she did not go there to do violence but to be seen by a government that, as a lady by my side tells me, he pretends not to see the great discomfort of almost nine million Italians who have decided not to get vaccinated.

I move away from the square where people dressed well have "armed" themselves with whistles to make their protest heard even stronger and I move to the steps of the nearby church to get an even clearer picture of the situation.
A quick glance to my right to observe a hundred of young university students who hug each other, smiling and in any case lightheartedly enter the square to join that tide of people.
I sit next to a middle-aged woman who has no belligerent intentions and tells me that she would never have imagined being in a surreal situation like the one she is experiencing: "with a state that blackmails you by telling you: either you vaccinate with an experimental serum or you don't work ", so the annoyed woman bursts, bringing her whistle to her mouth and then apologizing to me for the noise made.

Piazza del Popolo - Rome

On my right, another lady approaches, very distinguished, with glasses and a bag under her arm. It looks like she went out for shopping in via del Corso but she is there too. She too is not used to street demonstrations but has decided to join everyone, to show that there is no blackmail by a state that suddenly, from an employer, turns into an "enemy".
At the foot of the staircase there is instead one very old lady. She brought huge photo prints with her and placed them on the steps beside her. They depict a man of her age, presumably her husband, with bruises all over his body. If it is the side effects of the vaccine we will never know also because when the crowd started to constipate in the square, the Lady collected everything and left.
Una mom with two children that look a lot like her, she climbs the steps and takes a selfie with her children to immortalize a day that up to that moment has given everyone satisfaction, if only because the participation is enormous.


At that point I got curious and searched on google what was the capacity of Piazza del Popolo. It turns out that the square can hold 65 thousand people. So I look up, take a look at the square and considering that people have overflowed into the neighboring streets and are also squatting on the side containment walls as well as on Piazzale Flaminio, I believe that if there are no eighty thousand participants, we are close.


From "Makeshift stage" - since it is an uncovered van - they are talking in turns, but contrary to the demonstration in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome, it seems that the speakers are a little less professional than their colleagues who took turns on stage in the mega demonstration on 25 September.
The message that so many good people, honest workers, mothers, children and families wanted to give was clear: no green pass and no limitation to personal freedom and no limit to the right to work.

One last line is addressed to me by a lady who has come to demonstrate with her little dog. He looks at me and tells me that the rest of the Italians have suffered TV brainwashing. I cannot hide the fact that all around there was an improvised applause towards the lady who went away satisfied having made sense of her presence in the square this Saturday afternoon.

The infiltrators among the good people

La demonstration would turn out well if it wasn't for some troublemakers, less than a hundred, who equipped with drums, flags and banners, encouraged the square to start a procession.They moved towards Piazzale Flaminio and many of those good people, indeed a stream that never ended, began to follow them, convinced that passing in front of the buildings of power would have made the protest message even stronger. Too bad it was a trap, the usual trap. In fact in Piazza San Giovanni, from the stage, with seriousness, they immediately said that the demonstration had not planned any procession so the fuse went out before detonating the bomb.

Yesterday, partly because of the anger that all those common people were harboring internally due to the impossibility of going to work freely starting from October 15th, thousands of people got involved. The peaceful demonstration remained in the square and it seems, as reported today by some FB sites, it was displaced by the police with unorthodox means. The rest, made up of a few thousand of those eighty thousand who arrived at the meeting, they naively followed the procession which then clashed with the poor police officers who surely would have liked to spend a peaceful Sunday with their families instead of wearing helmets and riot suits.

However, a legitimate doubt arises, assuming that violence is always deplorable and that those responsible should be prosecuted. If in Piazza San Giovanni there was the same number of demonstrators and the news broadcasts spoke instead of about two hundred present gathered in protest, if there hadn't been those extreme acts of deplorable violence, the news would have talked about it or even these eighty thousand would have miraculously transformed in "a few hundred protesters?"


Violence never, ever, and none of the eighty thousand present went to the streets to break everything. Let alone, I have seen elderly people, children, mothers and fathers together with young university students who took to the streets with honesty and anger but unable to do violence.
A small group of troublemakers ruined everyone's day... but I ask again the question: if it had not been for them, the news would have talked about the great discomfort that nine million Italians are experiencing who do not intend to give in to the blackmail of a state?

The prosecutor has opened a file on terrorism

An anti-terrorism magistrate will also investigate the clashes that took place yesterday afternoon at the No-Vax and no Green pass demonstration in the center of Rome: a siege on the palaces of power, maneuvered by ultra-right groups ready to raise the tension and inject violence in the square in less than a week from the entry into force of the obligation of the Green pass in the workplace.

It is the war bulletin numbers that make it even more evident what happened on the sidelines of the no green pass event that was held in Piazza del Popolo. According to the bulletin known by the Rome Police Headquarters, 38 members of the police were injured in yesterday's clashes in Rome. These include a police officer who suffered a fractured rib and a forensic police operator who was fractured a cheekbone. What happened at the Umerto I hospital was also very serious, where a group of demonstrators broke into the emergency room to free a hospitalized man in police custody: four injured among health workers and police officers.

As for the control services, 600 demonstrators have been identified from different parts of Italy. 

The arrested

Six people were arrested in fragrance: the crimes for which they are reported are numerous, among which, aggravated damage, devastation and pillage, violence and resistance to a public official. Further investigation and verification activities are underway on the videos recorded by the staff of the Scientific Police, in order to assess other criminal conduct relevant to the facts that have occurred.  

At the moment 12 people have been arrested, including the historical leaders of Forza Nuova Giuliano Castellino and Roberto Fiore, as well as the promoter of the event Pamela Testa, 39, and Luigi Aronica, 65, "er pantera di Monteverde" ex belonging to the Nar and already sentenced to 18 years in 1985 precisely because of his militancy in the Revolutionary Armed Nuclei. Among those arrested was also the restaurateur Biagio Passaro, leader of the 'IoApro' movement, present during the assault on the CGIL headquarters in Rome.

 

 

The Charge of the Eighty Thousand in Piazza del Popolo