BY STEPHEN BENNETTS
FLORENCE Non ho mai visto Firenze cosi bella. Che bello vederla cosi piena di gente; di solito ci sono solo le bancarelle d'oro e le cartoline. E che palle! (I've never seen Florence looking so beautiful. How wonderful to see it so full of people; usually it's all gold shops and postcards. How boring!) Lead singer of the Tuscan-Zapatista rock band Chipil de Tamales.
Despite the climate of fear and hysteria whipped up by the Italian press in the weeks preceding the European Social Forum (ESF), held in Florence from November 6-10, the whole event went off without incident. It culminated in a triumphant and completely peaceful anti-war march on November 9, the largest ever held in the city, with a crowd estimated at 1 million people from all over Europe taking part.
Arriving in Florence the day before the ESF, I found many of the shops closed for the next few days. Important works of art, such as Michelangelo's David were protected with heavy-duty padding.
The mayor of Florence and the president of the region of Tuscany put their reputations on the line by offering Florence as the location for the ESF, while the right-wing government of Silvio Berlusconi government has done everything possible to get the meeting cancelled. The minister for culture even proposes a law banning big political rallies from le citta d'arte (art cities), a move which might eliminate major political protests from cities like Naples, Florence, Rome, Venice and Verona.
Identity
Leading conservative Florentines, such as the filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli and journalist Oriana Fallaci, seem to have viewed the ESF as the equivalent to arrival of the Huns. In a notorious letter published on the front page of the Milanese paper Corriere della Sera the day before the ESF, Fallaci called upon Florentines to express their disgust at the desecration of their city by pulling down their shutters in protest.However, as the leader of the anarchist Disobbedienti group Luca Casarini pointed out, the only attack on Florentine heritage ever carried out was the 1994 bombing of the Uffizi Galleries by the Sicilian Mafia, the same organisation that helped the Berlusconi government to win all 60 parliamentary seats in Sicily in the last national election.
What was up for grabs was the definition of Florence's identity. Zeffirelli and others present an exclusively aristocratic vision of Florence as a city for well-heeled reactionary aesthetes, as presented more or less in his recent film Tea with Mussolini.
However, the vision of Florence and Tuscany which prevailed during the ESF was of a region of strong democratic and progressive social traditions which, apart from being the birthplace of the Renaissance, was also a cradle of the Italian resistance to fascism and the first place in Europe to abolish the death penalty; a city of culture, art and innovation which is capable of entering into a powerful symbolic dialogue with the rest of the world.
The ESF also provided an opportunity for some Florentines to denounce the city's untrammelled commercialism and materialism; they feel Florence has sold its soul to the tourist dollar over the last 20 years. We are Florentines, not shopkeepers, one banner announced proudly during the march.
Compared to the disastrous behaviour of Italian police at Genoa during the protests against the G8 Summit in June last year, the Florentine police on November 9 gave a superb lesson to the rest of Italy on the role of police in a democratic society.
Although 6500 police were mobilised throughout the city, they remained almost invisible throughout the march. The police chief refused to deploy helicopters until late in the afternoon, and then only as a way of estimating the number of marchers.
The marchers did everything possible to keep the rally peaceful. The General Confederation of Italian Trade Unions (CGIL) dispatched a 2000-strong force of dockworkers as a servizio di ordine for the procession. One dodgey-looking group of masked figures was quickly ejected from the march by three 60-year-old women who pulled off their masks and shouted: Either take off your masks or get out of here!
Panorama
The march was due to set off at 3pm, but it had got underway four hours earlier. By 3pm, the rear of the march is still stationery at the starting point. We were at the mid-point, exhausted and freezing, with the Tarantellablock, a group of Calabrian friends and Roman hangers-on from the Calabrian Folk Music Association. Stopping for a break at one point, we convinced Francesco to pull out his organetto (squeezebox) and play a Calabrian tarantella tune.We are soon joined by a young man with a tamburello (tambourine) and we started dancing. I noticed four Yugoslavian Rom (gypsy) women hovering in the distance and motioned them into the circle. They took turns dancing with me and others, laughing.
An ESF delegate with a heavy Liverpool accent expressed his disappointment that as usual the Marxist-Leninists seemed to have taken control of everything; he insisted it was the anarchists who had started the no global movement. He seemed to have completely lost the plot, because the forum and rally presented a truly amazing panorama of alternative social, political, cultural and economic activity in Europe in which no one group imposed its position.
Everyone is here from the most dogmatic Marxist-Leninists to organic farmers, Buddhists, Catholic peace activists from Pax Christi, Italian ferals who live in tepees outside Florence, Kurdish, Basque and Sardinian separatists, ecologists and fair trade activists selling Caffe Rebelde Zapatista to support the Mexican indigenous movement in Chiapas and Sicilian Anti-Mafia activists from the group 'Libera', who are selling pasta and olive oil produced on land confiscated from convicted Mafia bosses.
There were literally hundreds of seminars, workshops and conferences held in the three days leading up to the march. The movement is transversal and even managed to attract students from the conservative Catholic University of Tor Vergata in Rome. On the train to Florence, which was packed with young no global activists, I fell into conversation with a young nun on her way to Padova and a young activist from L'Aquila in Abbruzzo. It became a dialogue between the disparate groups in Italy and Europe who are united in opposition to the current drive towards war and a globalisation that only benefits the rich.
How ironic that the UN Security Council should have given US President George Bush the green light for war in Iraq the day before the march in Florence. A New York woman, whose son died in the World Trade Centre towers and who has since set up a US anti-war group, was at the ESF. She got a lot of publicity, as did students participating in the forum from the American University in Florence.
There was an incredible variety of music during the march and rally, with many groups bringing their own huge sound systems mounted on the backs of trucks. Favourite tunes are Bella Ciao, the anthem of the Italian Partisans, the lovely song of the Chilean Communist Party and various renditions of Pizzica, the Salentine tarantella.
Ferment
Many Florentines managed to overcome the fear and hysteria generated by the likes of Zeffirelli, Fallaci and the Berlusconi-owned mass media. An elderly man waved a black umbrella with the words Grazie Ragazzi (Thanks guys!) as we passed. I spotted another old man proudly sporting his ancient Partisan beret. Elderly women in the poorer part of town waved ecstatically to the crowd from their balconies, while in one of the more well-heeled parts of town, a 12-year-old girl had hung a peace banner from the railings of her family's expensive townhouse.The director of the Uffizi Gallery offered free entrance to all ESF delegates, the ultimate rejoinder to those who had prophesied that Florence would be reduced to smoking ruins. In a scene which seemed almost Biblical, an elderly woman was lying on a stretcher at one corner of the march route. She had insisted on being brought there all the way from her home in Friuli. The mayor of Florence and the charismatic CGIL leader Sergio Cofferati stopped to greet her as they passed.
Cofferati was welcomed everywhere with enthusiasm. For many, he represents the only figure capable of leading the counterattack against Berlusconi.
The ESF was further evidence of the huge process of political, cultural and social ferment that is taking place in Italy at the moment. It is a far cry from the stagnation of the late 1980s, when I lived in Rome for two years. Italy today is being culturally rejuvenated by many factors, not the least of which is a greater openness towards the outside world, certainly one of the positive elements of globalisation.
Another important factor is the rising tide of disgust at the excesses of the Berlusconi government, which has galvanised a powerful mass opposition movement which is rapidly becoming more authoritative than the ineffective and discredited parliamentary opposition.
[Stephen Bennetts is researching the revival of popular traditions in the south of Italy. He is a former editor of the Indigenous Law Bulletin and Indigenous Law Reporter and has also worked as an anthropologist for the Central Land Council and other Aboriginal organisations in Central Australia. He will be in Italy until June next year. For the unabridged version of this article, contact Stephen at <bennetts@clio.it>.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 27, 2002.
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