Commentary. On that day, the demonstration didn’t just take over a few large squares: it took over Milan.

written by Andrea Colombo

Topic Italy

March 29, 2024

It was a demonstration against fascism, of course, with all the fitting slogans, appropriately imaginative, and the mandatory Bella Ciao, but with a rap beat and with the lyrics slightly changed: “O, partisan, take them away” – free us from the nightmare of still-avowed neo-Fascists in the majority and soon to be in government, from the Lega who had already taken Milan and were becoming popular all over the north, and from the artificial party which was the personal property of an industrialist for whom the word “controversial” was a serious understatement, and who, less than a month before, had taken 21 percent of the vote. Less than a point above the PDS, but enough to make it the most voted political force in Italy.

But above all, it was a demonstration against despondency and resignation. The former was rampant. The second was looming.

We had seen them coming: we just hadn’t realized how many there were. To suddenly see the MSI as Italy’s third-largest party, an integral part of a winning alliance, while its leader Fini was calling Benito Mussolini “the greatest statesman of the century” without even a hint of euphemism, was beyond the limits of the imaginable: the world really had turned upside down and it seemed to have done so almost in an instant.

We had a newspaper that we had never thought of as just an information medium, however alternative, but had always seen as an instrument of struggle: “an original subject of politics” in the words of Luigi Pintor, “a privateer ship” in those of Valentino Parlato.

We had just revamped it: in a different format, much more supple. Editor Pintor and deputy Pierluigi Sullo, who had come up with the idea, had wanted it that way not only in order to raise the circulation numbers, but, most importantly, to make it more combative and incisive, more appropriate to a phase that we knew was decisive for the country’s future.

And so, who else than us would be able to summon the entire left in disarray, call........

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