FLORENCE – “I don’t trust newspapers: is it possible that every day they manage to fill the pages with words right down to the last line?” asked the protagonist of an old joke. And judging by yesterday’s newspaper headlines, she wasn’t entirely wrong.
This was precisely the case on Sunday 28 April, in the middle of the bridge between Liberation Day and May 1st. In the Florentine editorial offices illuminated by the warm rays of a sunny afternoon, not even the shadow of a piece of news. Lackluster atmosphere. “Guys, come on! What will be published tomorrow?” asks the service manager. A young collaborator, from the back of the hall, proposes to give news of the demonstration that took place on Saturday through the city streets, from Novoli to the Cascine park. It’s the street parade, organized by girls and boys from Wish Parade Collective to protest against the anti-rave law, the one approved a year and a half ago by the newly installed Meloni Government, which equates the organization of an unauthorized musical event with the crime of manslaughter in criminal sanctions: up to eight years in prison.
In your opinion, yesterday’s newspapers had headlines about the reasons for the political protest demonstration, attended by around 10,000 young people who flocked to Florence from all over Italy? Imagine, the terms used in the titles were “angry Florentines”, “inferno”, “movida”, “controversy”, “residents’ protests” and “rave”. Have the organizers been interviewed? Nisba. The inhabitants of the neighboring neighborhoods and a president of the Neighborhood Council were interviewed, who condemned the authorization to demonstrate granted by the Police Headquarters in compliance with the most basic constitutional rights.
The demonstration lasted beyond the agreed times, the kids didn’t swarm away and the music resonated until dawn on Sunday. A bit like those happenings of the beat generation in America in ’68, which so inspired the European left. But the Florentine progressives are now mostly over fifty, bourgeois and right-thinking, often pensioners who go to bed early even on Saturday evenings. They just want to sleep. And since they constitute the soft electoral base of the Democratic Party, the Florentine elected representatives cannot disappoint them.
For goodness sake, nothing will happen. The party is over and Monday’s pages filled. Without the slightest capacity for journalistic analysis, we do not demand politics, but at least on a technical level. In fact, no one has asked themselves why so many protests over the noise on Saturday night and not when demonstrations are taking place in the same Cascine park, certainly authorized, but which in terms of musical technology far exceed the sound emission (measured in decibels) produced by the vans improvised street parade.
After all, the boys of the Wish Parade Collective they don’t read the newspapers and this morning those pages from yesterday on the stalls of food markets they will have already been put to other uses.
