Protesters clashed with police across Italy on Saturday and even briefly stormed the Colosseum in Rome; however, Giorgia Meloni’s government claimed that widespread disorder was prevented by the expanded powers granted to police, which enabled preventative detention and led to the arrest of one of the chief architects of the Milan riots.
The French-inspired protests in Italy continued on Saturday, yet the movements appeared to be less organised or capable of violence and destruction, with police taking a “decapitation” strategy of detaining top figures believed to be behind previous unrest.
According to Rome’s Il Messaggero newspaper, the ultra-left anarchist groups previously expected to stage insurrectionist riots were largely prevented from demonstrating. However, a loose-knit group of various left-wing student movements, described as “but only peripherally, to the insurrectionist movement” managed to stage a protest of around 2,500 people.
Although police largely prevented looting or significant damage to public or private property, around 500 protesters skirted law enforcement and breached the Colosseum, the 2,000-year-old amphitheatre in the heart of the Italian capital.
Police were forced to briefly use water cannons as the protest reached the Via Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, but thankfully there was not widespread violence or looting as was seen in Milan last weekend. Yet, some businesses were forced to close, and others shuttered their storefronts as the protest passed.
Meanwhile, around 10,000 protesters took to the streets in Milan. Il Giornale reportedthat “preventative checks decapitated the movement”, with police checking thousands ahead of the demonstration.
Notably, police in the Lombardy capital arrested the accused organiser of the so-called “October 17th Movement”, which is alleged to have been behind the Milan riots and looting last weekend as groups across Europe sought to emulate the unrest in France.
The suspect, Youssef Siher, is a 30-year-old Moroccan-heritage veteran of the pro-Palestinian movement in the city who also freelances as a journalist. He also earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of Milan.
According to Il Giornale, his thesis focused on Islamic movements in Morocco, and he previously studied the connections between 20th-century Islamic movements and the early iterations of political Islam. The paper also noted that in a 2023 social media post responding to a comment from Italian populist leader Matteo Salvini (now Deputy Prime Minsiter), Siher replied “Allah Akbar”.
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