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Italy's Cultural Underground

by Adam Bregman    

Some are draped with spectacular works of art, while others provide shelter and services for new immigrants. For many young people, especially in small and medium-sized towns, social centers provide an ideal hangout, which is the only alternative to expensive, sleazy discos.

The movement began in 1975 when some radical communists snuck into a dilapidated building in a poor neighborhood of Milan, cleaned the place up and issued a manifesto stating what they hoped to accomplish. The neighborhood lacked a preschool, kindergarten, library, vocational school, medical clinic and spaces for organizing meetings and concerts. They invited city officials and the local population to their social center, called Leoncavallo, where they eventually opened a carpentry workshop, a sewing school, a theater and other facilities. Leoncavallo, Italy’s first and most famous social center, has been shut down and forced to move locations several times. Today it is a giant structure covered with magnificent graffiti, containing a concert room, a disco, a skateboard ramp, a documentation center to help immigrants and several bars. The folks who run it are into hip-hop (which is still yet to hit it big in Italy) and Public Enemy chose to play there recently rather than a traditional concert venue.

During the ’80s, the social center movement was spurred by punk rock and in the ’90s the rave scene was a prominent influence. Currently, Italy has approximately 150 social centers, but there is a basic philosophy that governs almost all of them.

“Social centers are supposed to be open to any form of expression,” says Andrea Borgioli, a university student with dyed black hair and shaved eyebrows who digs Marilyn Manson and Korn and can’t find anyone who will rent him an apartment in Bologna because of how he looks. “Like if I wanted to do an exhibition somewhere else, I would need lots of money, but I could go to a social center and they would let me do it for free and anyone can go there and do whatever kind of art they want.”

Unlike anything else in Italy, social centers are also supposed to be open all the time to provide a refuge for anyone who needs a place to sleep or just somewhere to go, though often they are closed for security reasons or because no one is around. Distinct from practically any other place one would go to have fun, social centers are nonprofit, anticapitalist entities. The social center movement was mostly given form by communists. (Communists in Italy range from your typical jargon-spouting Marxist-Leninists to what most of the world would more accurately call socialists, and from a major political party that still uses the hammer and sickle as its symbol—but more closely resembles the United States’ Democratic Party—to young, radical communists who occupy buildings and create social centers.) Their anticapitalist tradition means that most social centers use any profits from events to pay their minimal expenses or to help their comrades who have been arrested. At most social centers, entry to a concert or rave is $3, beer or drinks, maybe $1 and food, probably free. But more recently, a number of social centers, like Link in Bologna, have strayed from these basic ideals.

“Link is not an occupied place,” says Lorenzo Costa, a literature student who lives in the hilly countryside just outside of Siena. “They managed to have Link given to them by the mayor. Artistically, it’s quite interesting. In all Europe it is known and as far as music and video, it’s done very well. But even though they try to remain in contact with the movement, everyone knows it is not a social center.” The often ill-spoken-of Link charges a whopping $8 for concerts and raves.

Social centers are free autonomous zones where the government and police have no jurisdiction and where folks should feel free to indulge in whatever they like, a stark contrast to the hundreds of ridiculous laws that apply to any sort of entertainment-related business in America.

“Inside you can use drugs, but not sell them,” says Borgioli, “which is not because of problems with the police or for the safety of the social center, but for social, idealistic reasons, because they don’t want someone to get rich selling drugs to everyone and exploiting people. At the same time, they want people to be free to do what they want.” This freedom means that at many of the smaller social centers, almost any band can set up its own gigs. Also, travelers can usually find a free place to crash.

Though sometimes tolerated, social centers are, of course, illegal in Italy and so they are often scattered on the edges of town. In my travels, I spent numerous hours unsuccessfully trying to locate social centers by foot and by car. One evening in Florence, I spent many hours circling around Parco delle Cascine, a huge, scary park populated mostly by Brazilian transvestite hookers. I was searching for L’Indiano, a social center that is the hub of the local techno/house music scene, but was not able to find it. In Genoa, I walked across half the length of the city, through dark, narrow, snakelike streets which live up to their seedy reputation, only to find that my destination, the social center Zapata, was on top of a mountain and unreachable. On a particularly bad night in Turin, I walked miles to Prinz Eugen (a social center known for publishing some excellent books), where they turned off the light and pretended they weren’t there when I knocked. So I decided to walk to the other side of town to Asilo Occupato, where I was greeted by a mustachioed French guy in a turtleneck and two dopey-looking Mohawked guys (one immediately antagonistic), who told me they didn’t, as a policy, speak with journalists. I tried to explain that I was down with their cause, whatever that might be. But the mustachioed fellow told me I could try and come back the next day and there might be someone who lived there who would talk to me, but probably not, and that in general, Turin’s squatters would not speak with journalists.

This proved not to be true. In fact, these were the only unfriendly social center folks I met. The next day I hopped on a tram which dropped me off way in the south of the city at the doorstep of Turin’s renowned anarchist social center, El Paso, which is housed in an 18th century villa and has been around for 12 years. A little nervous about knocking on the door, I hung out by the back door next to a 20-foot-tall metal monster made from mufflers and scooter parts. Soon, a girl emerged from the door and invited me inside and a fellow who spoke a little English and had lived there for 12 years gave me a tour. The interior was magnificent. There was a handmade metal fireplace, a concert hall where a bunch of big-name touring acts had played (including their friends Mano Negra, who had drawn a crowd of thousands), a loft with a pool table and an infoshop packed with anarchist propaganda, records, videos and porn magazines. Outside, there was a garden with a homemade swing and a front yard piled with salvaged metal, old signs and 50 giant wooden doors. But what really blew me away was the bathroom next to the bar, which was a folk art masterpiece. It had gorgeous iron lamps made from pipes, a stone sink, and a homemade piss trough and it was completely decorated in colorful, intricate, Gaudi-like tiling.

I also visited a couple of small-town social centers. While Milan has approximately 19 active social centers and Rome about 27, you can also find social centers across the whole of Italy in towns such as Verona, Bergamo, Arezzo, Alessandria, Ravenna and Asti. I found one that was recently occupied in Lucca, an attractive Tuscan town situated behind towering medieval walls. Just outside of the walls, is Ex-Safill, which is currently housed in an old aluminum factory and is run by a group of young radicals who have been kicked out of three other locations in several months. Their main activities include conferences on a lot of the usual social center topics (Chiapas, Kurdistan, the Palestinians, the WTO protests in Seattle and of course, Mumia Abu-Jamal) and large-scale dub, breakbeat, funk and house concerts, which have drawn up to 500 people.

Lorenzo Costa spent most of his college years deeply involved with the social center movement in Bologna. Somewhat of an expert on the subject, Costa explained to me how difficult it is for many social centers to survive.

“When we wanted to open a social center, we would look for places that are closed down and often places that were owned by the city. For the first month we’d sleep inside, because you don’t know if the police are going to throw you out. Sometimes, you’d get thrown out the next day. One time we occupied this very beautiful place that had been a monastery and a school and had been closed for 12 years. We had a guy who went around to radio stations reading a document explaining why we had occupied the place and inviting people to come down. A few hours later, we had 200 people. This was a real nice period where there was a real movement, but it eventually fell apart because of problems with the police and divisions in the city between various groups.”

Borgioli, the Marilyn Manson fan, is up on what’s currently happening in Bologna, one of Italy’s communist strongholds. “This year for the first time a guy was elected for mayor who belongs to the center-right party and he immediately closed all the social centers and they stayed shut for months and then one by one they started to reopen. To keep them closed, he would have had to keep the police in front of them every day, which would be impossible.”

Compared to how things would go down with the police in any city in the U.S., police in Italy generally show a lot of restraint when it comes to social centers. Other times, they act like the L.A.P.D. on a mildly bad day.

“Sometimes, they just break down the door and smash everything they find inside,” says Costa. “They even write fascist slogans on the walls. One time, they went into a computer room and pissed on all the computers. The things that they don’t ruin, they take away. You can ask for them back, but nobody does because they take down your name and then it’s sure that you’ll be accused of occupying the place.”

One of Italy’s most important social centers, CPA in Florence, is in imminent danger of being bulldozed for a shopping mall. A former factory which has been squatted for 11 years and which contains a large concert hall, a movie house, a sound stage, a skate park, a gym, a basketball court and a darkroom, CPA will be replaced by Coop, a large supermarket chain which was started by the former Communist Party. The politically active punks who run CPA (and publish a fine, monthly newspaper, Communicazione Antagonista) plan to fight their eviction, but they are up against powerful, greedy leftists and communists who could care less about a thriving autonomous community which doesn’t generate profits for them or anyone else.

However, Italy’s social centers, which the French newspaper Le Monde called “the Italian cultural jewel,” continue to expand. Though many European countries have squatters’ movements and some left-leaning governments are tolerant of them, only Germany’s squats, which are not nearly as abundant or diverse, in any way compare to the scene in Italy. Of course, in the U.S. there is no such movement to speak of. There have been squatters’ movements on the East Coast in New York and Philadelphia, but they have been invariably smashed to pieces by the police. Is America tolerant enough to ever let young people have control of public space to do with what they wish? Probably not. But before that ever happens, there will have to be a consensus among young people that they want to have control over their own lives and their own hangouts. And there will have to be an organized movement to achieve those goals.

Until then, go to Italy and check out some real democracy.


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