Riot Post

After class on Tuesday I went to Crudo, a restaurant and lounge to make reservations for my friend's birthday, which was Wednesday. I was walking back to St. Mary's (where we have class) when I suddenly noticed that I was surrounded by about 50,000 people (three hours of class makes me less than sharp). I also noticed that I was going in the direction they were going for the most part and that they had trucks blasting music, scarves over there faces, and outdated punk clothing.

It turns out that having a nifty scooter has another use than making you look cool. With a nifty scooter, you gotta have a nifty scooter helmet. Those nifty helmets can be (niftily) worn when rushing a line of carabinieri, who have night sticks and riot shields, both of which could otherwise inflict some not-so-nifty head wounds.

Basically, there was a short but intense battle on the street that St. Mary's is on. The protesters walked/ran forward with their hands up and the police just started beating them. There were a few associated press types taking pictures, but other than that people started to try to get out of the way of the violence. I somehow got locked in a cafe which was right in next to the carabinieri line. The owner was, quite understandably, freaking out. Everything in Rome has big metal storm-shutter type things which I now know are more for protection against riots than from the rather tame weather.

When the protesters retreated a little down the street, the cafe owner opened the side door and I walked out, almost running into a line of far more hardcore carabinieri on the side street, hidden from the crowd of protesters. The guys who had been in the mix earlier looked more like roughnecks. They just had blue shirts and blue helmets, and of course big night sticks. The more intimidating yet hidden carabinieri had like 12 nightsticks per man, guns, full padded riot gear, shields, and an extremely mean and fascist looking captain.

I sadly didn't have my camera, and I had the vague idea of doing work, so I popped into the St. Mary's library, got bored doing work there, and ended up going back to the Villa Bassi to get my camera. An hour later when I got back, the protest had unfortunately taken a more peaceful turn. It had moved mainy to Piazza Nuovona, and had been reduced to eating gelato, smoking cigarettes, and dancing to bad italian pop in front of police barriers (no punk!). I snapped this picture of the same somewhat evil looking captain, and went home. It turned out that the protest was due to some proposed reforms to the university system.

Chè pazzo!