From Leoncavallo to Spin Time, from Milan to Rome to the South: over 200 social centers occupy properties illegally between anarchy, politics and institutional connivances.
Next to the slogans of the radical left, to the rainbow murals and the posters of Che Guevara a narrative from a cultural forge that reaches the peak of propaganda in branches for migrants, in popular canteens and in the spaces for those who do not have a roof. Here the toughest ideologies resist, the Oltranzistist positions masked by pacifism are fueled, wake culture spreads with its equipment of asterisks and Schwa.
The retrobottega of extreme militancy
It is not the good living room of civil society: it is the retrobottega in which the most extreme militancy is formed. And, under the patina of inclusion and investee assemblies, in most cases the vein of the anarcho-insurrectionalism is hidden: the belief that the state is an enemy, that the conflict is inevitable and that violence is a legitimate tool. This is where i social centers They become the crossroads of across -the -year languages and practices: among the flyers against multinationals and anti -police processions, the same hard core always remains, the one that does not accept dialogue or compromise, but cultivates the struggle as a permanent political horizon and a system based on illegal occupation and the refusal of the rules.
Milan and the Leoncavallo case
In Milan, on an asphalt line that runs to via Watteau, Leoncavallo has made school: 50 years of employment, 133 attempts at eviction never performed and millions of euros of compensation paid by the state to the owners. It was the longest illegal tolerated occupation of Italy that someone would like to pass for a romantic social and aggregative activity. On August 21, Camponette and Consanne returned to the Cabassi, the legitimate owners, their barracks. The newspapers have recorded the government’s tightness. Left and environmentalists took sides with the former occupants (an electoral basin) who thanks to the Municipality immediately found a new location.
The Lambretta and the occupations in Milan
But in the city where tolerance has often turned into support there are no only goodbyes: the Lambretta, after 12 years in via Edolo, found a house, without a race, in a former 300 square meter supermarket in via Rizzoli 13, thanks to a municipal assignment for 18 years to the Mutual Aid Association with the Formula of the Suentro after the renunciation of the previous contracting. And it was officially divided in March 2025. The 23 occupations officially surveyed in the capital only (there are 25 throughout Lombardy, with a case in Bergamo and one in Cremona) return the most clear photography of the phenomenon. Walking through the city just follow the writings on the walls to census the hot points. Each building is a conflict placeholder. It is not a map that can be brought out with a simple online search. To know how many social centers there are in Italy you have to dig.
126 Anarcho-antagonist occupations
As many as 126 active occupations, which Panorama has managed to reconstruct, belong to the anarcho-antagonist area, the most nourished, and are the result of the intersection of dozens of information of the police headquarters, periodic reports to the prefectures, of updates that end up on the wiminal’s desks. It is a list that changes constantly, because every week there is an occupation that dies and another that is born, a center that moves from one building to another, an association that presents itself with a new face. Without that crossing of cards and relationships, the numbers dance. But they are not the only ones. The second block is linked to suburban culture. It is about thirty structures in everything. They are realities that are not born for the cult of the barricade but for neighborhood needs or youth scene. The social center occupied Forte Prenestino in Rome, a former military forte occupied since 1986, for example, is one of the largest self -managed spaces in Europe. More cultural than ideological: concerts, theater, comics, bio markets.
Rome, capital of occupations
Activists profess themselves “anti” everything: anti -fascists, antisessites, anti -racists and antiprobationists. Like level 57 in Bologna: occupied in 1993 in the area of the former general markets, it is an electronic music center. Then there are about twenty centers occupied by home movements. Spin time in Rome is one of the most concrete examples. Occupied in 2013, it is a ten -storey concrete giant and 21 thousand square meters, former headquarters of the APDAP. It is stormed and occupied by the Action Movement for the right to living. It is not an isolated gesture, but the long wave of what in the city call the “tsunami tour”: the season of the barricades of those who do not have the house and those who claim it as a right. Here in 2019 the alms of Pope Francis, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, went to reattach the meters that had been sealed by the supplier, leaving his business card to sign the gesture. Today Don Mattia Ferrari, chaplain of the Mediterranean NGO Saving Humans of the former white suit Luca Casarini often attended him. Rome is however the center of gravity of the phenomenon: 48 mapped occupations, all in the municipality. Many are attributable to the anarcho-antagonist area. On balance, therefore, also including the two right -wing occupations, CasaPound in Rome and Libero Cervantes in Catania, there are about 200 social centers that have applied illegally of a property. Anarcho-antagonists, however, can also count on a protective cord that ranges from politics to the Church. And some are considered “historical”, like Leoncavallo. In Padua there is the Pedro, named after the “companion” Pietro Greco, whose death was mythmed by the veterans of workers’ autonomy which 38 years ago occupied a local disused warehouse in municipal property in via Ticino, in the western suburbs of the city (the Northeast is a minute map, with three occupations in Veneto, two in Padua and one in Venice).
Tuscany, Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna
In Florence there is the Self -managed Popular Center CPA Firenze Sud which for 36 years and continues to say no to any compromise: 24 attempts to regularize burnt on the negotiation table. A granitic consistency, which activists call “resistance” but which actually resembles a position income. Throughout Tuscany there are nine occupations: five in Florence, two in Livorno and one in Pisa. Turin holds together seven occupations and two particular stories: askatasuna, with the path of administration shared on the property of Corso Regina 47 thanks to the wink of the municipal eye and despite the children of the tradition of the Turin worked autonomy, they ended up several times in the center of very heavy judicial investigations, and El Paso, of Radice Punk, who hosted Fugazi, Youth of Today, Negration, Pexing Names for the International hardcore enthusiasts. In Emilia-Romagna the guarantees also arrived judicially. The eviction of Làbas from the former Masini barracks (8 August 2017) gave birth to a jurisprudence: Tar and Council of State canceled the attempt to resign the employed premises. The region on the official map marks two occupations (both in Parma). This is also a fact that surprises. Bologna remains the historical capital of social centers, but does not end in the count. Liguria presents three cases: two in Genoa and one in La Spezia.
From the south to the unwritten pact
A single social center in the Marche. The capital of the phenomenon in the South is Naples: 15 occupations that punctuate port and popular neighborhoods, from the historic workshop 99, the secular cathedral of southern counterculture, to the new youth centers that organize music reviews and solidarity canteens. Palermo and Catania put together seven spaces in which the border between cultural laboratory and political garrison is thin. Puglia, with its three cases, has seen born centers that network with the world of university and precariousness, while Calabria, Abruzzo and Sardinia host small but fierce local experiences, one for each region, which resist evictions with a constancy that also surprises the police headquarters. Many administrators prefer to tolerate: the occupants vote, they are number to the primaries, move consensus. It is an unwritten pact for what holds the system standing.
