Italy’s Young Protesters Return to the Streets

 

Oct. 24, 2026, 9:26 p.m. ETOct. 24, 2026

Josephine de La Bruyère

Reporting from Milan

Italy’s Young Protesters Return to the Streets

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Young people protested the rising cost of living in Milan on Saturday, a week after similar demonstrations in cities across northern Italy ended in violent clashes and looting. Credit...Yara Nardi/Reuters

Young people demonstrated across Italy on Saturday amid a heavy police presence to prevent the looting and violence that occurred during protests last weekend.

The demonstrations echoed student protests in France that have unleashed a nationwide groundswell of frustration there, sparking the country’s worst rioting in decades.

Italy’s marches on Saturday were largely peaceful, though protesters clashed with the police in Turin, Padua, Bologna and Rome, where a small group of demonstrators stormed the Colosseum. The police arrested just nine people nationwide and reported 87 to prosecutors, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

In Milan, the site of last week’s largest and most violent demonstrations, some 10,000 people hit the streets, the police estimated — five times as many as had marched the previous weekend.

Throngs of young people chanted about their frustration with the high cost of living and Italy’s political establishment. They held hand-drawn signs denouncing low wages, high rents, economic inequality and Italy’s financial support of Israel, whose war in Gaza is deeply unpopular with Italians.

Protesters said that the country’s sluggish job market and a government they saw as more focused on military spending than on investing in young people had set their generation up to fail.

“I look for work abroad every day of my life,” said Ilaria Carrozza, 27, a design engineer. “And that’s not fair: This is my country, I want to stay here. But I can’t live like this.”

Manfredi Cacioppo, a 26-year-old sales assistant from Sicily, said he was demonstrating in solidarity with truckers and farmers in southern Italy, who had recently blockaded roads and ports to protest high fuel prices caused by the war in Iran.

“It all comes from the same issue: money being spent on war,” he said. “That money would be better to invest in health, education, transport, the housing crisis and help for the workers.”

Last weekend’s demonstrations took Italy’s northern cities by surprise. In Milan, groups of masked young people set fires, looted stores and lobbed projectiles at the police, causing an estimated $1.1 million in damage, according to a local business association. Fifty-one people, most of them minors, were arrested.

Milan’s left-wing mayor accused the national police of “having underestimated the moment” and posting too few officers to the scene. Italy’s right-wing interior minister accused the mayor of pandering to the left.

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, called an emergency meeting on Monday and announced tougher penalties for violent protesters. A cabinet member, Matteo Salvini, said that the government would send 500 soldiers to Milan this weekend to “defend” the city against “criminals.”

On Saturday, army vehicles and police vans dotted many of Milan’s main squares, and numerous stores in the city’s shopping district boarded up their windows. Throughout the city, plainclothes police officers stopped groups of young people to check their identification documents.

For many protesters, the first challenge was figuring out where to go.

A social media account that helped organize the protests was supposed to post a meeting place at 2:30 p.m. But shortly before then, the Milan police said they had detained the account’s owner. The announcement never came.

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Protesters in Rome on Saturday.Credit...Remo Casilli/Reuters

That left many demonstrators unmoored. In bars and online chat rooms, they argued over where, and whether, to show up.

“We were lost and confused,” said Caterina Sironi, a 23-year-old university student. “We ran all over the whole city.”

Ruggero Lorenzi, 19 and a high school student, crisscrossed Milan on three trains and a tram in search of a demonstration. “On Telegram, on Instagram, in metro stations, everyone was fighting over where to go,” he said.

After several false starts — “ten people over here, ten people over there,” he said — he found about 500 protesters gathered near a subway stop in the city center.

As Mr. Lorenzi’s protest snaked through the city to the Politecnico di Milano, Milan’s oldest university, its ranks swelled.

Many protesters said they were eager to keep the demonstration peaceful, hoping their message would be heard. The police used tear gas and water cannons against protesters in other cities on Saturday, but not in Milan, where they reported that there had been no violence or damage.

“We’re trying to emulate the French protests,” said Joshua Flores, 21, who is unemployed. “I hope this protest continues in a positive way.”