Piazza: from the Latin platĕa_, from the Greek_ plateía_, derivative of_ platús “Wide, wide”.
Or even in journalistic language, the people considered as opposed to rulers or institutions.
The Milanese photographer Dino Fracchia, born in 1950, has been crossing the squares for fifty years. Mainly in his city, Milan, but also in Genoa during the 2001 G8 or in Caorso in the 1980s, when the anti-nuclear movement was growing in Italy.
Now his archive has been collected in the book In the square, anger and passion (Edizioni Interno4) with one hundred photographs taken in the squares from the seventies to today, to form a long journey through the history of Italian protest movements.
From the workers’ protests in the early seventies, “when the proletarians would have found the number, the strength, the ability to rebel against the city-factory and its hundreds of clocks that mark the time of endless work and the time of restricted life”, as Primo Moroni wrote in the book Ca ‘Lusca, we pass, all naked, to the Lambro park in Milan in 1976 during the festival of the youth proletariat organized by the magazine Re Nudo – one of the main Italian magazines dedicated to counterculture – and then we arrive in the squares of the feminists, who taking the public space finally from the private sphere.
Even in the eighties, when everything seems over, Fracchia still follows the traces of the revolt in the squares and finds them in the protests against nuclear power plants and, in the nineties and two thousand, in the occupied social centers.
And today? Even today that being in the square seems emptied of meaning and “political action is felt as something impossible, not because it is forbidden but because it is ineffective, without result, emptied of all concreteness”, as Daniele Giglioli writes in his book State of minority, Fracchia accompanies the reader among the young people of Fridays for future and among those who lost their jobs during the pandemic.
“The dream is still there. In the eyes of those who find themselves in a large room where chairs are less than people and the writings on the walls are revolutionary haiku. In the hands that fill bags with packs of pasta and games for children, who draw flags, which scroll quickly on a keyboard. The possible dream, a new world ”, writes the activist Xina Veronese in Fracchia’s book. “It grows undeterred there. Where struggles are organized, where rights are embraced, where victims of injustices are welcomed ”.
Maysa Moroni
.