Where Is Culture in Rome? - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 231

tual aid societies and case del popolo (“houses of the people) (Cecchi et al. 1978),
which were linked to the socialist movement and the creation of communes by
the anarchist movement. The compound noun social center was already in use
in italy in the 1950s, though at that time it denoted organizations run by mu-
nicipalities to provide social assistance (ibba 1995). The first generation of italian
social centers dates back to the mid-1970s. They were founded in milan, an indus-
trial city which at the time was experiencing a brutal transition to post-fordism
through the dismantling of many of its factories (Cecchi et al. 1978, balestrini
and moroni 1997). in milan, as well as in turin later on, the growth of social
centers was prompted by the need for alternative political meeting places in a
period when the economic role of factories was declining. The peculiarity of the
Roman movement was instead its strong presence in “traditional” public spaces,
neighborhoods, piazzas, and schools.
at the end of the 1970s, the antagonistic movement including autonomia
and other organizations came under heavy attack from reactionary forces and
the coalition of Christian Democrat and italian Communist parties (melucci
1996). hundreds of people were put in jail or prosecuted without cause, and at
the beginning of the 1980s, the movement underwent a crisis. few of the social
centers set up in the 1970s were still in existence after 1979, and those few opted
for a lower profile of political action, rarely attracting the attention of the popu-
lation or the media. Three major developments took place in the 1980s, though,
which contributed to the rebirth of social centers. The first was a network of radio
stations, bookshops, and political collectives which had been set up in the 1970s
and continued their activities in the 1980s. in Rome, Radio onda Rossa (still on
air, fm 87.9), Radio proletaria (now Radio Città aperta, fm 88.9), Radio Città
futura (now linked to the Democratic party, fm 97.7), and the Via dei Volsci
political group of autonomia kept a climate of confrontation alive (e.g., antinuke
struggles).1 The second was the mobilization of high school students in 1985 in
an attempt to build new forms of political opposition. The punk movement was
the third important force behind a fresh squatting campaign which gave birth to
second-generation social centers in the 1980s.
what is a self-managed social Center?
each social center has its own history and political tendency, which makes it very
difficult to generalize about this heterogeneous phenomenon spread through-
out italy and in many metropolitan areas (Dines 1999). however, it is possible to
argue that they mutated from mere physical places of social aggregation into a
symbol, a label to classify a social group (adinolfi et al. 1994; ibba 1995; montagna
2006), developing a number of common traits whose analysis may also clarify the
differences between them.
most social centers were created through squatting or, in a few cases, by oc-
cupying sites assigned to them by the local municipal government at no cost. a