Even this new year begins with the same old black shadows from the past. On the 7th of January takes place in Rome in the Tuscolano suburb, precisely in Acca Larentia street, a commemoration of two far-right militants of the Youth Front, killed on that day of 1978 during the action of a radical left group. Indeed the demonstration is mainly an official excuse, in order to organize a sort of paramilitary parade with fascist salutes and dictatorship apology. The poster of the event also shows an imperial eagle on the top conveying the typical rhetoric of the regime.
Hundreds of far-right members, mainly of Casapound Italy rally on the street, holding out their arms at the “present” ceremony and showing nostalgic banners with celtic crosses and other extremist symbols. For this year the neofascist organization CPI even scheduled a ‘National Council’ before the demonstration, with the aim of monopolizing the recurrence within the ‘black galaxy’ as an appointment of their own organization.
Acca Larentia has represented for years, amid a thousand controversies and protests also by the residents of the area, a “liturgical” moment in the calendar of the Italian far-right: like the memory of Sergio Ramelli in Milan. Besides that, it has in the last two years become a pretext and occasion for violence and threats against journalists. In 2019 – as the National Observatory on the new rights recalls – former militants of the National Avant-garde and Forza Nuova attacked a journalist and a photographer from Espresso.
In this regard, it should be remembered that even CasaPound, which considers itself “heir of fascism”, is under investigation in Bari for attempted reconstitution of the fascist party and for violence. And that in Rome the so-called ‘black turtles’ have continued to occupy illegally a building owned by the State Property for 18 years.
No authority intervened to prevent the manifestation of clear fascist propaganda, while the former partisans’ association (ANPI) asks to prevent similar offensive demonstrations and to follow the French example which, with a decree of the council of ministers, banned the “Les Zouaves Paris” group for incitement to hatred and political violence.
The latter is only the latest political act of a government against neo-fascist drifts, after the dissolution of Generation Identitaire in March 2021. Despite the numerous attacks and demonstrations that are apologetic of fascism, FN and CPI have not yet been banned in Italy; while in addition to the French cases, there is the process of banning Golden Dawn in Greece in October 2020, or Combat 18 banned in Germany in January 2020, following the killing by far-right terrorists of the CDU politician Walter Lübcke.
More recent facts concern the clashes between CPI and the police during an eviction of one of the neofascist groups ‘futurist club’ which illegally occupied in Casalbertone suburb of Rome. On the 20th of January early in the morning tens of CPI members, alerted previously about the police operation, let themselves be found lined up with sidearms and helmets, ready to confront the agents in riot gear. CPI launched smoke bombs and charged, an effort in which two officers were injured and were taken to hospital. Luca Marsella, a former councillor in Ostia for the so-called “Fascists of the Third Millennium”, has been stopped as leader of the violent action.