Italian journalist Andrea Joly shared his experience on Monday after being attacked by combative neofascists in Turin on Saturday night.
Andrea Joly, a reporter for La Stampa newspaper, was passing in front of a party hosted by the neofascist group CasaPound in Turin in northern Italy when he saw smoke bombs and fireworks and decided to record the scene with his phone.
According to La Stampa’s report and the video footage, two men from the extremist group approached Joly asking who he was and demanding that he hand over his phone. They then kicked him as he tried to get away, causing injury that required hospital treatment.
“I was afraid of being strangled, I couldn’t breathe,” Joly explained in a video published Monday on La Stampa’s website. “I was simply doing my job,” he said. “It could have happened to any curious citizen, and that’s what scares the most.”
The Turin police on Sunday identified the two attackers as militants with the CasaPound group. They face charges of causing bodily harm and facilitating an organization promoting “discrimination or ethnic, national, racial or religious hatred,” ANSA reported.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Sunday condemned the attack as “unacceptable” and offered her solidarity with the journalist. “The government is paying maximum attention,” she said according to La Repubblica.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani also deplored the attack in a posting on X, saying there is “too much violence and intolerance in Italy against those who don’t think like you.”
Opposition leaders called for the dissolution of CasaPound. “What else are we waiting for before neofascist organizations are dissolved, as the constitution says?” Elly Schlein, leader of the center-left Democratic Party, asked in a post on Facebook.
Carlo Calenda, leader of the centrist party Azione, called CasaPound as “a fascist organization in method and substance, for too long pampered, protected and justified by a part of the Italian right.”
“The alarm bells about some anti-democratic drifts in our country have already sounded several times,” said Giuseppe Conte, president of the 5Star Movement. “It is up to politicians and sane forces to intervene to put an end to these delirious revivals of arrogance and violence.”
The attack on Joly was the second episode of apparently hate-motivated violence in Italy in recent days. A gay couple was beaten up by three men and a woman in Rome on Friday.
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