This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, held in association with The New York Times, where experts gathered in the Greek capital last week to discuss global issues.
The teenagers arrived singing ballads of protest. With a young leader on a megaphone, dozens marched along the streets of Rome from their high school, into the historic Villa Borghese park.
“Pizza is on the way!” one yelled. But the students had gathered for a higher purpose: It was mid-September, the beginning of the school year, and this was the first weekly meeting of student collectives from two of Rome’s most politically mobilized high schools, Augusto Righi and Torquato Tasso.
Throughout Italy, the collectives are a longstanding fixture of urban high schools. Particularly at schools like Righi and Tasso in Rome’s center, the collectives routinely deploy a form of Italian civil disobedience: high school occupations, where students seize control and largely govern their schools themselves, often for a week a year, speaking out about politics and demanding educational reform.
“Within the collective, we don’t have any leaders as a deliberate challenge to the hierarchy of the school,” explained Lorenzo, a Righi student, as others grabbed slices of pizza. (Students’ last names have been withheld to protect their identities.)
The occupations, subject to a vote beforehand, are “a method developed by students, for students, to reimagine the school — using our environment to express our dissent, and to try to create change,” he added.
Students often sneak into their school at night, lock the doors and sleep inside, inviting speakers and sympathetic teachers to collaborate as they hold classes on what they deem missing from their curriculum, like current events, civic participation, sex education and emotional literacy. They draft lists of demands for improvements (which occasionally are met), cement friendships and political solidarity, and celebrate with the occasional party or concert.
If occupations sound far-fetched for teens still under their parents’ roof, the practice has been passed down over generations: an initiation to democratic engagement, tacitly condoned since the resistance movements of the 1960s.
Now, though, tolerance for such demonstrations is uncertain in Italy, students and free speech advocates said. As this scholastic year was getting underway, they said they feared repercussions following the Security Decree issued in June by the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The bill creates 14 new crimes, making some kinds of demonstrations punishable with up to two years in prison. Communal protests and even passive resistance in prisons and migrant centers have been criminalized, while occupying buildings now can result in jail sentences. The legislation also expands surveillance and police powers, while escalating punishments for minor crimes — equating petty offenses like pickpocketing and organized protests with security threats.
The implications of the decree are not yet fully clear. And protests have multiplied recently throughout Italy, with hundreds of thousands at times turning out, mostly in mass marches to condemn Israeli actions in Gaza and in support of Palestinians. On Oct. 3, amid a national strike, an estimated two million people participated in marches across the country, with a million or so turning out in Rome alone the following day — among them were throngs of students.
The largely peaceful marches were met with some instances of police using tear gas and clubbing protesters. Several schools were occupied, among them the University of Genoa, where arrests of protesters were threatened. But overall, arrests were relatively few, despite widespread blockades of roads and railways.
Neither Ms. Meloni nor Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi could be reached for comment. But after the bill passed, Ms. Meloni said in an interview published on the government’s website: “They accuse us of authoritarianism because of the Security Decree.” She went on, “It provides for tough penalties for those who block roads and railways to demonstrate. I don’t consider this to be preventing demonstrations because you can freely demonstrate without infringing on the rights of others.”
Mr. Piantedosi spoke in a video interview posted by Il Tempo, a newspaper based in Rome, about the right to occupy schools.
“The activism of young people and their interest in important issues are always a potential resource for society. I would be more concerned about a period of civic disengagement among our youth,” he said. “However, it seems doubtful to me that occupying places dedicated to the free and critical formation of thought and knowledge might be useful to a noble cause like peace. More specifically, it’s unclear how disrupting classes can alleviate the suffering of Palestinians.”
School occupations are not expected to be affected by the new law. A trail of legal precedent protects students as long as they occupy their own schools, don’t vandalize or damage property, and allow people in and out.
Yet worries remain. Legal experts warned that the decree may do more than rein in unruly protests. Alessandra Algostino, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Turin, called it “a law that shuts down democratic spaces — the spaces where protest and dissent are voiced, restricting freedom of expression and the right of assembly.”
After last week’s large protests, with few arrests, Ms. Algostino added, “With millions of people marching, mass participation was able to defeat the government’s repressive intent.”
Italy’s new legal restrictions on protests coincide with attempts to impose limits on speaking out in other constitutional democracies, with Germany enacting tighter restrictions on protests against Israel’s ongoing attacks in Gaza and Britain’s recent designation of the Palestinian Action protest group as a terrorist organization after an Israeli-owned arms factory was vandalized.
In the United States, the federal government has also deployed new tactics that critics say are meant to limit dissent, with National Guard units and armed federal agents deployed by the federal government to cities under the banner of confronting crime, immigration, protests and the deportation of visa-holding university students involved in demonstrations for Gaza.
Whatever the impact of Italy’s new laws, Righi and Tasso students meeting on that September day at the Villa Borghese said they had no plans to temper their activism.
“The values of our collective are antifascism, antiracism, transfeminism, environmentalism, and anticapitalism,” announced Emma to students assembled in the shade of the Villa Borghese’s umbrella pines. By the time the megaphone was passed around for speeches and action planning, more than 100 students from Righi and Tasso were seated in two big circles.
“The genocide of Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools and homes is being committed by Israel with direct support from Western nations, and Italy is a key supplier of weapons,” one student said, echoing others who spoke about Gaza and their own refusal to be silent or complicit.
“A movement is taking shape, and our hope is that it’ll be similar to what emerged with Vietnam — that the struggle will spark greater political awareness and consciousness, especially among students,” Emma said afterward. “The high school collectives are growing because of Palestine — because we’re witnessing a documented humanitarian emergency.”
To make the case for student activism, Elena Vocale, a 24-year-old from Turin and a leader of the International Youth Think Tank, spoke earlier this month at the annual Athens Democracy Forum, in association with The New York Times. The think tank’s signature project brings together 18- to 24-year-olds to forge a comprehensive manifesto of democratic proposals that they publish.
Meeting in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, participants asked that their names be withheld from the publication, fearing potential repercussions. “We think of the United States as a bastion of individual freedom and rights, but maybe it’s time to reconsider,” Ms. Vocale said in an interview ahead of the conference.
Young people “are considered lacking in experience or in sufficient knowledge, and their ideas are often dismissed as idealistic or naive,” she said in an interview ahead of the Athens conference. But, she added, “After all, bold ideas and ideals are what chart new directions.”
During the September day of student gatherings — this time at the Brancaleone cultural center in northern Rome — some Righi students joined students from the nearby Orazio high school to discuss the state of activism.
They agreed: schools are failing them, political parties lack ideas and their prospects in Italy are grim amid poor youth employment and environmental crises. Attempts by educational and governmental authorities to limit dissent were meant to stifle their efforts to challenge those conditions, they said.
One of the students, Flavia, remarked, “They focus on turning students into workers rather than into citizens or critical thinkers.”
Basically,” Paolo said, “they’re trying in every way possible to keep people quiet.”
The students had all occupied their schools in the past, but believed that such protests have grown riskier under the Security Decree, and that grades for conduct have recently been given far more weight in their academic records, which they feared would affect their futures.
“Schools should aim to educate students in a well-rounded way,” Alice told the students in the courtyard. “To possess political awareness and understand something of how the world works — that’s what ultimately makes you free.”
Josephine de La Bruyère, a reporter-researcher with The New York Times bureau in Rome, contributed reporting.
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