The other night I was walking home from downtown Florence, my usual route, nothing out of the ordinary. As I'm walking, I notice a large group of people walking towards me waving flags as well as bright flashing lights. At first it seemed to be some kind of parade or something, but as I got closer, I started noticing that people were wearing bandanas over their faces, the flags had the communist symbol on them, and store owners were closing down their shops. I was obviously a little taken back by the situation, but continued on. As I'm walking through this huge crowd, I see news reporters talking into tape recorders and people taking pictures. No one was giving me a hard time, I got a few weird looks, but I just smiled and kept walking!
After I got through this first crowd of people, I realized that the bright flashing lights that I saw earlier were actually police lights. Standing about 20 yards in front of me was a row of police with their plastic sheilds up and batons drawn; they spand the entire width of street, from building to building. I shimmied my way through the "front lines" and was greated by pretty much every cop the state of Tuscany could scrounge up. Police buses, cop cars, fire trucks, and pretty much everything else you can think of littered the streets. When I finally made it to the outter part of the city, the traffic was horrible!!! Cars couldn't go anywhere because the authorities had barracaded all of the interesections. I couldn't get home because of this. It took me about 15 minutes before one of the cops let me through the streets. I wish that I would have taken pictures of the situation, but I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible. What is normally a 15 minute walk, took about an hour!
When I got home, I asked my family what was going on... Alessandra explained to me that the police heard there was going to be a manifestation of the Communist and Fascist groups and that there might be a riot. In an attempt dissolve the situation, the police blocked all the roads and increased the number of patrols on the streets. Despite the efforts to prevent this situation, apparently the Communist group somehow managed to form and cause quite a bit of disturbance.
The next day, there wasn't anything in the newspaper about the situation except that it caused traffic. Luckily it wasn't that big of a deal. There is, however, quite a bit of political instability in Italy right now, so there might be more to come. I'll keep you posted!
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