Italy’s real 1967
Italy is one of the few European countries where students did stage notable actions in 1967. The pattern was a series of occupations in several cities, beginning in the early months of the year and spreading in the autumn. The most famous confrontation, at Valle Giulia in Rome, happened on 1 March 1968, so it belongs to the following year.
Overcrowded universities
Italian universities in the 1960s had expanded quickly. Access had been widened by reforms, but facilities, teaching and staffing had not kept pace. Lecture halls were crowded, professors held very strong authority, and many students saw little connection between their degrees and later employment. The common ground of the movement became university reform demands, including a say in teaching and examination.
Italian politics added another layer. There was a strong Communist Party, a Catholic mainstream, a Socialist Party that had joined governing coalitions, and a neofascist presence in some universities. Students on the far left often criticised the established left as well as the government.
Paolo Rossi, April 1966
A key moment came before 1967. In April 1966, Paolo Rossi, a student at the architecture faculty in Rome, died after a confrontation at La Sapienza with right-wing students. The exact circumstances were disputed, and the case was debated for a long time afterwards, but his death provoked strong reactions across the Italian university world and led to protests and a period of unrest. It is often remembered as an early sign that a new student politics was forming, though one should not treat it as the single cause of what followed.
Early 1967: Pisa, Rome and elsewhere
In the early months of 1967, students occupied university buildings in several places. Pisa is usually mentioned first: students there occupied their university and produced a text, often called the Pisa theses, which criticised the university as a system serving the established order and called for a different relationship between students, teachers and society. It was influential among activists elsewhere in Italy.
In Rome, students occupied the architecture faculty in the same period, again linking campus demands to wider ideas about the role of architecture and planning. Other cities also saw occupations or strikes, and the movement was marked by assemblies and debates rather than by street fighting. The exact dates and the numbers involved in particular occupations vary between sources, and it is safer to say “early 1967” than to give a precise day.
Autumn 1967: Turin and Milan
The movement widened in the autumn. In November 1967, students occupied buildings at the University of Turin, notably at the Palazzo Campana, and at the Catholic University in Milan. The Milan case was notable because the institution was Catholic and was not normally seen as a centre of radicalism. In both places, students attacked fees, rules and authoritarian teaching, and the occupations were met with police intervention in some cases.
By the end of 1967, Italy had what amounted to a national wave of occupations. This was the real Italian 1967, and it was larger than the story of a single Roman clash.
Valle Giulia, 1 March 1968
The best-known episode took place on 1 March 1968, when students gathered near the architecture faculty at Valle Giulia in Rome. They had been evicted from the faculty building by police, and tried to retake it. Violence followed, and both police and students were injured, with arrests afterwards. The unusual feature was that the students resisted rather than simply retreating, and the episode has been remembered as a turning point in the Italian movement. Some commentators later pointed out that many of the police officers were themselves of modest social background, a point that drew wide discussion.
Valle Giulia opened a period of intense unrest in 1968, which fed into worker mobilisation in 1969, often called the “hot autumn”. These are later developments.
The wider ideas
Italian activists drew on several sources. There was the left tradition of workers’ politics, in which thinkers around the Italian operaist current argued that workers’ struggles were central. There was Catholic social thought, important in Milan. And there was an international mood, shaped by Vietnam, by the Cultural Revolution as it was imagined in China, and by figures such as Che Guevara, whose death in October 1967 made him a youth icon.
Not every student shared these ideas, and the movement had many tendencies. What united them in 1967 was mainly the demand for change in how universities worked, not a single revolutionary programme.
Keeping the dates straight
To summarise: Rossi’s death was in April 1966; occupations began in early 1967 in Pisa and Rome, among other places; Turin and Milan followed in November 1967; and Valle Giulia was on 1 March 1968. The sequence matters because Italy is sometimes treated as a mere echo of Paris in May 1968. In fact its student movement had started earlier: Italian students were occupying buildings before the Nanterre campus in France became a stage, and well before the May 1968 strikes, so by then they had already experienced more than a year of occupations.