Memories on the Move: The Italian Student Movement of 1977 between Local, National and Global Memories of Protest

Abstract

In December 2008, the following graffiti text appeared in a street in Bologna, a popular university city in the north of Italy: ‘Francesco and Alexis are alive!’ (Figure 13.1). The text was written beneath a glass plate which covers the bullet holes that serve as a painful reminder of the death of left-wing student Francesco Lorusso, killed by a police officer during clashes between students and police forces, on 11 March 1977. On 6 December 2008, a similar incident occurred in Greece, when 15-year old Alexandros ‘Alexis’ Grigoropoulos was killed by two policemen during riots in Exarchia, an Athens suburb with a high population of far-left activists and anarchist groups. Much like in Bologna, when the public prosecutor investigating Lorusso’s death ignored eyewitness accounts and other suggestions that the police officer had aimed at Lorusso’s body and had been in no real danger at the time of the shooting, the Greek police officers claimed they acted out of self-defence and did not aim at head height.¹ The graffiti text written under the glass plate in Bologna represents, then, a very clear re-activation of the collective memory of the Lorusso incident in the present. In the field of memory studies this phenomenon is referred to as ‘memory transfer’, which Ann Rigney defines as follows: ‘With the help of various media and memorial forms later generations recall things other people experienced, and do so from the conviction that those past experiences have something to do with the sense of “our history”‘.²