Pino Corrias: “Leoncavallo will be reborn”

This entry is posted on number 36 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until September 2, 2025

There is no longer the Leoncavalloas per the police order number of such as such, cleared after the last mid -August in a deserted Milan, except for the 300 anti -Somemossa agents mobilized at dawn and employed for the blitz, with very secret urgency, not even a phone call to the mayor Beppe Sala that was badly remained: “I knew nothing about it”. Obvious. Because the legality of a government in perennial punitive expedition Against the rave and social centers, a little less against the fascist CasaPound of Rome, he has his pedagogical rites that a left -wing mayor would not understand.

Not even the mosquitoes and the pigeons knew, awakened with a start, while with the shears of the law they jumped the locks of the Leoncavallo and the empty halls of its history were wide open who actually filled half a century of lights and metropolitan shadows. Leonka is part of Milanthe one not yet compliant with the skyscraper and its polished mirror aesthetic. To his lounge bar. And to his Ztl groups: only the saved admitted, for all the others the fine.

There will be a protest procession on September 6th. A former factory will be found, the social impatience that Leoncavallo has accepted, and sometimes addressed, in so many decades of counterculture and political antagonism exercised as progenitor of the social centers scattered in Italy, will be compatible with the order, often creative compensation chambers in the void of the neighborhoods.

For many years it was boiled with anger and relaxation at Leoncavallo, Okkupato in the year of grace 1975, half a century ago, an abandoned warehouse, which was made of a pair of halls, a courtyard, many chipped walls that the boys named the musician of the homonymous street, that of Strawbut also to the fantastic animal that the poets call Chimera, who came to ride right there, among the mists of popular coinage in a Milan that was of anger and revolt, of solitudes and new loves that in that self -managed space met, perhaps at the concert of the 99 posses. At the recital of Paolo Rossi. To the lesson of political theater of Dario Fo and Franca Rame.

Three times it was cleared. Even with clashes and tear gas. On the third lap, its last location, 31 years ago, more or less in the season of the Pantera and the employed universities. Always following the political seasons of youth movements, his laughter, his lifestyles, his aesthetic languages ​​passed through the scratch to the tattoo, passing through grunge, tolerance for marijuana, beer at a political price, neighborhood struggles against the scholar of the heroine.

Much was practiced in there: Italian courses for immigrants, feminist collectives, workshops for children, music school. It is likely that the employment ritual is out of time, as youth is, minority in a country for old people. An agreement with the Municipality will be found. Leoncavallo will be reborn. Even anger these days need a social address and contract.

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Source: Vanity Fair

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