'More work! Less pay!'

In the mid-1970s, a long wave of contentious radicalism swept through Italy. ‘Proletarian youth’, ‘metropolitan Indians’, ‘the area of Autonomy’: a shifting galaxy of groups and movements practised new forms of activism. Factories and universities were occupied; rent and utility payments were withheld; neo-Fascists and drug pushers were attacked on sight. The movements were at once creative and brutal, intransigent and playful. A particular target for mockery was the parliamentary Left, and abov