Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has won what looks like a significant victory in her quest to eradicate squatting. About 250 carabinieri and police officers took possession this week of a former paper mill in Milan which had been occupied by numerous groups of squatters for 31 years.

The 4,000 square metre building was a citadel of far-left extra-parliamentary politics and culture, and also of loud late-night music and hard drug abuse. The parliamentary and mainstream left, meanwhile, were and remain, complicit.

Fourteen governments and four Popes came and went but an ever-changing cast of protagonists remained limpet-like inside what they called the Centro Sociale Leoncavallo to keep the revolutionary flame of 1968 alight.

The former paper mill is the main feature in a complex

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