Self-managed social centers appeared all over Italy during the mid-1980s, as a result of the recession and resignation of 1970s left-wing militant students and youth that were dissatisfied with authority.
Young adults with no money, place to meet, or fondness of authority squatted abandoned buildings, renovated them, and turned them into social youth centers. These self-organized groups began to find new purpose in the centers, as if they were operational factories, schools, prisons, gas stations, or stores that they once were before abandonment. These refurbished buildings became semi-legal, unconventional, independently run activity centers.
The social centers were often located in the outer suburbs of larger cities and were run cooperatively by several groups that used the facilities as underground drop-in centers, youth clubs, drug rehabilitation sites, recording studios, cinemas, art galleries, and eventually even computer venues that specialized in computer hacking. As a retreat for disgruntled youth, the social center became a breeding ground for Italian political music. Today, they are considered the heart of Italian hip hop.
Famous quotes containing the words social, centers and/or italy:
“I am heartily tired of this life of bondage, responsibility, and toil. I wish it was at an end.... We are both physically very healthy.... Our tempers are cheerful. We are social and popular. But it is one of our greatest comforts that the pledge not to take a second term relieves us from considering it. That was a lucky thing. It is a reform—or rather a precedent for a reform, which will be valuable.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“the San Marco Library,
Whence turbulent Italy should draw
Delight in Art whose end is peace,
In logic and in natural law
By sucking at the dugs of Greece.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)