Separatists Fail To Take Venice By Storm Police Arrest 8 Who Had ‘Captured’ Landmark Tower
Their armored car proved to be no more than a farm tractor draped in sheet metal, and their sole accomplishment was to unfurl the flag of the long-defunct Republic of Venice, but the separatists who stormed the Campanile in St. Mark’s Square early Friday morning were carrying real automatic weapons, and the police mounted an assault to recapture the landmark tower.
This latest episode in northern Italy’s small but flamboyant separatist movement’s challenge to the nation’s unity ended without a shot being fired, but with eight men arrested.
The campaign, characterized by an improbable mixture of political bombast and secessionist pageantry, has left Italians bewildered.
The takeover before dawn Friday began as the last stragglers at the Gran Caffe Chioggia on St. Mark’s Square sipped wine and chatted.
A ferry landed at the canal end of the square, where ferries do not normally put in, and a van and an armored vehicle descended and made for the Campanile, which stands near the venerable St. Mark’s Cathedral.
Alvise Rossetti has worked the tables at the canal-side cafe in the heart of this gracefully decaying maritime city for years, but he said he had never seen anything quite like Friday morning’s events, which amounted to a miniature invasion of Venice.
Men in jumpsuits, their heads shrouded by ski masks, burst through the bronze doors of the Campanile, reappearing minutes later on the columned balcony near the top the huge brick bell tower, where they unfurled the golden pennant with the lion of Saint Mark, the symbol of former Venetian glory.
The first inkling for Rossetti, a waiter in his 30s, of what was afoot came from the banner that flew above the “armored car.” It was then, he said, that he knew that the men were from the radical fringe of northern Italy’s separatist movement, whose shrillness in recent months has grown in proportion to the melting of its strength at the polls.
In recent weeks, pirate transmitters in the Venice region broke into the national television’s news programs 14 times to stir northerners to secessionist fervor. Recent transmissions, some lasting 15 minutes, called for a march on Venice to mark the day 200 years ago when Napoleon’s forces took control of the city, ending its more than thousand-year history as a Mediterranean power.
Later Friday, the police confirmed that they had arrested eight men, including four who had scaled the Campanile: Andrea Viviani, 26, from a town near Verona, and Fausto Faccia, 30, Cristian Contin, 23, and his uncle, Flavio Contin, 55, all from towns near Padua.
The men were detained only hours after the stunt began when police officers stormed the tower. But the audacity of the episode, and the report by the police that the men had carried an automatic weapon with two cartridges and 70 shots, as well as equipment for breaking into television transmissions, stirred the national debate.