Reportage
For Ilaria Sula, first silence then rage as Rome takes to the streets
'We need laws and repression, and also work that lies at the heart of education, to deconstruct stereotypes and the seeds of patriarchal culture.'
On Wednesday, at 6:30 p.m., at La Sapienza University in Rome, a commemorative event was scheduled to remember Ilaria Sula – “a victim of femicidal savagery, something that we cannot stand idly by,” as Rector Antonella Polimeni wrote in the email circulated to all students, faculty and workers at the university. But people began arriving much earlier, in the early afternoon, bringing flowers to be laid on the flower bed in front of the Department of Statistics building, as indicated by the organizers.
When the rector took the floor, hundreds of people were in the forecourt in front of the Statistics building. There was a long moment of silence, broken up after a few minutes by the jingle of keys waved in the air by everyone present.
“I feel so many different things at once. There's grief and disgust, but also a lot of anger, more than anything else, because it's the second one in a few days, and I wish everyone felt the same anger,” said a student from the Statistics department, one of Sula's classmates. Many people lined up to leave flowers on the flower bed, right under the banner the university had made with a photo of Sula. Two girls approached with a rose and a camellia, with two small signs tied to them: “With all the pain, with all the anger,” the first one read; “If I don't come back tomorrow, sister, burn everything” read the other, a line from a poem by Cristina Torres Càceres' poem that has become a symbol of the transfeminist movements.
In her short speech, Rector Polimeni commemorated Sula “and all the women victims of the murderous rampage perpetrated by a partner, a husband, an ex.” She stressed once again the commitment of the university and state institutions, but remained on an ambiguous level in an attempt to move between the lines of opposing visions on how to intervene to combat gender violence: “We need laws and repression, and also work that lies at the heart of education, to deconstruct stereotypes and the seeds of patriarchal culture.”
Repression is the recipe favored by the governing right, which in a Council of Ministers on March 7 put forward the proposal of punishing the crime of femicide with life imprisonment. “It is urgent to approve the draft decree law presented by the government as soon as possible. All of us, from the majority and the opposition, are called upon to send a strong signal by passing this measure unanimously,” said Licia Ronzulli of Forza Italia on Wednesday. “By the time a sentence is passed, a woman has already died. We need prevention, not a new crime,” replied Laura Boldrini of the Democratic Party.
The solemn silence at the university's official event could not be more different from the noisy march organized in the evening by Non Una Di Meno, together with student collectives and associations, in the San Lorenzo neighborhood, a few hundred meters from the university. “We are organizing to hold each other and scream together,” they wrote in the morning. They followed the event at the Faculty of Statistics from afar, unfurling a banner that read “We want us alive.”
Shortly after 9 p.m., there were hundreds of people at the San Lorenzo march, and the speakers on the megaphone immediately seized on the timid position of the rector in her speech at the afternoon event: "When Polimeni spoke, she wasn’t even able to say the word femicide. We are answering her tonight that we have no use for slogans: we have been calling for the university to be transfeminist for years, and all they do is call us the usual extremists," they said. The separate march, exclusively attended by women and nonbinary people, set off and crossed the streets of the neighborhood, while the keys were jingled once again.
Right from the start, there was no ambiguity in their policy demands: “In the space of twenty-four hours, we have witnessed two femicides. That makes 23 this year, and yet you keep lecturing us on how to behave, when it is clear that it is the men who must be educated on consent and to stay in their place,” was the message from the megaphone.
Another protest took place on Thursday at 2 p.m., once again at La Sapienza, called by the student associations. "From the classrooms of our universities to the streets of our city, we want to burn everything down. We don’t want flowers or memorial benches, but real solutions and anti-violence centers. That is what we want and that is what we’re going to get."
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/prima-il-silenzio-poi-la-rabbia-roma-scende-in-piazza-2 on 2025-04-03