The wave of protests under the Black Lives Matter banner that followed the murder of George Floyd on May 25 this year has gone beyond the Atlantic and reached the European continent, where solidarity with African-American communities intertwined with the institutional and open racism faced by Black communities in European countries, which stretches back and connects to the history of colonialism in the Old Continent.
Italy was no exception on this front, with thousands of people joining protests in June all over the peninsula from Turin to Bologna and from Florence to Naples and Rome and it was in the capital that thousands of people gathered in Piazza del Popolo.
However, while the activism of local realities like Black Lives Matter Roma is still present on the ground, the attention span of Italy’s media and society ended up disappearing quite abruptly. This move was not random or casual at all, but strictly connected to the specific challenges that Italians of African descent face in the Belpaese.
