Blocco Studentesco
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Blocco Studentesco (Student Bloc, BS) was founded in 2006 as the youth wing of CasaPound Italia (House of [Ezra] Pound Italy, CPI). On its website, BS describes itself as supportive of "third millennium fascism," echoing a well-known CPI slogan (2024a). The neo-fascist youth group emerged from the Cutty Sark bar in Rome, which has served as a meeting point for the city's far-right community since the late-1990s. As of this writing, BS remains active in high schools and universities across Italy.
BS refers to itself as a "revolutionary movement" that breaks with the so-called "corporate school" model of public education in Italy "where ideas are banned, where students stand for nothing"; an educational system that, according to this perspective, is governed by headmasters and instructors who are purportedly nostalgic for the countercultural atmosphere of the May 1968 student protests. Evoking the fascist emphasis on action over words, BS' website states: "We are thought that becomes action." The far-right youth group encourages its followers to occupy Italian schools as a form of anti-establishment demonstration, mirroring CPI's occupation of a large multi-story residential building near Rome's Termini Station, allegedly in protest against the city's shortage of affordable housing. Its aim, BS explains, is "to bring the same avant-garde spirit, the same style that characterized the experience of the non-conformist occupations, into schools" (2024a).
In 2012, the group made national headlines when several members hung a flag from the Victor Emmanuel II National Monument (AKA the Altar of the Fatherland) in central Rome which depicted the technocratic Prime Minister Mario Monti as a vampire, along with the words "no to the government of barons" (2012). BS' national coordinator, Rolando Mancini, remarked that this was a youth-led protest against a "government of bankers" which was allegedly overseeing "yet another act of systematic destruction of the welfare state and loss of national sovereignty." Five years later, the group received 56,000 votes in the national student elections which were held in high schools across Italy, winning control of student councils in Ascoli, Fermo, and Viterbo, and taking up a vice-presidency in Frosinone (2017).
BS's logo consists of a white lightning bolt inside of a black and white circle (2024b). The circle, according to the group's website, represents the organization's emphasis on unity in response to the "modern emptiness" of an atomized, neo-liberal society, while the lightning bolt symbolizes action over words. Taken together, the "encircled lightning bolt" visually represents lightning as "the force that springs from being united." The youth group's logo, it should be pointed out, was inspired by the logo of the British Union of Fascists, known as the "flash and circle" (2024a). Its social media presence incorporates a range of neo-Nazi symbols including Nordic runes and the swastika, demonstrating the group's ideological extremism (McSwiney et al. 2021: 2,510).
