July 20, 2001. Genoa, Italy.
Group of Eight Summit.

On the A train to JFK, Rosethorn reads to me from a book she found remaindered in a dumpster.

The blah blah blah travel guidebook in English for residents of countries considered likely to travel for pleasure and spend money says that the Italian city of Genoa (Italian Genova (jen’o-vah), French Gênes) was a major seaport and etc. during the Renaissance. It has a population of about 700,000.

Over the Atlantic, then on the connection flight from Heathrow to Milan.

According to legend, Genoa gave birth to the statue of Cristoforo Colombo in circa 1446, although he might as well have been a Catalan mercenary named Colón since the Chinese landed in Baja California fifty years before he did and the Vikings settled Nova Scotia four hundred years before that; Chris C. who sailed for Spain, had Columbus Circle named in his honor and was brought back to court in chains after his third voyage. Genoa’s industries include shipping, fishing and other things. The few restaurants in the book are too expensive. So are the hotels.

On the bus from Milan to Genoa.

The Genoa Aquarium is Europe’s largest and the Palazzo Doria is a prime example of early Renaissance architecture, as is the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, the Palazzo Ducale and the Old Harbor, now an open air mall with shops. All of these are located well within the eight kilometers of four meter high steel, concrete and razor wire fencing that encircles the fortified Red Zone with its impenetrable gates manned by uncommunicative carabinieri brandishing assault rifles.

Walking from Brignole Station, she’s still reading to me.

Unlike Rome, Genoa has no ancient ruins inhabited by prides of feral cats. Apart from the Centro Sociale Emiliano Zapata on Via Sanpierdarena, or the public squats, the numerous green parks, steep hills, Mediterranean vistas and baroque fountains, Genoa, with its factories, crime, shipping yards, working class neighborhoods and closeness to larger and more touristed cities, bears a certain resemblance to the city of Newark, New Jersey.

Except that no one in Genoa speaks Portuguese.

The travel guidebook in English for residents of countries considered likely to travel for pleasure and spend money is entirely worthless. Rosethorn uses it as a temporary headrest on the steps of the Armondo Diaz School as we wait in the shade for Sara and Aldo to return from the Independent Media Center office across the street.

Italian authorities closed off most access to Genoa for the G8 Summit except by road. Warships seal the harbor, armored personnel carriers patrol the streets and special surface to air missile emplacements point toward the sky. All this in preparation for the hundreds of thousands of protesters expected from around the world: South Korean auto-workers, Brazilian autonomists, Indian farmers, Ugandan university students, Canadian independent journalists, Papuan environmentalists and Europeans from across the social spectrum. And us.

Police expect to use 6,200 rounds of tear gas over the course of three days. Two hundred body bags have already been stockpiled. At the European Union summit in Gotëburg in June, Swedish police opened fire on a Reclaim the Streets dance party with live rounds. Several demonstrators were seriously injured, but no one was killed. Everyone expects that it is only a matter of time.

Sara, an Argentine student, and Aldo, a trade unionist from Bern, shared the bus ride from Milan. Rosethorn knows Aldo through a friend of hers with Indymedia UK. Sara and Aldo return from the IMC and Sara cocks her head to one side. She jokingly strikes a runway fashion model pose with her mirrored sunglasses tilted low.

“So, okay Sleeping Beauty,” she says to Rosethorn, “it’s time to go to Carlini Stadium and defeat capitalism by some marching around, yes?” Sara wears a ridiculous pink feather boa.

Aldo raises his eyebrows at me, dubiously scratching the dark stubble along his jaw with a fingernail. “It is already after ten,” he says. “We should get going.”

The walk from the IMC to the stadium through Albaro, a suburb of Genoa with narrow streets and grassy hillsides, loops past the parks where many of the protesters encamp. People gather for the march announced by the tute bianche: a Red Bloc of English Socialist Worker Party members, Maoists, Trotskyists and other political parties; a Pink Bloc of people in festive, silly costumes; the tute bianche and ¡Ya Basta! along with their English counterparts, the Wombles, with motorcycle helmets, foam padding and shields as protection from police batons; and thousands of demonstrators unaffiliated with any organized contingent.

The Genoa Social Forum, the G8’s umbrella protest coalition, set today as a day of direct action to breach the Red Zone. The tute bianche, the Pink Bloc, the anarchists and the radical COBAS trade union alliance all had separate meetings.

Aldo spoke with a friend who went to the anarchists' spokescouncil. There were the Polish squatters with shaved heads, the Greeks with their long, flowing hair, one or two from Russia, possibly Krasnodar, but the rest were from western Europe, many of them Italian. One of the Greeks stood as the meeting commenced and addressed the gathering in English on behalf of the others.

“We make total destroy in Genoa. Thank you,” he said and sat to a burst of applause.

All in opposition to the Group of Eight, elites of elites, meeting to plot the course of world events from their fortress zone sanitized of popular dissent.

“I heard people talking about the government encouraging fascists to dress in black, like the anarchists, and start fights with the pacifists,” Aldo says.

“Or of agent provocateurs dressed in black, you know?” Sara adds.

“Wait, the National Alliance is fascist,” I tell Aldo. “That’s a political party here. In the US, the National Alliance is just a fringe white supremacist group.”

“In Germany, fascism is outlawed. In Italy, it has seats in parliament,” Aldo replies. “Maybe it is easier to blame anarchists? I think maybe pointing fingers gives an excuse.”

“Like a scapegoat.”

“Perhaps.” Aldo says.

“But all of us are considered terrorists by them.” I look at Sara and Aldo. “They’ve been using the same tricks to divide people for a hundred and fifty years.”

“I think maybe it is because anarchists do not really believe in utopias,” Aldo says, “not as the Left still does in Europe, as I do even, in the possibility of utopias. No, maybe I think anarchists have a utopia, but do not really think it will ever happen, like a priest who one morning discovers himself to be an atheist. You still know right from wrong, but the bubble goes pop and there is reality and you have to deal with it.”

I look over at a knot of twelve people wearing red t-shirts with party insignia and yellow bandannas, tied about the neck as a group of scouts would.

“Me, I’m not an anarchist, a communist or anything like that. I am a person,” Aldo says. “Other people believe what they want to believe.”

“I think too many people believe the fucking corporate media,” Rosethorn says.

“Maybe. But also maybe they, we, do not want to touch reality,” Aldo continues. “Nobody wants the reality of violence in a world where no answer is simple. So of course some will find it easier to blame anarchists for starting trouble; anarchists are the heretics. It is a matter of convenience.”

Sara puts an arm around Rosethorn’s shoulder and gives her a squeeze. “So no more beating up all the police on your own, okay?” She scolds Rosethorn and laughs, waving her index finger. “You really need to stop with that all the time!”

Aldo smiles at everything he sees. “Don’t let it get you down. Look up there!” He pulls a digital camera from his backpack and snaps a picture.

A handful of multi-colored helium balloons ascends into the air and floats toward the steel perimeter of the Red Zone several kilometers away.

Aldo smiles and points up at the balloons, nudging Sara with his elbow. The two of them hold hands, Aldo’s shirt sleeves rolled up above his shoulders and Sara’s blue t-shirt tied in a knot at her ribs, modesty preventing anything more and the heat precluding anything less.

Sara tosses one end of her pink frilly boa over her left shoulder. “Good. Those balloons will distract the missiles they set up.”

“We have our own air force, didn’t you know?” Aldo adds.

Rosethorn looks past Sara and Aldo, taking in the mass of shoulders and heads that stretch down the Via Tolemaide as the march begins to move.

Cohorts of young Italian militants clad in foam padding beneath white industrial chemical suits march at the front. These are the tute bianche, the White Overalls of ¡Ya Basta! from Italy. First organized to defend squats and social centers from police raids, the tute bianche construct body armor and march in formation with shields, helmets, two-by-fours and large, clear plexi-barriers or giant rubber inner tubes.

Aldo lets us in on a little known secret: in Italy, police could be your cousin or your best friend’s sister’s boyfriend serving out his conscription in the carabinieri rather than the army. The militants and rank and file officers often negotiate mock battles beforehand. “Okay, you hit us, but only on the shoulder padding,” Aldo tells us, “then we hit you, but only on your shields.” These informal rules of engagement allow both police and militants to beat their chests afterwards and keep injuries to a minimum.

The Italian government outsourced the training of police for the summit to the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD’s first instruction was that Italian police must no longer speak to or interact with demonstrators, must not even make eye contact.

“This is a very different thing for Europe,” Aldo says.

The tute bianche march from Carlini Stadium to the Piazza Verdi thins and stretches out for over a kilometer along the Via Tolemaide. To the right and down a steep cliff are the train lines leading to Brignole Station. To the left are the neighborhoods of Albaro and the outskirts of Genoa proper. Half a kilometer from Piazza Verdi near Via Giuseppe Casaregis, the police and carabinieri take up flanking positions near the march’s vanguard and block its advance.

“What’s going on up ahead?” Rosethorn asks. The singing and chanting stops. “Can anyone see what’s happening?”

A fusillade of tear gas grenades lobs over the heads of the padded tute bianche and lands in the soft, unprotected mass a dozen meters behind them. The march was public, its route negotiated. No one is prepared for gas and people shout in confusion. Above us on the balconies of apartment buildings overlooking the march route, armored police lean over and shoot off more canisters down the length of the road. One canister shoots straight down and rattles away ten meters in front of us, sparking and sputtering. Helicopters begin to hover directly overhead.

Shouts come from the tute bianche leadership to hold this ground, to charge the police as people panic and rush down side streets away from the clouds of gas, coughing and waving their arms, blinded. A group of nuns in full habits retreat from the chaos as police charge the flanks.

“We must hold here,” the tute bianche yell over the crowd and the explosions.

At the front, police tear padding from the militants as they haul others from the march to stomp and beat them. Helicopters begin dropping more gas into the frightened crowds below. Flags and banners flutter to the pavement.

Some of the Wombles from Britain, further back, break away from the rest of the march and try to flank the police, ignoring calls from the leadership to stand fast. People surge backwards and forwards, but begin to retreat. Some leap several meters from the top of the cliff to the right or scramble down its sheer sides into the rail yard to escape the police assaults. Most split into smaller groups coursing into the neighborhoods to the south as the police pursue them, firing tear gas at the retreating multitude.

The sudden police violence pushes the remnants of the march into dockworker neighborhoods, past the homes and street corners of fishermen and factory workers. Here cobblestones are first pulled from the streets and fly in arcs against police shields. Push, fall back; surge forward once again, and retreat. An Irish brogue rings out through the commotion, “We almost broke through up ahead! We just need more people!”

The tear gas spreads thick among the balconies and between apartment blocks in narrow alley ways, enveloping homes and seeping into living rooms where video clips from last week’s football match are visible on the television. Il bambino begins to cry and wail from the fumes, his chubby face turning purple, and la nonna rushes inside with a handkerchief to her wrinkled mouth and face and coughs sharply, trying to breathe.

“Chi cazzo fa male alla mia famiglia?!” An enraged maritime worker, burly and sun-burned a dark red on his massive neck and forearms, stands in front of his house in a t-shirt and black pants and shakes his fist.

Rosethorn runs past him, taking cover from the tear gas canisters and covers her face in a vinegar-soaked bandanna from the smoke.

Medics rinse faces with solutions of water and Maalox to get rid of the gas residue. Other workers stumble out of their homes, squinting against the stinging cloud drifts. They want to know who the fuck is hurting their families, too.

“Che fai?!” The dockworker grabs a young man in a red bandanna, crouching next to Rosethorn, and pulls him up by a St. Pauli University football shirt. “Che cazzo fai?!”

The young man points and responds in German, “Polizei, polizei!”

The dockworker lets go of the young man as his gaze turns to the police. He waves his neighbors over to him and they grab pieces of wood, cobblestones, broom handles and anything else they can use, then advance toward the carabinieri.

The dockworker does not pick up a stick or anything else, but claps his hands together once.

“Questi bastardi li ammazzo con le mani!”

Shoulders set with a look of grim resolve on his face, the dockworker strides forward as though braving torrents of rain as workers and other demonstrators release a volley of bricks and debris against the transparent ridged shields of riot police.

The police march forward and the crowd meets them head to head at the edge of the intersection.

A police officer cranks his arm backward to deliver a solid blow to the shoulder of a woman to the dockworker’s right.

The dockworker grabs the policeman’s arm by the wrist on the second swing with his left hand and yanks him forward by the chin mounted aluminum filter of his gas mask with his right. In one rough motion the dockworker pulls the officer to his knees and rips the gas mask and blue riot helmet from his head.

They make eye contact now, this forty-year old docker and this baby-faced, teenage conscript, no more than a boy. The boy’s eyes fill with fear.

He raises a gloved hand and turns his head as if guarding himself from the glare of a bright light.

The dockworker spits and calls him a little kid, “Non sei un ragazzino!” He gives the boy a hard kick in the ass as the carabiniere scrambles to his feet and runs for the police lines reforming at the end of the block. “Vattene!” Go, the dockworker mocks. “Ti chiama la mamma!”

Away from the stand-off in a nearby piazza, young Poles and Czechs wheel a garbage dumpster out to barricade the street as others pile building materials, mattresses, wooden shipping pallets and furniture next to it. Everyone falls back behind these barricades now or presses against the wood shuttered thresholds of apartments along the street, locals cursing the police. Demonstrators attempt to find their friends in the brief lull and talk on mobile phones or trade stories.

Aldo phones his friend Walter. “He says a bank along the Corso Torino was vandalized and a small chain supermarket to the north was looted…a small group even tried to tear down a prison! But it had been empty anyway. Oh well. Lots of gas.”

“Has anyone made it to the fence?” Rosethorn wants to know.

Aldo cradles the mobile with both hands to hear better. “Oh, police provoked fights between different groups, pushing militants into pacifists and tear gassing the lot, that sort of thing. People have been pulling those metal wheely bins out all over.”

“Where is Walter now?” Sara asks.

“He says he’s to the north of the river beyond Brignole Station.” Aldo pauses. “Oh, he also says they heard someone may have been shot or killed. A French woman at the Ventimiglia border crossing.”

I share a glance with Rosethorn. “Shit.”

Aldo shuts the phone’s flip screen with a click.

“He had to go.”

“Is Walter okay?” Sara pleads. “Were they gassing him?”

“Hä?” Aldo shakes his head. “Oh no. They’re taking a lunch break. So are the police.”

In the square, people gather behind the makeshift barricades as carabinieri hold fast and reinforce their lines several dozen meters away. We join in to push another dumpster into place. Sara takes an orange shirt from Aldo’s backpack and tears it in half for Aldo and her to cover their faces.

“It’s not much, but it should help,” she says.

“The police are naughty today. They didn’t have to attack,” Aldo says. “I have never seen it this bad, and I was in Praha with the Blue march.”

“You weren’t in Gotëburg,” Sara responds.

“I was in Davos in January, though,” he goes. “Well, not Davos. They wouldn’t let us in, so everyone went to Zürich instead.” Aldo unscrews the cap on his water bottle and takes a swig by lifting his makeshift bandanna. He passes the water to Sara, who stands and looks up the street.

“Cabrón,” she swears.

Rosethorn follows Sara’s gaze. A pair of armored police vans, two-toned mechanical bricks with flat fronts and small windows, speed directly toward the barricades from police lines, covering the intervening ground in seconds.

“Hijos de puta, they’re ramming,” Sara says under her breath.

The front face of the van with the word CARABINIERI stenciled in large white letters occupies the view of the street completely, hurtling straight for the dumpster.

“They’re RAMMING!” Sara grabs Aldo and Rosethorn by the upper arms, pulling them onto their feet and into a sprint. I follow close behind.

The van collides with the dumpster, sending it scraping along the pavement and into the crowd gathered in the road behind it in a wild spiral. People grab each other and jump from its path. The vans pursue close behind, charging into the mass of people standing in the road. Most recoil just in time as the first van pulls a tight turn and heads back to police lines, but the second clips several people, knocking them to the curb before it too turns and heads back up the street. Police rush into the square, chasing people away from the smashed up barricades.

We head east and north away from the street battle toward the Piazza Alimonda. There, stragglers from the tute bianche march and some anarchists from the Zapata Social Center gather and hold the area.

The walls of the piazza are covered in political graffiti, while small chunks of cobblestone, empty water bottles and scraps of trash or signs litter the road. On the corner of a building across from the low wrought iron fence around a small clump of trees, someone has written NO MORE COPS. Past the zebra striped crosswalk on the edge of the piazza, demonstrators up-end a row of gray metal dumpsters and engage the police in a pitched street battle for control of the road.

Many of the Italians here wear motorcycle or scooter helmets. One has an orange life vest on over his chest and shoulders while several others carry transparent plastic shields with circle A’s spray-painted on the front. Some carry wooden two-by-fours or poles. All eyes are directed at the carabinieri in body armor and gas masks gathering up the side street fifty or sixty meters away beyond the rows of shuttered apartments and shops with cars parked diagonally along the left hand side of the street.

Aldo recognizes one of the anarchists, a skinny young man in a white tank top shirt wearing a ski mask with a roll of packing tape as a bracelet around his arm. Aldo thinks he met him when he was in Italy this past April and went to see a benefit show here in Genoa. They talked about the Italian Anarchist Federation. “It wasn’t the best show, but it wasn’t the worst.”

“Like all punk shows,” I go.

“It was put on by Students Against the G8 at the Zapata Social Center. I think Troubled Heads, Coma Punk or something like that, but also a ska and a grunge act.”

“They play grunge in Italy?”

“Sure, why not?” Aldo sighs and looks at the sky. “It’s nice today. Days like this, everyone goes to the beach. We should do that.”

“It we weren’t here, you mean.”

“If only the G8 would give up and go home so we could all go to the beach. You know, I think I’ll tell Berlusconi that,” Aldo says with a snap of his fingers. “Remind me to make an appointment!”

Shouts and curses go up from the demonstrators as two blue and white carabinieri Land Rovers race toward them into the piazza, coming in for a ram and turn maneuver.

"Dalli, dalli!" Aldo tosses the cigarette to the ground and we run back to link up with Rosethorn and Sara.

Demonstrators scramble away and pelt the vehicles with cobblestones as the Land Rovers pull a tight, off-balance swipe through the intersection.

The driver of the first seems to lose control and plows the jeep head first into an overturned dumpster. The rear window breaks. Two dozen people swarm the vehicle like angry hornets with backpacks, shields and sticks. A red fire extinguisher falls from the rear window of the first Land Rover onto the street as the second Land Rover drives off.

Three people break the passenger side windows of the jeep with a thick plank of wood. More demonstrators approach from the rear but keep their distance about two meters from the bumper. The Land Rover is trapped, front end flush against a metal bin.

The carabinieri forming on foot thirty meters away stop and wave for reinforcements, but are slow to react. Inside the Land Rover, the carabinieri are not wearing gas masks or helmets; the old filters failed earlier and they wound up gassing themselves. They try to pepper spray the demonstrators but the wind blows the chemicals back into their faces. Taking deep breaths, panic sets in.

Over the rim of the rear mounted spare tire, a protester in a purple hooded sweatshirt and motorcycle helmet sees the carabiniere in the back of the Land Rover point his pistol out of the window. Other demonstrators stand back. A bare-chested, helmeted man on the passenger side attempts to wedge the wooden plank into the steering wheel so the driver cannot reverse.

Aldo takes out his camera and starts taking photos, in a trance.

The protester in the purple sweatshirt, turning to run from the pistol, trips over the fire extinguisher and over the skinny anarchist in the white tank top and ski mask, who has his hands on the extinguisher trying to get it out of the way. The kid in the sweatshirt stumbles and falls on all fours. Others shout that the cop has a gun out and the bare-chested man turns away and drops the wooden plank to the pavement.

Unnerved eyes follow the motion of purple sweatshirt to the street, then jerk back up at the skinny anarchist, standing two meters behind the Land Rover. The carabiniere aims the gun at his head.

Shudders hurtle nerve bundles running from head to toe, mouth open, but no sound escapes, sharp breaths darting into a tight chest. He raises the fire extinguisher in front of his face, knees bent as if preparing to leap out of the way. To the right, his friend in the sweatshirt scrambles to his feet.

Demonstrators pull back from the Land Rover and disengage from the fight.

Two shots crack from twenty-one year old carabinieri ausiliare Mario Pacanica’s Beretta 9 millimeter pistol and twenty-three year old Carlo Giuliani twists in mid air, falls and crumbles to the ground on his side.

Protesters turn and scatter. Carlo lies behind the Land Rover and rolls onto his back. He is still moving. The blue and white carabinieri Land Rover Defender, license plate CC AE-217, reverses over Carlo, still breathing, it reverses, the tires on its left side crushing his legs as it shifts into first gear to run over Carlo again.

Sara looks at him, blood pouring in a fountain from his eye. She inhales and gasps for air, eyes turning red, overflowing with tears. Sara’s entire body begins trembling uncontrollably as her knees give out and she drops to the ground.

The carabiniere in the back of the Land Rover covers his face with his hand as photographers rush in from the center of the piazza. Armored police reinforcements stutter forward on foot from the edge of the square. A policeman takes cover near the side of a building while another stands with legs splayed, frozen in place. A third steps forward, clutching the sides of his helmeted head, shaking.

Rosethorn leans ahead from the sidewalk to my right and I grasp her by the arm before she runs forward. She reaches across her body and clutches my right hand, fingers digging deep into my skin. The world beneath our feet heaves and dissipates as we move.

“Assassini! Assassini!” Protesters rush to Carlo, lying in the street in a pool of spreading blood. “Assassini!” One tries to stop the bleeding as others call for paramedics, but they can only cradle his head and stare in futility at the horror around them. “Assassini!” The carabinieri reinforcements form ranks at one edge of the square. “Assassini!”

“What the fuck?” Rosethorn yells. “Where’s the ambulance?”

Once formed, the police beat batons against their shields. They move forward, first in step, then charging into the Piazza Alimonda with truncheons and gas. Furious, the demonstrators fight back, lashing out with poles and cobblestones, smashing furniture against police vehicles, smashing everything. Demonstrators charge forward to get back to Carlo and remove him, but each time the police counterattack to retake the square. It is hours before medics, held back by police, arrive to treat Carlo behind a wall of riot shields. By then it is too late.

During the course of the battle someone dresses Carlo in a shirt and places a bandage beneath his head. When the police take the square for the final time, he is carried away. The carabinieri attempt to cover and soak up his blood with sand before they withdraw for good. As people move back into the piazza, they kick the sand away to reveal Carlo’s blood again for the whole world to see, placing flowers on the spot where police killed him.

On one side of the Piazza Alimonda is a colorful mural, its background painted blue and red, and written across it in large, canary yellow cartoon lettering is the word GENOA. Many days after, across from the mural at a memorial to Carlo, a passerby leaves a hastily scrawled message in front of the flowers and wreaths: Hanno ucciso un ragazzo nella piazza dove sono nato. They killed a boy in the square where I was born.

These are things tourists will never read about in travel guidebooks.

Five days later at Walter’s flat outside Milan, Sara cannot stop shaking. “Why? Why did they do this?” she cries to Aldo.

Aldo says, “I don’t know why.”

He repeats this again and again, I don’t know why, cradling her.

Italian and French news is a steady stream of footage from Piazza Alimonda. The programs run pictures of carabiniere Pacanica being taken from the rear of the Land Rover at the hospital, his shaved head spattered with blood and it looks as though he is weeping, his face contorted.

Rosethorn and I try to sleep on the floor, listening to Sara break apart in Aldo’s arms in the next room. I think of the raid on the Armondo Diaz School on the night of the twenty-first, where police kicked activists from their sleep and beat them until blood ran down the hallways, dripping red handprints left on the walls. Police raided the IMC across from the Diaz School next, smashing all the computers and stopping only when members of Italy’s parliament arrived. Everyone camping out in Carlini Stadium fled after that. The police trashed the camp and let street thugs root through the belongings scattered about in their wake. No one has been released from jail yet.

This is not the stuff tourists want to hear.

I look at Rosethorn. She rests on her side, staring blankly at the wall. She does not speak, except to say yes or no, as we catch the bus from Genoa. She does not speak now.

The travel guidebook will never mention the fascist hymns the carabinieri chant at the Bolzaneto barracks. Uno due tre, long live Pinochet! Or how they force prisoners to watch propaganda films of Mussolini’s speeches. Quattro cinque sei, death to the Jews! It will never tell you about the special room in the basement of the hospital they use for interrogations and beatings. Sette otto nove, no pity for the niggers! It will never list the injured or the dead, Carlo Giuliani not the first and tragically, not the last.

Aldo’s friend Walter makes a pot of black tea and sits cross-legged on the floor next to Rosethorn, handing me a cup and placing another on the floorboards beside her.

“You know he didn’t want his parents to worry, so he told them he might go to the beach today instead of coming to the protests.” Walter is lanky, bones pushing against the skin of his chest and torso as he rests on the floor in his sweatpants. “He was just a kid, like any of us.”

I nod in sympathy.

“Now people are making speeches in the streets praising Carlo Giuliani as a martyr of the movement,” he tells me. Walter shakes his head in disbelief. “In the same breath, they denounce everything he stood for, saying police did not do enough to arrest the troublemakers, that police were not harsh enough when dealing with them, with us! Then they go on to call Carlo a martyr. Their martyr.”

The same ones who muttered fascist at Rosethorn during Friday’s march.

“Martyrs.” Walter breathes out heavily and finishes his tea. He slams his cup onto the floor and lets the moment pass. In a beaten sigh, he says, “To hell with martyrdom.”

Rosethorn sits up. “Anything worth dying for is worth living for,” she goes.

Walter looks at her without a sound, tired and spent of skepticism.

“I think Carlo knew that,” she says. “He was protecting his friends.”

“Yes.” Walter thinks for a moment. “But now he is dead.”

“You can still be inspired by someone’s memory and keep it in your heart,” Rosethorn tells Walter. “Other people will say what they want, but that doesn’t matter.”

“Some have already told me, Walter, the people need martyrs!” Walter says. “They need martyrs to inspire them, to look up to, to revere.” He waves his hand angrily. “To be a martyr is a miserable fate.”

“But it happens. None of us want to be…”

“No, I’m sorry.” Walter wipes his eyes. “I knew him, you see. People are stupid. They’ll follow a dead cat if you hold it in front of them and say, ‘It died for the cause!’ He was just a kid, like any of us, but now it’s late and time to forget about this.”

We sit and sip our tea in silence. Walter finds us blankets and slips into his bedroom as Sara and Aldo’s voices subside into the darkness from the spare room across the hallway.

After we lie down, Rosethorn asks if I’m still awake.

“Yeah,” I answer.

“Do you have a pillow?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“All I have is this guidebook.”

“It’s okay. I’ll use my shirt.”

“You know how in the US,” she says to me, “rich people go to Cancun, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Fiji, Acapulco-all without ever setting foot outside the resort compound?”

I turn onto my side to look at her.

“I think if I ever come back to Genoa,” she tells me, “I’ll bring a flower for Carlo from one of the gardens back home. I think in a lot of ways, he’s luckier than us, locked in time at the point when his life held the greatest potential.” Rosethorn takes in a deep breath. “I think I’ll go back to the Piazza Carlo Giuliani and try to remember.”

The guidebook, positioned beneath Rosethorn’s head on the floor, presses into her neck, but somehow she is able at last to sleep.