The Italian Student Revolts, 1967–68

Abstract

Most scholars would agree that the initial spark that ignited the demonstrations in Italy’s universities at the end of the 1960s came from longstanding ills within academia itself. Italy’s antiquated institutions of higher education reflected the nation’s historic problems of underdevelopment. Symptomatic of this inability of the universities to adapt to changing times was the student rebellion in Trento. The alpine university became one of the first centers of student revolt precisely because it was the only place one could study sociology in the entire country and thus concentrated a number of highly politicized and socially active students in a small, conservative town. As historian Gerd-Rainer Horn convincingly demonstrates, the Italian government’s initial hesitancy to confer a degree in the subject, led to the first occupation of the university in January 1966.¹ This is but one example of the inadequacies of these archaic institutions that were revealed during the student movement’s initial demonstrations for educational reform in the mid-1960s. As we shall see, the student movement at first formed to address problems in the universities, but by the end of the decade they had left the campuses to extend their critique into all of society.