In the last few years, anti-austerity and anti-corporate mobilisations have risen in strength and visibility all over Europe. Italy, in this context, constitutes a peculiar case, with the failure of all attempts to build an occupy-style movement. Still, Italy sees a high level of social contention by any European standard, but has not lived a transformative experience able to impact on the public field that might be compared with the Spanish or Greek examples.
This paper aims at describing and explaining the main characteristics of this phenomenon, focusing on some particular factors: the political context, with the peculiar role of Silvio Berlusconi, of the technocratic government led by Mario Monti and of populism; the movement landscape, shaped by 4 years of anti-austerity mobilisation and scarcely malleable to fit in an imported framework; and the social and economic conditions, the evolution of which is still substantially different from the Spanish and Greek ones.
