Clandestine party of 10,000 people and five days is Italy’s biggest summer scandal

Nothing like it has ever been seen and it is the big scandal of this summer. A planned operation, like those “blitz” that the Germans did in World War II, landed on Friday in large trucks in front of the beautiful Lake Mezzano, in some agricultural fields. The troops were thousands of young people summoned by social networks in Italy and half of Europe for an evening of electronic music; a “zombie dance” with drugs and alcohol. Just this Thursday, the police managed to get them to leave.

Lake Mezzano is in the region of two large cities, Viterbo and Grosseto, in the Lazio region and about 100-120 kilometers from Rome, and its metropolitan area of five million people.

The “blitz” of the organizers of the “zombie party” was profound. What is unusual is that was not detected. Suddenly, thousands of cars, motorhomes and all kinds of rolling vehicles arrived in a splendid tourist area, loaded with young Italians, French, Polish, English, French, Croatian, Spanish and other European nationalities.

Italy has been experiencing a devastating pandemic for 18 months which has killed more than 128,000 people. And the plague continues. What worries the most is not what happened but what can happen if the reunion of ten thousand young people becomes a contagious home which spreads the Delta variant of the virus throughout Italy and half of Europe, highly contagious and deadly.

30 hectares, chemical toilets and showers

Locals saw them arriving and deploying in an area of ​​30 hectares, where they pitched tents and places to sleep. The organizers also planned chemical toilets and showers.

On Friday 23, the party started. Some movies showed a youngster who wasn’t too crowded because there was a lot of space. They sang and moved on their own, precisely like zombies, walking dead, accompanying the deafening music, which we heard it “even in the Vatican”According to a furious tourist condemned to sleep little and nothing.

Sunday 15 was Mid August, the August feast day of the Roman Empire which celebrated the end of the annual harvests and began the agricultural feasts a few thousand years ago.

One death and cases of ethyl coma

This Ferragosto, the organizers of the party, whose identities are unknown, brought everything to its climax, while the greatest concentration of people arrived at the rave. That day he died at Lake Mezzano a young man found seven meters deep in the waters by the diving firefighters. They don’t know what happened to him.

Also on this day there was the three cases of ethyl coma among the “zombies”. And according to some accounts like that of Zelma, a young Italian student, “everything happened, with so much alcohol and so many drugs ”. One of the addicts tested positive for the coronavirus.

Now it is known who came and lived with, what other people have found, to detect coronavirus infections. The mayor of Valentano Stefano Bigiotti, where the lake is located, almost shouted denouncedor “a situation of extreme gravity, for a totally illegal, arbitrary, illegitimate initiative ”.

“Our biggest concern must be the dangers of contagion from Covid: we have a pandemic that severely punishes Europe and in particular Italy, where so many people are from. without anyone having checked”.

Biggiotti lamented the “semi-catastrophe” caused to tourist interests for the rave night. In the zone farmhouses flourish, which were quickly abandoned on Monday. In hotels too, there were tourists who they preferred to leave before the noise caused by “the dance of the zombies” and the fear of the madness of the absence of jugulars and human crowds.

The cry in the sky was started by the mayor of Grosseto, Piero Camilli, a notable of the region as the president of the local football club, which is right the farm business owner where the techno musical complex was located.

“You have to take them out now, because they will go alone when they run out of cocaine and heroin, ”Camille lamented.

Viterbo’s police chief Giancarlo Sant’Elia said that “dispersing them now is impossible because there are ten thousand of them on 30 hectares”. The specter of the pandemic called for caution.

The health adviser for the Lazio region, Alessio D’Amato arrived from Rome and decided on Tuesday that “The situation is out of control” and that it was not possible to stop intervening.

In Rome, at the Ministry of the Interior, events were still puzzling. The rave organizers may not have realized what they inadvertently accomplished provoke a political crisis, because the leaders of the parties of the strong Italian right, Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, had called for the resignation of Lucia Lamorgese, the Minister of the Interior, accusing him of incompetence.

To make matters worse, some of the thousands of participants preferred from Monday to focus on tourism and 2,500 left the rave. to distribute in other neighboring regions, increasing the protests of those who feared the invasion might escalate. Others fear that some may have helped spread the virus.

The organizers insisted on their intention to continue until Sunday 22nd, but the police commissioners who were preparing the deportation operation replied that it was impossible and that they take into account the fact that if a source of contagion of the coronavirus pandemic were unleashed, distributed in Italy and in other European countries, they would pay in prison praise the scandal.

This argument convinced them that it was better to break camp.

Since the night of this Wednesday, all the routes and roads entering and leaving the area, already in the hands of the police stations, began to identify those who wanted to leave and to prevent those who wanted to return to the camp from entering. .

The operation accelerated on Thursday. At dusk, isolated groups of young people were preparing their packages. They all left the place, saying goodbye to the lake.

Rome, correspondent

ap