ROME, Italy (CN) — Children splash in a wading pool on the front lawn of what was once a hulking public art institute on Via del Casale de Merode, a residential street near central Rome. Their shouts of glee fill the heavy summer air with lightness. For now, life carries on as normal inside this gigantic squat.
Under the shade of a passageway connecting two buildings of the former school, aging Muslim men sit and talk and smoke cigarettes. Out in front of the school, a Peruvian man is working in his luxurious garden. Women chat in Italian as their children play in the water.
This tranquil scenario is deceiving: Everyone here is on high alert. At any moment, they know a phalanx of police could show up and force them all out.
“This is a critical moment,” said Andrea Papa, a 35-year-old juggler and aerial acrobat who lives in the squat. “This is a very difficult moment.”
This old art school is one of some 90 squats in Rome, and is slated to be shut down along with dozens of others in a mass operation to evict thousands of people who've turned abandoned buildings, most of them public structures, into homes.
These squats are a focal point in an ideological war between Rome's left-wing populace who by and large support the squatters and a new powerbroker in Rome: the right-wing Northern Italian party known as the League.
By going after Italy's squats, the League's leader and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is going after two of his favorite targets: immigrants and left-wing activists.
The first major expulsion took place July 15 when hundreds of police officers shut down a large squat inside a school where about 350 people lived. Many of those living in the school were Moroccans, Egyptians and Romanians. There were some Italians too, including a woman who'd lived there for 19 years.
In the past few days, police in Turin in Northern Italy evicted about 350 immigrants living inside abandoned structures in the Olympic Village, built to house athletes for Turin's 2006 Winter Olympics.
“Onward with the evictions and the return of order in all of Italy after years of waiting and silence,” Salvini said in a statement after the evictions in Turin.
Salvini is ordering law enforcement agencies to shut down squats big and small across Italy.
Squats, or occupazioni, are found throughout Italy and function as cheap housing for Italians but even more so for immigrants and foreigners. The squats are attractive for many people because there is no rent to pay.
But these squats also often serve another function: They are strongholds for a potpourri of mostly left-wing artists, musicians, political activists and radicals. And it's in Rome where one of the country's most entrenched, and diehard, movements in support of the squats can be found.
“We occupy public buildings that have been left empty for years,” Papa told a Courthouse News reporter during a tour of the large squat on Casale de Merode. “We don't occupy private buildings.
“A house, an income and dignity,” Papa said. “That's a slogan that is very dear to us — all of us.”