On Saturday there have been hard clashes in Milan between the police and  protesters. Masked guys broke shop windows and devastated the city center. The trigger was a demonstration against the cost of life. Vandals might have come, it has been reported, mostly from the city outskirts: second generation Italians, “maranza”, as we say here.

One imagine struck me the most: a guy running out of a pricey restaurant in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele sporting a big, white cake under his arm.

This goes beyond individual psichology – why in the world should you steal a cake in the middle of big turmoils?  It has more to do, I think, with that sort of collective inconscious whose definition had been given by Carl Jung.

There is a double path in this city, and at age 14 you suddendly realize that you’re  either on the one leading to a potential success in life, or on the other one, leading to nowhere,  a life of permanent struggle if not desperation. You know that half of the guys your age will never make it, lost in a permanent limbo, stuck in a vacuum filled with social media and comparisons.

I’m in no way justifying the devastation occurred. But, while identifying the vandals a and punishing them is fair, we must try to recover them and read between the lines: Milan has  mocked bigger cities like London and Paris , losing its identity and progressively dismantling its safety nets: it managed to attract rich people from all over the world at the direct expenses of many of its inhabitants.

The fact that a center-left mayor like Giuseppe Sala is running the city since 2016 is ironic.

In reality, over the course of the years, real estate speculators took control of the city. Marketing is everywhere, and the cost of life skyrocketed. Social envy and the perception of violence are out of control.

There’s no punishment hard enough to reverse this course: it’d be better to admit the failure of this carefully polished model, that last week’s clashes showed for what it is: pure fiction.