"Uno terrorista internazionale!" the Carabinieri officer yelled at me, hitting me in the face.
"Io non terrorista!" I cried.
He hit me a second time as his men were looking on in delight.
I was standing naked, apart from my brief, in an interrogation room in Rome, surrounded by thugs in uniform.
The officer´s boot was grinding down on my naked foot with the same movement you use to extinguish a discarded cigarette.
I was starting to feel a bit like one of those poor guys in a Nazi torture cellar from the movies.
The officer smiled, then he hit me a third time.
Rage had been building up inside of me with every blow, I was preparing to hit back if he would hit me one more time. I don´t know why, but luckily he didn´t. I guess if he had, I would have hit back and then I would have been in serious trouble.
If you want to see what Italian cops are capable of, watch Diaz - Don´t Clean Up This Blood and you will see that which slumbers at the substratum of any police force – pure fascism.
I had a wonderful time in Rome, in the summer of 1983.
I had just graduated from school after the usual 13 years it takes in Germany to do the Abitur, Germany´s entry requirement for university.
After that I hitchhiked to Athens, took a plane to Tel Aviv, had many adventures in Israel, took the boat back to Piraeus and hitchhiked to Rome.
In Rome I met a bunch of hippies from all over Europe living in a small park.
There was a fountain, with water falling down from the top, where we used to take a shower every morning, we were hippies, but no dirty hippies😉, some nice big trees for protection against the relentless Roman sun and adjacent to the park there was a vegetarian restaurant (in Rome in 1983! even before I was vegetarian).
The hippies had a deal with the restaurant. In the afternoon, when the restaurant would start putting out chairs and tables in the little park (probably also not strictly legal), the hippies would move away from their usual resting place under those trees, to a place behind the fountain, so the restaurant´s patrons could enjoy their dinner without having to look at or being watched by some hippies. In exchange for their cooperation the hippies would get lots of free food from the restaurant at night after it had closed and the patrons had left the park. And this was excellent Italian food, not some crap, we feasted on every night!
In the morning we did the rounds to some ecclesiastical institutions, where the good samaritans would give us bread and cheese, and in the streets we would ask passersby for some coin, which we then miraculously turned into the blood of Christ.
Ah, the joys of living freely and fully!
As one of my hippie comrades used to say “If you starve in Rome, you´re either lazy or stupid.“
Then, one faithful day, against the warning of our veteran hippie, an old Irish junkie, I decided to go and see another place in Rome, Piazza Navona, where I met another group of hippies to hang out with.
Little did I know that Piazza Navona was one of the hotspots of Roman drug trade in those days and a favorite play ground for the police to practice their raiding techniques.
So first it was the Municipale, Rome´s municipal police, paying us a visit, which went along quite civilised, but then, about an hour later, the Carabinieri came.
Still despised by many Italians for their role under Mussolini, they certainly lived up to their reputation!
They put us up against some fence, machine guns at the ready, not a nice feeling!
Some Carabinieri guy was dragging a blonde hippie girl to the fence by her hair.
But due to some herbal influence I was actually quite chilled and said to the boss officer "Relax mate, no problem!" in German when he asked me for identification. Big mistake! He immediately freaked out, threw me into his car and off we went, my backpack being left on the piazza, to the Carabinieri station, where they told me to strip and searched my stuff. They did not mind the bit of Cannabis they found, but when they found the bullet, the beating started!
I had found that bullet, which was still fully functional, in Massada, Israel and had kept it as a souvenir. It was a rifle bullet from some M 16 or whatever the Israeli soldiers guarding Massada had been using at that time.
So for the Carabinieri it was uno proiettile d´arma da guerra, a projectile of a weapon-of-war.
What I did not know at the time was that, due to the terror of the Brigate Rosse, The Red Brigades, in the seventies and eighties, Italy had very strict anti-terror laws and the possession of such a projectile was on a par with possessing the actual weapon.
Of course those Carabinieri did not speak one word of English or German. I should have kept quiet, but my inexperienced 19 year old mind was so shocked that they thought I was a terrorist, that I was eager to explain myself. Now I did not speak any Italian, but with years of Latin and some French in school, I could understand and explain pretty complex stuff as long as the Italian was similar to those Latin loanwords we have in German or English, like terrorist, international, liberation and so on. It did not really help when they found out that I had been to Israel, because then I could have also been to Lebanon, then the training ground of international terrorism.
So I had been explaining some pretty complex stuff, when they asked me a question starting with dove which is not the Germanic word for pigeon in Italian but means where, which unfortuntely I did not know at the time and could not deduct from any Latin, where where means quo as in quo vadis? Of course they did not believe that I could talk about a lot of complex stuff but did not understand a simple word like where and thought I was taking the piss.
In German we have the word doof, relative to the English deaf, but in the meaning of dumb, so I thought, "Are they asking me if I am dumb or what?" But I just could not figure out what they were talking about.
After yelling "Dove, dove?" a few times into my face, they lost patience and drove me to some prison.
As the cell door was clunking shut behind me I still could not believe what had just happened to me.
Meaning of the Carabinieri insignia
can read
knows somebody who can read
knows somebody who knows somebody who can read
Revenge is a dish best served cold - Old Klingon proverb 😀
For more inspiring stories and a group of inspiring and supportive people check out @ecotrain.