On Saturday, September 28, over 10,000 people marched in silence through the streets of Mestre, a Venetian town on the mainland opposite the lagoon. The march was organized after 26-year-old Giacomo Gobbato, nicknamed Jack, was stabbed to death a few kilometers from Veneto's tourist capital on the night of September 20, while defending a woman who had been robbed.

Residents leaned out of their windows to applaud the procession as it progressed along the road from the train station to the city center. Triggered by the tragedy, angry Venetians spontaneously joined forces to visualize a different city.

In the last few years, Mestre has been subjected to a steady increase of robberies and violent incidents related to drug trafficking and heroin is wreaking havoc among ever younger users. The two Italian cities with the highest number of deaths from drug overdose are Venice and Rome, and according to the Italian website Geoverdose, seven people in Veneto have already died since the start of the year. Local health services count some 2,000 drug users undergoing treatment, but their figures certainly don't reflect the total number of drug users.

Concurrent with the overtourism that has spread throughout the Veneto region, resulting in real estate speculation and rising rents, entire neighborhoods in Mestre are being deserted by many of their residents. It is a demographic bleed that has had serious economic consequences, which two years ago, was highlighted by the artist Freak of Nature, who painted about 150 window fronts of all the vacant stores in the city center. The empty streets and disused buildings have now been infiltrated by criminal organizations, and the Venetians who remain often live in fear and feel they have been abandoned.

The conservative mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, a former businessman whose election to office in 2015 was facilitated by the Lega Nord (LN), always placed security at the heart of his election campaigns. In the summer of 2018, he organized a spectacular operation against drug trafficking. He brought in the police, the army and helicopters and the streets around Mestre's train station were closed to traffic. They arrested 25 people.

After Giacomo Gobbato's murder, the mayor continued to call on the interior minister to keep sending soldiers to maintain order. But his repressive approach, coupled with a nine-year administration of serious budget cuts in social services, has resulted in failure. In recent months, a series of investigations and indictments against the mayor and his advisers for corruption seems to have further distanced the municipality from the expectations of its constituents.

You have 46.97% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.