Italy will deploy 500 additional army troops to “defend Milan” following two days of unrest in which demonstrators clashed with police, looted shops and vandalised property, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said on Monday.
The deployment is expected to form part of a package of security measures that the cabinet is due to approve at a meeting on Tuesday, reports The Guardian.
The move comes as shops in central Milan shut early and boarded up their windows amid fears of renewed violence in Italy’s financial capital.
“From words to action: 500 more troops to defend Milan,” Salvini, head of the co-ruling right-wing League party, wrote on social media.
Most shops in Via Montenapoleone, Milan’s luxury shopping district, had removed merchandise from their windows as a precaution.
The street, home to high-end brands including Chanel, Tiffany and Dior, saw police patrols as a handful of tourists looked on.
Several hundred hooded protesters, many believed to be minors, set rubbish bins on fire and looted shops in the city centre over the weekend.
The violence followed an initially peaceful demonstration on Saturday over poor public services and rising living costs.
Television footage showed that sports retailers Decathlon and Arc’teryx, along with mobile phone operator Vodafone, were among the businesses targeted.
Clothing brands Levi’s and Under Armour, as well as Decathlon, covered their shop windows with cardboard and wooden panels.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who faces a national election next year, condemned the violence and chaired a meeting with ministers and security chiefs on Monday to discuss the situation.
“The government will respond firmly to these attacks on the state, including through measures aimed at curbing violence by minors,” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who also serves as deputy prime minister, wrote on X.
The Corriere della Sera newspaper reported that Meloni was considering extending preventive detention for minors and introducing a crackdown on youth gangs. The government is also considering bringing forward some provisions of an existing security bill currently under parliamentary scrutiny.
Italian police said they had detained 271 young people during Sunday’s unrest in Milan. Of those taken to police stations, 32 were arrested, including 23 minors and 13 foreign nationals, police said on Monday. A further 28 people were reported to judicial authorities.
The unrest followed clashes on Saturday in other northern Italian cities, including Bologna, Brescia, Bergamo and Turin. A police report released on Sunday said authorities had arrested 28 protesters in those disturbances.
The violence echoed unrest in neighbouring France, where hundreds of thousands of people angered by rising living costs and declining public services took to the streets on Saturday, in some of the country’s most violent protests in years.
