Far-right leader Matteo Salvini’s seemingly unstoppable political rise in Italy has been hit by an unlikely challenge from a grassroots movement known as “the sardines”.
The group emerged in the city of Bologna when four friends invited people to join a protest against Salvini’s League, whose popularity is growing ahead of an election in the northern Emilia-Romagna region.
Salvini is looking to lead a resurgent right to its first victory in the region in the Jan. 26 vote and has said if the left loses power in the wealthy area then it should also quit central government and open the way for a national ballot.
But an estimated 12,000-15,000 people answered last Thursday’s protest call, squeezing together like sardines in Bologna’s main square to denounce Salvini, whose anti-immigrant, Italy-first rhetoric has resonated with many voters.
“To those who shout the loudest, we are responding by being as silent as fish, but in a shoal, packed one next to the other. There are more of us than them,” said Mattia Santori, 32, one of the organizers. Some in the crowd held up cut-out sardines and the name caught on.
Pollsters say Emilia-Romagna, a traditional leftist stronghold, could fall to the League and its rightist allies following successes in other regional votes, most recently in central Umbria last month.
The images of packed squares in Bologna and Modena were shared widely on social media, prompting similar initiatives in Florence and Benevento, a town in the southern Campania region.
Now graphic images of sardines are also flooding the social networks, but those images of closely grouped fish were already in evidence here in Barga way back in 2011 when Fabio Guazelli opened his exhibition of paintings ” il Dodicesimo Segno” which included images of sardines and other fish closely packed together /( full article here)
The fish motif reappeared again 3 years later in another of his exhibitions in Barga (article here)
The value of the sardine painting which is now in a private collection in Canada, will of course at the moment, be rising along with the rise of the Sardine Movement.
