On this week's episode...

Margherita arrives at the studio just in knick of time to tell us and all the listeners about the experiece of the Emerging Writers Festival, the events she helped organise, the conversations, the many points of meeting and the importance of enmeshing cultural, political and social realities in order to create the world that we want to build together. 
 

You can check out what the program was and maybe you'll even find a new author whose books to love here. 

And speaking of alternative realities and different ways to organise the lives we live, we cross to the streets of Rome on the 20th of September to hear Radio Onda D'Urto correspondent Stefano Bertoldi who gives an in depth recap of the day. Roughly 50 thousand people were there on the streets of Rome protersting the closure of the much loved social centre SPIN TIME LABS and talking about the many realities that lived inside and now continue their activity outside the centre.

The fight is far from over as the Italian government refuses to let the over 70 families that were living there back inside and these people are forced to camp on the street or seek other accomodation many of whom with young children or escaping conditions of domestic violence. 

We will continue to keep you updated on the situation but in the meantime you can read and listen to more here. 

As we talk about self determination and the need to collectively build a new world together it brings us to the sad news that renowned free server providers Austistici//Inventati have been forced to shut down there servers. Those servers hosted many radical blogs and alternative sources of information that were freely disseminated around the world, many of these formed part of our network of information through which we were able to report to our listeners updates about the Anan Yaeesh trial and other stories. A//I was designated a terrorist organisation by the US and the Italian government was only too happy to comply.

Margherita reads out their final communique which is full of bittersweet power, you can read the communique here. 
 

By now nothing really surprises us regarding teh depths that the Meloni government is willing to go. In this week's cabinet of horrors the demagogue and her acolytes announced policies which would see children stripped of their constitutionally protected rights to freedom of religion by banning Islmaic religious garments from being worn at school. This however wasn't enough in her proposal was also the capping of "non italian" students in classrooms with very fast and loose definitions of what impacts these decisions would have for hundreds of thousand of parents and their children. To add insult to injury foreign minister Tajani the same week proclaimed that women should wear long skirts and stay at home if they wish to be fit and proper to be considered women.

We discuss these issues and conceptions of what makes a migrant and how contexts shape these terms and our responsibility towards them as progressive activists. Especially as these conversation takes place on Aboriginal land that has not been ceded. 

You can read more about it here.  
 

All the way from Milan tracing her families lines of migration teacher and author Giovanna Stanganello joins us live in the studio to talk about her upcoming book "Sciatu Meu (Mio Respiro)" that is currently on the press at Transeuropa Edizioni.

The story is a saga that is not nostalgic but engages with contemporary issues. It begins in Calabria in the early 20th century, moves to Argentina, and from there arrives in Melbourne. World War I, the great migratory waves, and the Great Depression of 1929 are more than just a backdrop: the vicissitudes of a family living on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea and crossing the oceans become a symbol of a broader history, capturing a universal dimension made up of desires and uprooting.  At a time when wars, sovereignist self-interest, and the unscrupulous nature of finance dominate, the text brings these themes to life with language that draws on fragments of the poetic quality of the dialect.

We explore with Giovanna the many themes that her novel explores ebbing and flowing through stories real and conjured to bring to our present something that yells out from the past. 

You can listen to the interview here. 

Songs we played:

Nilla Pizzi - L'Emigrante
Franco Battiato - Povera Patria