ITALY's political establishment was yesterday trying to assess the significance of the bizarre sequence of events which saw a group of eight armed men seize the campanile in Venice's Piazza San Marco in a gesture apparently intended to highlight their call for an independent Venetian state.
The seven-hour siege of the bell tower by the "soldiers" of the "Serenissima" (Most Serene Republic of Venice, which fell 200 years ago next Monday) ended just before 9 a.m. yesterday when a special police intervention force stormed the building from three different points and arrested the eight separatists.
No shots were fired during the police operation and no one was injured, even though the separatists were later found to have a machinegun and ammunition.
The eight had hijacked a vaporetto (Venetian ferry bus) late on Thursday night and forced it to land them and a seemingly home-made armoured vehicle on Piazza San Marco. From there the men proceeded to the campanile, forcing open the main door and occupying the building.
Although the pseudo-military operation appeared like something straight out of opera buffo, neither government nor opposition spokesmen considered it a laughing matter.
"We need to take note that a state of mind exists which invites political forces to speed up reforms ... to move towards a more federalist state," said the Senate speaker, Mr Nicola Mancino.
The Junior Minister of the Interior, Mr Gian Nicola Sinisi, confirmed that the occupation had been carried out by the same group of activists which, in recent months, has jammed evening television news bulletins by the state broadcaster RAI in the Venice area in order to voice its separatist demands. Mr Sinisi added: "The level of danger of this action lies in the fact that, in the end, they had arms and therefore it wasn't just a folkloric happening."
Italy's Northern League movement has long based its political fortune on northern disenchantment with Rome-based central government, seen by many as, at best, inefficient and needlessly bureaucratic and, at worst, corrupt and Mafia-infested.
However, the Northern League leader, Senator Umberto Bossi, was quick to dissociate his movement from the campanile occupation. "The whole thing seems unreal... If these people wanted to arouse public consciousness, then they chose the wrong method," he said.
Mr Bossi's words, however, did not spare him severe criticism from those who argue that his violent rhetoric and the fact that he has shifted the Northern League's primary objective from federalism to secession have helped to create the political context in which yesterday's so-called terrorist action took place.