Photos by Giacomo Cosua
Yesterday was the official day of the opening of the world EXPO in Milan, Italy. At the Expo on its first day, they have been counting around 200.000 visitors. But not everybody yesterday was happy about it. At least 20.000 people have been demonstrating on the other side of Milan against EXPO, as symbol of the failure of a corrupt system. Police and May Day protesters fought running battles through the center of Milan, over perceived social injustice and the cost of staging at Expo 2015. The central theme of this edition of Expo is “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”, and its challenge is to find new ways to feed the planet, in particular on those areas where the loss of food is still a huge problem, showing a big gap between rich and poor countries. Expo have been also criticized as it received some discussed sponsorship, like Coca Cola, McDonalds and ENI.
The demonstration at the beginning was very paceful, but after few hours at least 6-700 Black Bloc, have been starting fighting with the italian Police and Carabinieri. For 400 times the police have been using tear gas against the crowd, but it has been not enough to stop them, as we reported around 10 cars burning and few shops destroyed. Around 6pm the demonstration was over and Milan now has just to recover from a lot of scarf that this demonstration left in the center of the city.
