Don Burgio, 'it is a suffering generation and these episodes are not over'

The urban guerrilla with the attack on shops and supermarkets in Milan which saw the protagonists of very young people, even second generation ones, "is the result of many issues on the agenda for some years now, with inequalities that are very widespread. I say that it is a sort of assault on the bakeries of Manzoni's memory, except that the bakeries today are replaced by Foot Locker and by those shops that say wealth and impoverishment on the other side". Don Claudio Burgio, founder of the Kayròs association for the reception of adolescents in difficult situations and chaplain of the Beccaria juvenile prison in Milan, explains it on the phone to ANSA.

"The moral conscience of these kids is actually fragile - he underlines -. What we have seen are predatory demonstrations therefore without an ideological logic, obviously also given their age, we must ask ourselves if there is a direction behind these episodes, for me there is some direction and I believe that it is not finished".

According to Don Burgio, what drives these kids is a discomfort, "a problem of integration" but not only "because I also saw Italian kids". Theirs "is a predatory and impulsive style, violent as kids generally are when they're sick, so it's a very suffering generation", he explains further.

The League's proposal to tighten the granting of citizenship at 18 if certain crimes are committed does not please Don Burgio. "I think the opposite, it is precisely because there is no citizenship, because these kids are without citizenship that they rebel - he concludes -. So it is clear that integration involves not giving citizenship to those who commit crimes, but in a preventative way by allowing these kids born in Italy to feel part of this country. This thing, by dint of avoiding it, clearly creates all these discontents".