IT WAS a Saturday night, March 15th last, the night of Carolina's 14th birthday. Her parents had decided to spring a little surprise on her, asking her two best school friends to organise a party and invite 30 or so of her pals around for a festa in the family's central Milan apartment.
The parents made themselves scarce, leaving their elder daughter, Francesca (22), to hold the fort. All was proceeding normally, on a classic Italian teenage diet of disco music, pizza and coca cola, when the apartment citofano, or doorbell, rang.
It sounded like a late arrival and without thinking, Francesca, opened the door. It was in fact a group of about 50 young people, mainly male and in the 15-17 age bracket, all uninvited. Most of them had arrived on state-of-the-art scooters. All were fashionably and well dressed.
At first, Francesca did not understand what was happening, thinking the new arrivals were teenage gate-crashers. When the uninvited guests began to knock food onto the floor, spit on the carpets and fight among themselves, she understood that something untoward was happening.
Francesca asked the gate-crashers to leave. They ignored her. In desperation, she called the police and when it became obvious to her "guests" that a squad car was on its way, they left en masse in a hurry, smashing windows and knocking over potted plants in the condominium building as they charged back downstairs to their scooters and a getaway.
When the invaders had gone, Francesca and Carolina discovered that, while they had been trying to put some of the gate-crashers out, others had been upstairs going through every cupboard and drawer in the house, and helping themselves to whatever they came across. Watches, cigarette holders, jewellery, Lacoste T-shirts and personal knick-knacks all had "walked".
You might argue there is nothing very strange in all of this. Teenage parties the world over can become rowdy. However, this was more than a one-off prank. Party gate-crashing and the subsequent sack of the house or apartment in question has become a habit for a select band of Milanese kids, a sort of gang ritual confined to those with wealthy parents.
Francesca and Carolina are the daughters of a well-known and successful Italian singer, Roberto Vecchioni. Unlike other parents who had simply shrugged their shoulders and started to clean after encountering similar experiences, Vecchioni decided to file a complaint against the gate-crashers (many of whom were known to his family as the children of well-known Milanese lawyers, doctors, architects and even MPs).
When Vecchioni went to his local police station to confirm his complaint, or denucia, he was confronted by an angry mother who said: "Here you are, denouncing children and getting annoyed about stolen items and you don't even have a safe in your flat."
That the above story indicates a certain malaise among the idle, young Milanese rich is only too true. The 15- and 16-year-olds in question represent the (relatively harmless) expression of an existential angst not known to their parents' generation in Italy, a generation that had to struggle hard in the wake of the second World War. The fruit of Italy's remarkable economic success story, these children seem to conform to a classic pattern of material wealth and spiritual poverty, of technological facility and moral vacuum.
In much of this, these young people resemble their contemporaries in the developed and affluent West. In Italy, however, they tend to be conformist, even when it comes to protesting, so much so that an identikit for the typical "idle young brat" can easily be put together: His/her scooter is a Honda ZX, Honda SH or an Aprilia Scarabeo; he/she wears an Aspesi rain jacket, Adidas trainers, a button-neck sweater and a Swatch watch; he/she drinks coca-cola, works out in the gym, always carries a mobile phone (mammy and daddy pay the bills) and, if they have a political preference at all, it is to the centre-right (the Forza Italia leader, Silvio Berlusconi, and the Alleanza Nazionale leader, Gianfranco Fini, are their favourites).
Since the Vecchioni story became public knowledge last weekend, five young people - a 14-year-old girl in Milan, a 20-year-old unemployed man in Aprilia near Rome, a 21-year-old student in Rome, a 23-year-old student in Genoa and a 24-year-old local government employee in Rome - have all committed suicide. Makes you wonder.