Belbo leads the group to safety amid clashes at a Milan demonstration

The Milan demonstration and its sudden turn into street violence reveal Jacopo Belbo as a practiced guide through political disorder. When a march against fascist conspiracies breaks apart amid police charges and panic, he steers Casaubon and Sandra away from the main routes and into the alleys, transforming flight into a deliberate use of the city’s geography. The episode also exposes the violence as bounded by an unspoken urban arrangement: the danger rises when protesters cross the lines that divide their territory from that of the fascists and the police.

Setting and Unwritten Boundaries

The demonstration is organized to begin at the university, with left-wing intellectuals invited to attend. It has no permit, yet the police initially watch rather than intervene, apparently on the understanding that the march will remain within the limits of a tacit territorial settlement. The protesters occupy an area beyond Largo Augusto; fascists are entrenched around Piazza San Babila and its neighboring streets. As long as neither side crosses the line, little happens. The narrator compares this balance to a lion and a tamer: the lion has been fed and sedated, and becomes dangerous when the tamer steps into its space. The analogy makes the calm seem less like an absence of conflict than a carefully managed condition, with the threat of force built into the arrangement.

Casaubon attends but does not march with a group. He stands at the edge of Piazza Santo Stefano among reporters, editors, artists, and the familiar crowd from Pilade's, there to show solidarity. The position keeps him near the demonstration but outside its organized ranks. That distance becomes consequential when the marchers begin moving: he is close enough to be caught in the upheaval, but not aligned with the militants who are prepared to fight.

The Clash and the Break in the March

The violence begins when activists wearing ski masks and carrying chains force their way through police lines toward Piazza San Babila, shouting as they advance. The police front parts; fire hoses appear, and ball bearings and then stones fly from the demonstration's front ranks. Police move forward with clubs, and the procession recoils. A shot is heard from the far end of Via Laghetto, though Casaubon cannot tell whether it is a tire exploding, a firecracker, or a pistol shot. The uncertainty is part of the scene: a sound that cannot be identified is enough to turn confrontation into panic.

The police draw their weapons, trumpet blasts signal a charge, and the demonstration divides. One group consists of militants ready to fight; the other, including people who believe their duty is done, breaks away. Casaubon runs along Via Larga, afraid of being struck by a club. The march's political purpose gives way, in an instant, to the immediate problem of getting out alive. His account also remains explicitly uncertain: he recalls the episode imperfectly, and the shot's source is never settled.

Belbo's Escape Route

Belbo appears beside Casaubon as the crowd runs, accompanied by Sandra. At the corner of Via Rastrelli, he takes Casaubon by the arm and directs him away from Via Larga. Casaubon initially resists the choice: the wider street seems more open and populated, while the small lanes between Via Pecorari and the Archbishop's Palace feel claustrophobic and offer fewer places to hide or blend in if police intercept them. Belbo nevertheless signals for silence and leads the group through several turns, gradually slowing their pace.

The route changes their exposure to danger. They emerge behind the cathedral, where traffic is normal and the sounds of the clash do not carry, although the fighting is less than two hundred meters away. They circle the cathedral to the side facing the Galleria. Belbo buys a bag of corn and feeds the pigeons with an air of serene pleasure. The ordinary gesture completes their escape: dressed like people in the Saturday crowd—Belbo and Casaubon in jackets and ties, Sandra in a gray turtleneck and pearls—they disappear into a public scene that gives them cover. The danger has not been defeated; the group has simply moved beyond its immediate reach.

The City as a Tactic

Once they are safe, Belbo turns the escape into a lesson in urban planning. He argues that broad, straight boulevards, including the Champs-Élysées, are easy for authorities to use when controlling angry crowds. Narrow streets, by contrast, are harder for police to guard comprehensively; officers who encounter people alone in the alleys may be as frightened as those they pursue. Belbo’s practical rule is not to flee in a straight line but to head for side streets, and to reconnoiter an unfamiliar neighborhood before attending a mass rally, locating the point where the narrow lanes begin.

The explanation connects the group's route to the planned shape of the city. Belbo says Napoleon III, following the example of the Savoys in Turin, had Paris disemboweled and remade as a network of boulevards, a work of urban design that also made the streets useful for controlling crowds. He contrasts those avenues with the little streets of the Latin Quarter, where May '68 was seen to its best advantage. In this episode, an apparently minor choice of alley rather than boulevard becomes a means of evading the police. The demonstration's territorial boundaries shape the outbreak of violence; the street plan, in turn, shapes who can escape it.

Significance

The episode brings together political spectacle and physical vulnerability. The demonstration begins under an informal arrangement that permits it so long as its participants respect the city's unwritten divisions; once activists cross toward Piazza San Babila, the police response makes the latent threat explicit. Casaubon's fear is not an abstract reaction to politics but a bodily one, focused on the possibility of being hit as he runs. Belbo responds with practiced attention to space, pace, and appearance, guiding the others from a scene of visible confrontation into the ordinary Saturday crowd.

Belbo's calm is especially striking against the demonstration's theatrical language of lions, tamers, and simulated revolution. First the narrator compares the uneasy political balance to a sedated lion; later Belbo's knowledge of alleys turns the city's architecture into the practical answer to the danger that balance conceals. The episode also establishes the contrast between the open avenue, where crowds can be contained and charged, and the smaller street, where control is harder to enforce. Belbo's escape is therefore both immediate protection for Casaubon and Sandra and a demonstration of how the physical organization of the city can serve power—or help people slip beyond its grasp.