The Milan anti-fascist demonstration and clashes begin as a march bounded by an informal territorial truce and end in panic, with police advancing, missiles flying, and Casaubon running for safety. Jacopo Belbo leads him and Sandra away from the confrontation, then explains how the city’s streets can turn flight into a matter of survival. The episode becomes more than an escape: Belbo’s practiced retreat recalls his childhood in wartime, while Casaubon later examines his own participation as a spectator and the shame he attaches to having run again.

Setting and political truce

The demonstration is called against fascist conspiracies and is to start at the university, with left-wing intellectuals invited to participate. It has no permit, but the police initially appear content to watch so long as the marchers respect the unwritten boundaries of Milan’s contested downtown. The protesters occupy the area beyond Largo Augusto; fascists are entrenched in Piazza San Babila and neighboring streets. The arrangement permits the rival groups to assemble while limiting the likelihood of direct confrontation.

The narrator likens this managed standoff to a lion and its tamer. The apparent threat is not simply that the lion may attack: the lion has been fed and sedated, and it remains calm while its own space is respected. When the tamer advances, the animal roars; the tamer raises a whip while stepping backward, and calm returns. The analogy makes the demonstration’s initial order seem less like the absence of violence than a performance whose boundaries regulate when violence can erupt. As the narrator observes, “A simulated revolution must also have its rules.”

Casaubon attends but does not march with any group. He stands at the edge of Piazza Santo Stefano among the reporters, editors, and artists who have come to show solidarity—the same social world that gathers at Pilade's. He finds Belbo beside Sandra, a woman he has often seen with Belbo at the bar and assumed to be his companion. Casaubon’s later knowledge of the file on Dr. Wagner changes how he understands her disappearance, but at the demonstration he knows her only by sight.

The march turns violent

The confrontation starts when activists wearing chains and ski masks force their way through police lines toward Piazza San Babila, shouting as they advance. The police front opens, fire hoses appear, and ball bearings and stones fly from the demonstration’s forward positions. Police move in with clubs, and the procession recoils. A shot is then heard from the far end of Via Laghetto. Casaubon cannot establish whether it is a tire exploding, a firecracker, or a gunshot; the uncertainty itself sharpens the panic rather than clarifying what has happened.

The police draw their weapons, trumpet blasts signal a charge, and the march divides. Some militants are ready to fight; others conclude that their duty has been done. Casaubon runs along Via Larga, afraid of being struck by a club. Belbo and Sandra appear beside him, moving quickly but without panic. The narrator recalls the clash only imperfectly, a limitation that leaves the episode’s confused sounds and movements closer to a frightened participant’s experience than to a definitive account of the violence.

At the corner of Via Rastrelli, Belbo catches Casaubon by the arm and redirects him into the narrow streets. Casaubon initially resists the route: Via Larga seems broader and more populated, while the alleys between Via Pecorari and the Archbishop’s Palace feel claustrophobic and offer fewer places to hide. Belbo signals for silence and leads them around two or three corners, gradually slowing their pace. They reach the area behind the cathedral, where traffic is normal and the battle is inaudible despite being less than two hundred meters away. After circling the cathedral, they emerge on its side facing the Galleria. Belbo buys a bag of corn and feeds the pigeons with apparent serenity. Jackets, ties, and Sandra’s gray turtleneck and pearls help the three blend into the Saturday crowd.

Belbo’s route out and wartime memory

Belbo turns the escape into a lesson in urban geography. Broad, straight boulevards, he explains, make it easier to control angry crowds; even where streets were widened for city planning, they could serve the authorities’ power to contain people. In contrast, the small streets of the Latin Quarter had favored the protesters in May 1968. His rule is to avoid fleeing in a straight line: use alleys, which a police force cannot all guard and which small groups of officers may themselves hesitate to enter. Someone attending a mass rally in an unfamiliar district should reconnoiter the neighborhood beforehand and take a position near the point where the side streets begin.

Casaubon asks whether Belbo learned such methods in Bolivia. Belbo instead connects his instincts to the war. He recalls his grandmother caught between Fascists and partisans on opposite sides of a cornfield. With bullets potentially crossing the field wherever she ran, she flung herself down in their line of fire and lay face-first in the dirt for ten minutes, hoping neither side would advance. She survived. Belbo says that lessons learned as a child become hardwired in the nervous system.

When Casaubon asks whether Belbo had been in the Resistance, Belbo answers that he was a spectator. He was eleven in 1943 and barely thirteen at the end of the war: too young to take part, but old enough to watch with what he calls photographic attention. He watched and ran, as he has just done in Milan. He suggests that, had he been twenty at the time, he might have written a poetic memoir in the 1950s; by the time he was old enough to write, he could only read books that had already been written. His belatedness spared him from the possible fate of being shot on the hill, but it also left him outside the actions and stories that shaped his generation.

The return of the spectator’s role

Casaubon later recognizes a troubling resemblance between Belbo’s childhood flight and their escape from the demonstration. Belbo had spoken about running away as if memory had given the act a heroic radiance, yet that memory returned only after he had again fled—wisely, but without heroism as Casaubon sees it—with Casaubon both accomplice and witness. The demonstration thus brings an old story into the present without resolving the difference between prudence and cowardice.

The problem becomes explicit in Casaubon’s private reckoning. He asks whether he attended out of moral choice or to test himself against the idea of an “Opportunity”—a decisive moment that he believes he has repeatedly missed because he was born too early or too late. He imagines that he would have wanted to fight in the cornfield, even at the risk of hitting his grandmother, and wonders whether he stayed out of the Milan confrontation because it belonged to another generation. He also considers whether accepting a danger that does not feel like one’s own might prove that one would have acted courageously in a different, more consequential crisis. His conclusion is uneasy: a contrived test is not the true opportunity, and a person can miss the moment while spending a life waiting for it.

The later recollections of the wartime town intensify the contrast. Belbo remembers those days as a rare time of clarity: a bullet was a bullet, a corpse was a corpse, and the opposing sides seemed distinguishable by red and black. The memory’s sweetness lies in that apparent sharpness, not in an uncomplicated claim that the past was safe or simple. Even then, Belbo had been a spectator, watching other people’s memories and the making of History rather than becoming the author of it. The Milan march repeats that position in a different political landscape: Belbo once again watches, runs, and survives, while Casaubon is left to interpret what the escape says about choice.

Narrative significance

The episode sets bodily action against retrospective explanation. In the streets, Belbo’s knowledge works before debate: he takes Casaubon by the arm, chooses alleys, and knows when to slow down. Only after the danger has receded does he turn that practical knowledge into an account of city planning and crowd control. Casaubon’s later reflections, by contrast, cannot settle whether running was wisdom or failure. The difference between immediate survival and retrospective judgment gives the scene its central tension.

The confrontation also links the book’s political present to the private history of the Italian Resistance without making the two occasions equivalent. Belbo’s childhood and the demonstration both involve danger, flight, and observation, but he was a child during the war and a cautious adult during the march. Casaubon’s search for an opportunity to prove his courage risks turning political commitment into a personal test; the narrative leaves that temptation exposed rather than rewarding it with a clean verdict. The crowd’s sudden division, the uncertain shot, and the quiet return to the Saturday streets show how quickly a public conflict can recede from view while remaining unsettled in memory.