I took the train to Genoa for the protest against the G8 summit on the evening of July 20, 2001. I had long planned to attend Saturday’s demonstration; then came the news that in Piazza Alimonda, a police officer had shot and killed a twenty-three-year-old, Carlo Giuliani. At that point, going was no longer a choice. That night the trains to Genoa were full of people like me: folks who could not stay home after Carlo’s death.

On July 21, in a militarized city the day after a killing, three hundred thousand of us marched anyway. Union members, scouts, church groups, families with strollers, alongside students and radical collectives. Those who were there also remember how it ended: the police charge on the authorized march, the tear gas along the waterfront, and then, that night, the raid on a school where activists were sleeping and the abuse of detainees in a makeshift holding facility. Acts that Italian and European courts would eventually call by the only word they deserve: torture.

Does it still make sense to talk about the Seattle movement and the Genoa G8, twenty-five years later? Absolutely. Not out of nostalgia, and not only for the sake of justice, though the memory of Carlo and of the victims of that night’s violence would be reason enough. But because that movement asked the right questions twenty years ahead of time, was defeated before its diagnosis could become common sense, and left behind a void now occupied by those who give the worst possible answers to those very questions.