Warning: How Punks Illegally Stole a Roman Fort

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Forte Prenestino

First in a new series: It Don’t Mean Squat! — a Politics Verses The Music Scene spinoff, opening with Forte Prenestino, a squatted Roman fort that’s been running as a music venue since 1986. Same beat, wider map: venues, squats, and the forces that keep music alive (or don’t) outside the U.S.

We’ve spent a lot of column space on this site talking about what happens to a music scene when the buildings that hold it start disappearing. So it’s worth showing you what the other end of that story can look like — Forte Prenestino, a squatted fort in Rome that’s been standing, functioning, and hosting bands continuously since 1986, on land the people running it have never once paid rent for.

I played a show inside it. This is that story, plus the actual history, plus one thing that happened there I still can’t fully explain.

“Per questo rimarrà sempre un po’ scomodo, sempre un po’ in bilico, che chi sta troppo comodo si addormenta, e noi, costruendo un sogno, preferiamo tenere sempre gli occhi aperti.”

“That’s why it will always stay a little uncomfortable, a little precarious — because whoever gets too comfortable falls asleep, and we, building a dream, prefer to keep our eyes open.”
— from the fort’s own “Chi siamo” (Who We Are) statement, forteprenestino.net

What Forte Prenestino Actually Is

Forte Prenestino sits in the Centocelle neighborhood of Rome, and the short version is: it’s a 19th-century military fort that got squatted by anarchists, punks, and students in 1986 and never gave the building back.

The fort itself was built between 1880 and 1884, one of fifteen nearly identical forts thrown up in a defensive ring around Rome after the city became the capital of a newly unified Italy. It was obsolete almost immediately — artillery technology moved faster than the concrete could dry — and none of the fifteen ever saw combat. By the 1950s it was just sitting there. In 1977, the city of Rome started using it as an actual garbage dump.

On May 1, 1986 — May Day, deliberately — a coalition of activists occupied it during what they billed as a “Festival of Non-Work.” Their first move wasn’t a political statement. It was cleaning up nearly a decade of dumped municipal trash with their own hands.

It’s been running ever since. Thirteen hectares, roughly two dozen semi-independent collectives operating inside it, an actual self-managed music school, a print shop, an archive, a comic-arts festival, a wine festival, and a music venue that’s hosted acts ranging from Fugazi (five separate times, according to Dischord’s own live archive) to Mano Negra to Autechre to Jello Biafra to the industrial group Test Department — and, further back than any of those, Rollins Band, who played the fort on September 21, 1987, with support from Gore, right in the middle of a European run that also hit Bologna, Milan, and Turin that same week. NoMeansNo played the fort too — there’s video of it, dated June 30, 1988 — and by my own memory, Canada’s D.O.A. rolled through more than once on those same kinds of package tours, though I can’t point you to a paper trail on that one the way I can for the others; I was there, my camera was there, and that’s the account I’ve got. The rap crew Assalti Frontali — who still headline the fort’s biggest shows today — built their own recording studio inside it back in the 1990s. One Italian design magazine has called it, flatly, “the biggest social centre in Europe.” Every May Day, it throws the same party it’s thrown for going on forty years now — the Festa del Non Lavoro — thousands of people, a full day of bands on the piazza stage.

One thing worth being precise about, because it matters for how this story ends: in 2008, the Italian government recognized the fort as a protected cultural heritage site. That is not the same thing as legalizing the occupation. As recently reported, the building has never been formally regularized and never evicted in nearly forty years — “mai sanato, mai sgomberato.” The state gave the building a plaque. It never gave the squatters a lease.

A Quick Word on “Squatters’ Rights”

Before going further, it’s worth explaining what that phrase actually means, because it’s older and stranger than most people think — and because the American version of it isn’t the version protecting this fort.

“Squatters’ rights” in English usually means adverse possession: a legal principle with roots that go back to Roman law and even earlier, built on a simple idea — if land sits unused long enough while someone else is openly, continuously using it instead, the law eventually recognizes the user over the absentee owner. “Use it or lose it.” It’s why the concept shows up in the Code of Hammurabi nearly 4,000 years ago, and why it’s baked into common-law countries from the U.S. to the U.K. to Australia today, usually requiring somewhere between five and twenty years of open, uncontested occupation before a squatter can claim real legal title.

Italy runs on civil law, not common law, so its equivalent is called usucapione — but there’s a critical wrinkle that actually matters here: Italian courts have made clear that usucapione essentially cannot be claimed against a municipally owned building, which Forte Prenestino is. So the fort was never going to be legally “won” the way a homesteader might win frontier land. That’s not what’s protecting it.

What actually protects it is a different, more Italian-specific legal idea, one the Italian Supreme Court (Cassazione) has spelled out directly in rulings on cases just like this one: acquiescenza — tacit tolerance. If a city knowingly tolerates an occupation of its own building for social or cultural purposes for roughly twenty years without moving to evict, the courts have ruled that tolerance itself starts to function as a kind of unspoken consent. The court’s own phrase for it, more or less: tolleranza uguale legittimazione — tolerance equals legitimacy. It’s not ownership. It’s closer to a squatter’s version of adverse possession’s logic, applied to permission instead of title.

There’s a second wrinkle that explains why nothing happened after that 1996 police clash I mentioned above: under Italian criminal law, occupying a building like this is technically a crime — up to three years and a fine — but it’s only prosecutable if the property owner formally files a complaint. The city of Rome, which owns the fort, mostly just… hasn’t. Decade after decade.

Zoom out, and the fort fits into something much bigger: a real, organized European squatting movement that took off across the continent in the 1960s and ’70s — Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, England all saw waves of it, tied to housing shortages, urban decay, and a generation of counterculture activists who treated a “right to housing” as something worth actually taking rather than waiting on. Italy alone is estimated to have somewhere around 50,000 currently occupied buildings, though nobody keeps an official count. Some of those occupations eventually cut deals and legalized — Italy even has separate acronyms for it, CSOA for the still-squatted version, CSA once a center formally regularizes. Forte Prenestino has always stayed in the first category, on purpose.

And that tension — tolerance without ownership, twenty years of looking the other way that can just as easily stop — is exactly what’s back on the table right now, with a formal national push underway in Italian Parliament to either regularize centers like this one for good, or clear them out for good. Which is where this story picks back up.

Looking around Topeka Kansas its not hard to find empty unused buildings. Several well known slumlords have been collecting properties for years, yet not paying taxes on them. The buildings sit empty, decaying, eroding the environment. Often they do get “Squatted” but not in the European way; Homeless persons find a way in and set up camp. But they are eventually evicted.
It shouldn’t take a visionary genius to figure out what could happen in Topeka that would solve many problems at once.

Getting Inside Forte Prenestino

The main entrance still crosses what everyone there just calls il ponte levatoio — the drawbridge. It doesn’t move anymore. Somewhere along the last forty years it got fixed permanently in the down position, because nobody occupying an anarchist social center has much use for a drawbridge that actually needs raising. You walk across it, through a corridor, and out into the Piazza d’Armi — the old parade ground, dirt floor still original, stone drainage channels still cut into the ground exactly where the Italian army put them a hundred and forty years ago.

From there the fort opens up sideways into a wall of arched brick chambers — what everyone who’s spent time there just calls “the cells.” That’s not a euphemism and it’s not a horror-movie flourish; it’s literally what the fort’s own architecture calls them. They were built as soldiers’ barracks, low and vaulted, positioned right up against gun-slits in the outer wall so troops could already be in firing position the second an invasion came. Nobody ever fired a shot out of them. Instead, over four decades, different collectives claimed different arches and turned them into whatever the fort needed next — recording studios, gallery space, housing, a hair salon at one point, apparently a bee farm at another. Tunnels run back from there into more chambers, a powder magazine, water wells, and — this part is real, not folklore — a labyrinth that keeps going further than most visitors bother to follow.

We played the stage in the big open courtyard, generator running off to the side, just behind the old weapons magazine. Somewhere further down that same wall of arches, they’d set up a couple of the barracks rooms as a crash pad for touring bands. That’s where the story starts.

The Cafeteria Murals

Before I get to the crash pad, I have to tell you about the food hall, because I still think about it.

They fed us there — same room, same line, same food, where they feed the neighborhood’s homeless population too, no separation, no distinction made between a touring band and anyone else who walked in hungry. I’ve had a lot of tour food in my life. The minestrone I ate in that room, cooked by whoever happened to be running the kitchen collective that week, is still the best bowl of soup I’ve ever had, and I mean that with total sincerity.

In fact, several times a week they serve meals to the local neighborhood citizens and homeless or needy folks. Punks, artists, activists, people show up for these meals for a sense of community as much as for the food. Most of the squats I have visited in Europe also provided meals for the local poor and needy, some operated food pantries and took in donations of ‘close to spoiling’ food from grocery stores and restaurants in the area.

In a couple of these more organized squats, there are actually Michlin rated 5-star restaurants with waiting lists.

Some squats are strictly housing and do not have the live music and arts and cultural things. Just a place for the poverty stricken and homeless to lay their heads and keep their stuff.

The walls in there were covered in murals, and I wish to god I could find the photos I took of them, because they told the story of the fort’s early years better than any placard could. Street battles. The punks and anarchists and artists who’d occupied the place, going up against the police who kept trying to push them back out. One panel — and this is the one I actually remember clearest, decades later — showed a punk perched up on top of the fort’s outer wall, bare ass hanging out over the edge, firing off cartoon turds down at the police below, middle fingers up on both hands and drawn on fire.

That’s not something I can find you a source for. It’s a mural somebody painted in a squat cafeteria, and as far as I know it was never photographed for anything but personal cameras like mine — mine included, except I’ve lost the print. But the underlying history it was joking about is real. A detailed piece of Roman reporting on the fort’s history documents a specific clash in November 1996: a noise complaint brought police in, it “degenerated” — shoving, thrown objects, officers hurt — and Rome’s prosecutor’s office actually opened a formal case against the occupation afterward. And then nothing happened. No eviction followed. The case just sat there, and the fort stayed exactly where it was.

That’s the pattern, as far as I can tell, more than once: the state shows up, something ugly happens, paperwork gets filed, and the fort simply outlasts the paperwork.

The Part I Have to Be Honest About

Here’s where I have to slow down, because I got two different versions of this place’s history depending on who I asked, and only one of them holds up.

What I was told, standing in Rome in 2001, was that the fort had been used by Nazi or Fascist forces during World War II — not for long, the story went, but long enough that something happened there. What actually holds up under real digging is more specific, and it points about six kilometers west, to a different fort in the same defensive ring: Forte Bravetta, on the other side of the city. That one has a documented, well-sourced, genuinely grim history — it was Rome’s actual execution ground from 1932 through 1945, and during the nine months of Nazi occupation between late 1943 and mid-1944, somewhere between 68 and 77 Roman partisans and resistance fighters were shot there by German military tribunal order. There’s a memorial park there today with their names on a plaque.

Fifteen nearly identical forts, ringing the same city, built in the same decade by the same design — it is an easy story to attach to the wrong building, especially secondhand, especially years later. I can’t find anything that puts Forte Prenestino itself inside that history. What I can tell you is that the confusion is old enough and common enough that I’m clearly not the only person who’s heard it this way.

I’m not scrubbing the story out of this piece, because it’s part of what I was told and part of why the place felt the way it felt. I just owe you the honest version alongside it.

What the Bass Player Wouldn’t Say Until He Said It

None of that history is why our bass player wouldn’t sleep inside.

The touring-band crash space was set up in a couple of those barracks rooms — the arched brick “cells” along the courtyard wall, same style as everywhere else in the fort, mattresses on the floor, nothing dramatic about it. Everybody else in the band crashed there without a second thought. He didn’t. First night, he grabbed his sleeping bag and went back out to the van instead, and didn’t say much about why.

Second night, same thing. By the third, somebody finally asked him directly, and he gave it up reluctantly — the kind of reluctant where you can tell the person telling you doesn’t actually want to be believed, they just don’t have a better explanation to offer instead. He said the rooms felt occupied. Not in a jump-scare way — more like walking into a room mid-conversation that stops the second you enter it. He wouldn’t call it seeing anything, exactly. He’d call it feeling watched, and feeling like whatever was watching had been doing it a very long time before we ever got there.

He’s not a guy prone to that kind of talk. Which is exactly why the rest of us let him have the van.

Knowing what I know now — that this specific fort almost certainly wasn’t the site of the history I originally attached to it — I don’t have a tidy explanation for what he felt. Maybe it’s nothing but old stone, bad sleep, and a hundred and forty years of a building holding onto every soldier, squatter, punk, and stranger who’s ever passed through it, without needing a specific atrocity to explain the weight of that. Public housing. Public storage of everyone who was ever there. That’s a real thing buildings can hold, ghosts or no ghosts.

Still Standing, Still Loud — But Maybe Not Forever

None of this is a museum piece. I checked the fort’s own site while writing this, and the calendar is still moving: Friday, September 25, 2026, they’re throwing their first punk show since the end of summer — The Mob and Anarchia Futura, billed simply as “PUNK E ANARCHIA.” Same courtyard, forty years later, same reason for gathering.

By my understanding, once it became clear the city couldn’t actually push the occupiers out, Rome eventually took the path that let everyone save face: a symbolic label, something along the lines of a “Social Community Project,” and — as I was told directly, over that same bowl of minestrone, by one of the original squatters — an offer of money to bring the collective into some kind of official fold. They turned it down flat. “If you don’t like the man, don’t take the man’s money,” is how it was put to me. I can’t hand you a document with that exact offer written on it. I can tell you it fits everything else that’s actually documented: the state gave the building cultural-heritage status in 2008 while pointedly never legalizing the occupation itself — recognition without surrender, on either side.

I was awestruck by all of it, honestly — by the sheer scale of what these punks and anarchists and artists and outcasts had actually pulled off. They took a piece of state property the size of a small neighborhood, used old squatters’-rights logic nobody expected anyone to seriously invoke anymore, and just… held it. Forty years later, they still do.

But here’s the part I have to add before this piece goes up, because it changes the ending: as of very recently, that may no longer be a given. Italy’s Interior Ministry has reportedly announced a “zero tolerance” policy toward long-running squats, following actual evictions of two other historic Italian social centers — Askatasuna in Turin and, just weeks before I finished writing this, Leoncavallo in Milan, evicted August 21, 2025, after fifty years, with over 130 carabinieri on site and the Prime Minister herself posting about it afterward. I’ve been to Leoncavallo — a genuinely massive former pharmaceutical factory, 10,000 square meters, with skate ramps built into it that I remember as some of the biggest half-pipes I’ve ever stood next to. It’s gone now. According to that same reporting, Forte Prenestino is now on the list.

Forty years of outlasting police clashes, parliamentary hand-wringing, and one quietly declined city payoff. The fort’s own solidarity page is currently running active notices for three other threatened squats — Spin Time, Casale Garibaldi, L38 — without, as far as I can find, saying much yet about its own name potentially being added to that same kind of list. Maybe that holds. Everything about this place’s history says it usually does. But “usually” isn’t “always,” and I’d rather flag this honestly than pretend the ending is settled.

Why Forte Prenestino Belongs in This Series

Forte Prenestino is the clearest possible answer to a question this site keeps circling: what does it actually look like when a music scene gets to keep its room?

No landlord. No insurance underwriter deciding the genre is too risky to cover. No sudden rent hike closing the doors after eighteen months. Just four decades of a community deciding, collectively, that the space belonged to the people using it, and defending that position long enough that even the Italian government mostly stopped fighting it and just called it cultural heritage instead — while conspicuously never handing over an actual deed.

That’s not a model that transplants cleanly to Kansas. But it’s worth knowing it exists — and worth asking, the next time a room here closes because the math stopped working, whether the math was ever really the whole problem. It’s also worth watching what happens next. Forty years is a genuinely long win streak. Nobody’s guaranteed the next round.

Next in It Don’t Mean Squat!: more venues, more squats, more of what we found standing in the places other scenes gave up on.

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Chrome Tuna

bobscutler@gmail.com

https://chrometuna.com

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