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Rome's Piazza del Popolo filled with 50,000 women and some men protesting against PM Silvio Berlusconi, the aging lothario caught up in a sex scandal, and the accepted general sleaze of current Italian culture.
There were banners reading "Italy is not a brothel."
Sunday's protests were titled - Se non ora, quando?/ If not now, when?
Similar protests were also held in Brussels, Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, Lyon and Toulouse in France, and Tokyo and throughout Italy..
The Guardian reported: "There are lots of us," said one protester. "But we're not visible. The privately-owned TV channels, which belong to [Silvio] Berlusconi, and all but one of the [state-owned] RAI channels, manipulate the news. So people know nothing, or only half, of what is happening."
Another said she had come to the demonstration to protest at "the spread of a warped idea of relations between men and women. I want a society in which women are judged on merit and not on their degree of availability to men." Other protesters had a simpler agenda, namely being fed up with the present government.
Bloomberg reveals that a recent poll showed that 61% want Berlusconi to resign.
One protestor said: “People have been anesthetized by this man.”
