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Casaleggio called every contact he had. The Italian web fizzed with anticipation; the national press was silent. The day before V Day, Canestrari and Pittarello drove down from Milan to Bologna, where a giant stage was being set up in the city’s main plaza.
By the afternoon of V Day, September 8, 2007, the square had swollen with a crowd of about 50,000 people. All around Italy, in some 200 squares, other crowds were massing too. In Naples, people started lining up at 9 am to sign petitions, says Fico, who ran the signature-collecting campaign in his home city. “We couldn’t believe our eyes.”
When Grillo got to the microphone in Bologna at around 4:30 pm, he took in the crowd, visibly shaken. It was enormous. “Boh … what have we done?” he finally said, teetering around the stage and shaking his head in disbelief. Gathering himself, he launched into a typically throat-tearing tirade against Italy’s ruling elite.
The success of V Day was thrilling. Two million people had turned out across the country; 350,000 signatures were gathered for the Parlamento Pulito. And it had all been meticulously planned by Casaleggio Associates....
