Four out of 10 students in Bologna carry pepper spray

By: Anna Fortunata Gaspardo

Photo by: Maria Bobrova/Unsplash

Bologna hosts one of the oldest and biggest universities of Europe with almost 100,000 students from all around the world and last year it scored third place in a national survey for the number of reported “street crimes” such as robbery, rape and violence.

According to the ‘Gazzetta di Bologna’ with 6,000 reported crimes every 10,000 citizens the city comes right after Milan, Rome and Florence for the territory with the highest number of reported crimes per citizen as of 2024.

How are its students coping with these statistics?

The results of a survey on their feelings about the safety in their city show that 77.8% of students who participated know someone that was a victim of a kind of street crime (violence, robbery, sexual harassment). In 2024 there were 701 reported robberies, a growth of 34% compared to the previous year.

Maddalena Giomarelli, a second year Political Science student, says: “I’ve seen some things, I’ve seen some fights, like one time getting out of the library I was studying at I saw some men chasing another man and throwing bottles at him and I had to hide behind a column because I was scared they were going to hit me.”

Giomarelli isn’t the only one experiencing these type of unpleasant encounters, six out of eight students in the survey say they have witnessed violent behaviours or seen scary things around the city and near the university, a place they should feel safe at to concentrate on their studies and invest in their future.

“I’ve seen people doing weird things like kicking shop windows and if I’m just walking there, I try to walk faster to get through it,” says Caterina Brunone a first year Medicine student.

On 5 January Alessandro Ambrosio, a train conductor, was stabbed to death on the job in the Bologna train station, a place often frequented by students out of necessity, the area around it is considered one of the most dangerous in the city along with Piazza Verdi.

The latter known for its drug activity which also happens to be less than 200 meters from the university’s main campus.

“When I hear news especially about girls my age it makes me anxious because maybe it’s not something that is close to me but it could be (…) it scares me sometimes because I think that maybe when I go home and nothing happens to me I'm just, you know, lucky,” says Brunone, most students that took the survey share her concerns especially after reading the constant negative news flow.

In response to these events and concerns from students the city created a new professional figure called “street tutor”, they will be employed in activities of prevention of risks and as mediators of potential conflicts on the streets, they are stationed specifically in front of the university campuses.

Most students on the survey express their desire for more police patrolling around the city along with more protection on public transport which is reported to be quite unsafe in certain areas, especially at night.

Many have taken it upon themselves to seek some form of protection such as pepper spray, Brunone says: “I bought pepper spray because sometimes I think that it could be useful I've never used it, but you never know.”