There is a Festival of Confiscated Assets in Milan

After the Fashion Week and the Design Week, Milan has also seen the arrival of the Wellness Week, the Wine Week, and forty-seven other “weeks” to satisfy every possible niche of interest. While these events often tend to have a consumerist undertone, next week the narrative will shift towards extremely relevant themes in Italian social culture. Starting from October 26, as it has for the past eleven years, the Festival of Confiscated Mafia Assets will take place. Every year, the event seeks to make people experience firsthand the world of organized crime through visits to former mafia-owned properties and exhibitions featuring confiscated works of art. For some time now, a growing interest has been perceived from the public regarding goods that pass through judicial bodies, as seen on TikTok, where the Milan Tribunal store went viral for users' haul videos, who treat it like a luxury vintage shop. Clearly, the festival does not focus on buying and selling, but aims as much as possible to inform—especially younger generations—about the infiltration of organized crime in Italy and the efforts of institutional actors to counter it.

Among the most interesting activities of the week, in addition to various panels and talks, there are the guided tours of some confiscated properties, which have been repurposed as nurseries, schools, and offices for non-governmental organizations. To remain on the theme of Italian cultural heritage, beyond organized crime, the festival also wants to highlight the historical and artistic tradition of Italy with the presentation of the exhibition “SalvArti, from confiscations to public collections”, which will open to the public on December 3 at Palazzo Reale, where over 90 works confiscated from organized crime will be exhibited. Although in the popular imagination the figure of the mafia criminal is represented by characters like Genny Savastano or Al Capone, often the tastes of criminals resemble those of great art critics: Massimo Carminati—a central figure in the Mafia Capitale investigation—had confiscated from him a drawing by Renato Guttuso, an original copy of “Marilyn” by Warhol, a screen print by Miró, and several bronzes by Botero. The intention of the Municipality, as stated by the Councilor for Welfare and Health Lamberto Bertolè, is to give «meaning to an event designed to raise awareness» through firsthand experiences—whether it be visiting properties or seeing artistic works that were once part of organized crime. The Festival of Confiscated Mafia Assets, in addition to providing information, also fascinates because it offers the thrill of, once in a lifetime, entering the house of a thief.