How a once-playful slang term became Italy’s newest racialised public enemy
In this sharp, deeply reported piece for Internazionale, journalist Leonardo Bianchi traces the transformation of the term maranza, a once-benign descriptor for flashy club kid, into one of the Italian right’s most potent culture-war weapons. Over the past few years, the label has hardened into a racialised slur targeting second-and-third-generation youth, especially those from working class and immigrant backgrounds in northern cities like Milan and Turin. The article maps how this evolution unfolded, why it matters, and how it has unleashed a nationwide moral panic with dangerous political consequences.
Bianchi begins in Turin, where activists from the youth wing of the Brothers of Italy have been staging aggressive leaflet drops outside schools, distributing flyers that depict “Maranza culture” as a threat to Italian society. Their presence has sparked clashes with students and police intervention, moments that reflect a broader national anxiety. The flyers echo a growing right-wing refrain: that maranza youths embody violence, misogyny, and disdain for Italy, part of the same manufactured “security emergency” that political actors have long used to justify crackdowns and militarised policing.
The term itself, however, has a more complicated history. Bianchi traces its origins to the late 1980s and 1990s, when the word maranza referred to swaggering, slightly ridiculous “truzzi” and “tamarri”, which were club-goers with loud fashion and louder attitudes. In the early 2000s, it became associated with Italodance and nightlife. Only after disappearing for a time did the word resurface in the pandemic era, when viral Twitch clips showed teenagers interrupting street streamers. The digital culture of TikTok produced a new archetype: racialised, marginalised, and living in suburban peripheries, the modern maranza became visually codified, with tracksuits, shoulder bags, Nike TNs and musically aligned with the trap and drill music movements emerging from Italy’s working-class districts.
This aesthetic shift coincided with the rise of rappers such as Baby Gang, Rondodasosa, and Simba La Rue, whose music channels the frustrations of youth shaped by police violence, poverty, and cultural exclusion. Their popularity forced Italy to confront issues of class and social conflict. But it also helped fuel a reactionary narrative. After a 2022 lakeside gathering in Peschiera del Garda devolved into disorder, the media collapsed “maranza,” “North African youths,” and “baby gangs” into one amorphous threat. Right-wing politicians seized the moment: Giorgia Meloni denounced leftists for supposedly shielding immigrants, Matteo Salvini railed about “gangs,” and calls for harsher policing intensified.
A turning point came in late 2024, when nineteen-year-old Ramy Elgaml died during a police pursuit in Milan. The tragedy provoked protests demanding justice, but media and politicians again cast the unrest through a racist lens, comparing it to French suburban uprisings. Figures from the League (a Italian political party on the hard right) escalated further: MEP Silvia Sardone claimed racial incompatibility, while others openly proposed “remigration”—a far-right concept calling for the removal of foreign-born residents and even Italian citizens of immigrant descent. The League folded an “anti-Maranza” clause into its security agenda, revealing how the panic has become a pretext to redraw the boundaries of belonging in Italy.
As scholars interviewed in the piece explain, the maranza panic is ultimately about citizenship, not safety. It turns marginalised youths into scapegoats for structural failures, policing them into silence while denying their presence as part of Italy’s multiracial reality.
Mackay on the selection:
Like many EU countries, the media climate in Italy in recent years has been characterised by a widespread preoccupation and collective moral panic about issues related to migration. This article by Leonardo Bianchi is a welcome and unusually sane intervention that, unlike so much coverage on ‘integration issues’, provides a much-needed granular analysis of how xenophobia and social division are manufactured at the grassroots level. Bianchi’s report shows that the far-right has been embarking on a propagandistic invention of the ‘maranza’, a nebulous, race-coded cultural enemy which extreme groups use to polarise society, mobilise specific voter bases, and reframe complex issues of social change and integration as a cultural threat. By shifting focus away from the political class to the street level, Bianchi admirably demonstrates here how fear is packaged and sold, when the reality is Italy is simply becoming more diverse.
The original article was published in Italian as Com’è nata l’ossessione della destra per i maranza on the 26th of November 2025 in Internazionale.
It is available here.
Internazionale is a weekly Italian news magazine founded in 1993 which, amongst other things, translates articles from around the world into Italian.
