La Pantera siamo noi. Il movimento studentesco del 1990 tra protesta, progetti, speranze

From 5 December 2025 to 3 May 2026, the MEUS – European Museum of Students will host the exhibition La Pantera siamo noi. Il movimento studentesco del 1990 tra protesta, progetti, speranze (We Are the Panther. The 1990 Student Movement between Protest, Projects, and Hopes).

Between December 1989 and the spring of 1990, an intense wave of protest swept through the universities, set against the backdrop of global upheaval and the paralysis of Italy’s political system. Students demonstrated against Minister A. Ruberti’s law on university autonomy and in defense of the right to education. They organized themselves into a movement that took the name “Panther” from a news story: a panther reportedly sighted near Rome that was never captured. For several months, the Panther clawed at Italian politics—against the Ruberti reform and on many other fronts of struggle that united a generation shaken by the impact of neoliberal ideology, unsettled by ongoing economic and social transformations, yet determined to assert its own subjectivity, projects, and hopes.

The exhibition, under the scholarly coordination of Maria Pia Donato and Sabina Pavone, retraces the trajectory of the Panther movement from its beginnings to its dissolution.