*Please note that this book is available in Italian language only.* "The authors are one of the founders of Franti, the other since the early 1980s a fanzinista and then a reporter for A/Rivista Anarchica from the trenches of punk and self-production. Our names are Stefano Giaccone and Marco Pandin. Each of us, in his or her own way, dreamed of a revolution in the 1970s and 1980s: sure, we were young and these were things that were nice to do and needed to be done. Almost thirty years ago we collected and assembled together "Nel cuore della bestia" (In the heart of the beast), the first document to be published in Italy where punk and anarchy were related. The book was published on 1 May 1996 by Zero in Condotta, the publishing house linked to the Milanese anarchists.
Not a novel, not an essay, not a lecture or some kind of vindication, but a simple tale of our lives, a true story that passed inside our heads and also through the cellars where music was played and the demonstrations in the squares, to which we mixed together personal reasoning and some chronicles of our actions as a pack, all with a discreetly loud soundtrack. However, we realised that limiting ourselves to our stories would just be another useless self-referential wank, so we set out to find it. We found what we were looking for amidst the fanzines and songs, inside the cassettes and self-produced records, in the writing on the walls and flyers of the time.In the pages of this book at the end results a strange mosaic, an artificial and partisan reconstruction of our need to be desperately part of something and at the same time to call ourselves insistently and obstinately out of everything.
However, we never imagined that our book would later be read at university and even taken as a reference text: it was alienating, when not embarrassing, to receive the first phone calls, letters and e-mails from girls and boys engaged in historical studies, anthropology or sociology who wanted to go deeper, looking for material and testimonies. Then they called and wrote girls and boys who were curious to hear a different voice from those celebratory tracks they can find on the web and YouTube. They are those same girls and boys who stay to talk even late after a concert or at the banquet.
Once the first and only print run of the book was sold out, hundreds of photocopies were made and we don't know how many floppy disks were sent and then attached as pdfs. Even today, every so often someone asks if there are any copies of the book left - and the answer is always, let's see if we can reprint it, that would be nice.
And here it is today: in a collective effort that also involved the publishers of the time, the book has been reprinted - with a different cover and format from the original, but with identical content."
