STUDENTS' WILD RIOTS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 100, 27 April 1912, Page 10

STUDENTS' WILD RIOTS.

NAPLES UNIVERSITY.

Tho University of Naples has long enjoyed an unenviable notoriety as the centre of violent outbursts on the part of lawless students. The disgraceful and riotous conduct witnessed lately surpasses anything of a similar kind within living memory. The Government having refused to suspend certain regulations objected to by 500 medical students in connection with the matriculation examinations, a mob of about a thousand students forced the doors of the University, which the authorities had thought wise to keep shut, and flung out into the streets the police agents and carabinieri stationed there on guard. Many members of the police force were badly beaten with sticks, and their uniforms were stripped off their backs. Having locked the University gates from the inside, the horde of howling colkgians devastated the place from top to bottom, smashing all the windows and destroying the marble statuary that adorns its corridors and the portraits and paintings that grace its walls. All the lavatory basins were broken, and the courtyard fountains demolished. Wooden doors and iron gates were wrenched from their hinges, students' benches and professorial chairs ruthlessly torn away and piled in big heaps. The vandals afterwards set to work to burn down the buildings with the wreckage. On its arrival the fire brigade wa3 stormed from the roof and upper windows with chairs^ tables, and blocks of marble, so that they could not succeed in affixing the hose to the hydrants. The damage done is enormous. The riots were only quelled after repeated parleying and by the final retirement of the police force.