Standing Room Only
Piazza del Plebiscito, Naples, packed at 100,000
We had occasion a couple of weeks ago to talk about political crowds and their sizes. That was (here).
At issue was the fact that, for the first time ever, the Center-Right had managed to get out a massive crowd on the order of those the Center-Left has traditionally been able to put into the piazzas. The organizers claimed they had 2.3 million people at their event, the police gave them 700.000.
Because all this was intensely embarrassing to the Left, there is still some thrashing around about these numbers. Mr. Piero Fassino, the Secretary of the Democratici di Sinistra – “Left Democrats,” the neo-Communist party – has since given an interview in which he explained he was not impressed because, in 2003, his own side had got three million people into the same Roman piazza, San Giovanni in Laterano.
The correspondent’s rule of thumb in filing on events like these is to cite the organizer’s number as well as the inevitably lower police estimate and then let the reader take his or her pick.
“Upper Italy” rather sweetly assumed that the true value probably fell somewhere between the lower and the higher estimate, and not that these numbers – all of them, from whatever source – were complete, utter and absolute bullshit. We were wrong.
A few years ago a distinguished Italian historian, Prof. Giuseppe Galasso, decided to look into the question of crowd size data in relation to Italy’s four most important “political” piazzas. These are Piazza Duomo in Milan, Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano and Piazza del Popolo, both in Rome.
Galasso pointed out that these locations have finite dimensions. Piazza Duomo occupies about 18,000 square meters, Piazza del Popolo about 21,000 square meters, Piazza del Plebiscito 25,000 and Piazza San Giovanni, roughly 50,000.
Given then that the members of the public are not expected to stand on one another’s heads, you can get about four spectators into a single square meter. In real terms, that’s pretty much packing them in, though they may be slightly tighter up front and a little looser in back.
Let’s leave aside for the moment that these piazzas all have monuments in them, that speakers’ platforms take up space and are usually kept separated from the crowd by a broad – and empty – “security zone.” Let’s forget the ambulance stations, the loud-speaker and light towers, the press pen, the food stands and the porta-potties.
Even assuming, in other words, that these spaces are totally empty and available, there is no way on God’s Earth that either the Left or the Right can get any more than 200,000 people into Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano. Naples’ Piazza del Plebiscito is good for half that and Piazza del Popolo and Piazza del Duomo can hold – tops – around 85,000 and 72,000 respectively. That is if they are filled completely to the rafters.
We’re going to hammer this into the ground because we feel silly at not having thought more clearly about it. To get 2.3 million people into Rome’s Piazza San Giovanni, you’d have to pack 46 individuals into each square meter and Mr. Fassino’s 3 million would go in at 60 people a square meter: about fifteen times what’s actually possible and the equivalent of having just over 3.6 people occupying a single sheet of American 8.5” x 11” typing paper without a molecule of space to separate them.
And we started out assuming the piazzas were absolutely empty of anything but the masses – which they’re not. Even the “conservative” police estimate of “only” 700,000 still has each individual getting just a hair more than eight tenths of that single sheet of paper at best.
So we’re not looking at numbers at all, we’re talking about a figure of speech. 2.3 million actually means “lots of people,” So does 3 million. So does 700,000. Functionally, these three numbers all have precisely the same value. Since they are all false, there is really no relative variation between them. They are different ways of saying “big crowd” – and mean nothing whatever more than that.