Florence — In recent months, the Unarma union had filed several reports denouncing the "totalitarian" atmosphere at the Tuscan marshal school, where on April 22nd a young woman took her own life.

 WhatsApp message checks, luggage searches, and other humiliating practices. To the point of prompting about sixty students to abandon the course: "An approach that seems to reflect a training method similar to that of the Marines."

 At the end of March of this year, a young Carabinieri student marshal decided to end her life by shooting herself at the barracks. The first to raise the alarm were the students themselves, who were also the first to intervene on the spot. About two months later, the family of the young woman moved heavy accusations against the Scuola Allievi Marescialli dei Carabinieri in Florence with a letter.

 According to the family, in the days leading up to her death, the carabiniere "showed many symptoms attributable to a condition of strong psychophysical stress. She told her mother that she was losing her hair and that she could no longer tolerate those rules that were of little functional value and infiltrated every aspect of her life.

 She often sent photos of how she was forced to dress in civilian clothes to have a couple of hours of leisure allowed during free time, about having to keep her hair tied up so tightly that she was losing it even to go to the pool. She increasingly told her mother, "this school is ruining my life."

 According to the family, the girl "cared deeply about the Arma but some provisions were not clear to her and she considered them devoid of educational value," such as keeping administration books on the desk and personal ones below.

 The family claims that the young woman "at the beginning of October 2023 contracted Covid with fever and respiratory symptoms, despite her precarious health conditions and the contagious disease that closed the entire world for a year, she was ordered to go to the assembly place every morning at 6:15 am."

 The intention of the family is therefore clear: "We want to express our total disapproval of a system constituted by hierarchs inserted in a context that does not manifest human values. Episodes like that of Beatrice, or like the one that occurred in the same school in 2017, must serve as a stimulus for a change in institutions so that they find a way to support their units in times of difficulty."

 The General Command of the Carabinieri chooses not to respond but renews "its closeness" to the family. The commander of the School of Students and Marshals, General Pietro Oresta, does not make any statement. After the publication of the letter on the Unarma website, General Oresta — during a meeting with his officers — said: "I renew my deep despair for the death of this young carabiniere."

 The UNARMA trade union had previously involved the Minister of Defense and the Commander General of the Carabinieri regarding reports of atypical procedures and sanctions imposed on attendees of the School of Students and Marshals. No response has ever been received, and nothing seems to have changed from those first timid signs of discomfort that, after the holocaust of Beatrice, are beginning to become more bold and precise.

 Today, another anonymous witness, for concrete fear of reprisals, tells rules and customs of what seems to be a world apart rather than a barracks of the Republic, an anachronistic enclave of an old absolute and totalitarian state, where the value of the person is practically zeroed due to senseless deprivations and excessive procedures compared to training objectives.

 The carabiniere recounts that while waiting for lunch, to be consumed in ten minutes, the students were forced to remain in static standing positions, immobile, in the cold, heat, or rain. Even the ritual of the "contrappello," late at night and with exhausting times, had to be awaited standing.

 In the first months of the course, the students would have suffered a dangerously dehydration, caused both by the prohibition of buying water at the barracks' shop, and by the reduced times for lunch and dinner consumption: either they ate or drank.

 The lack of sleep due to the scarcity of time was associated with the impossibility of recovering psycho-physical energies, not being able to enjoy adequate time for rest and leisure: limited free outings due to excessively long and exhausting reviews, breaks during training activities shattered by commitments, the possibility of spending the weekend at home (overnight) conditioned on educational success or even on not having been sick during the leave enjoyed in the previous weeks. At times, the lack of time made even daily hygiene difficult.

 Many girls would have suffered menstrual irregularities, excessive hair loss, and even eating disorders.

 The accusations brought forth against the Carabinieri school in Florence are grave and demand urgent attention from authorities. The reported practicesrepresent a serious breach of ethical and human rights standards.

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