A woman with long brown hair and a cigarette-scratched voice has a question. "What does this place look like to you," she asks, with the help of an interpreter, "an ugly ghetto, or something maybe beautiful?"

It was a trick question. We were sitting in a ramshackle squat in one of the least picturesque suburbs of Rome. The walls of the stumpy building were covered in graffiti, the ground was muddy, and all around us were bulky, menacing housing projects. If any of the 20 million tourists who flocked to Rome last year had taken a wrong turn and ended up here, they immediately would have dived for their Fodor's and fled for somewhere with vaulted ceilings, fountains and frescoes.

But while the remains of one of the most powerful and centralized empires in history

STEVE ANDERSON

are impeccably preserved in downtown Rome, it is here, in the city's poor outskirts, where I caught a glimpse of a new, living politics. And it is as far away from Roman emperors and Caesar's armies as you can possibly get.

The squat in question is called Corto Ciccuito, one of Italy's many "centri sociali." Social centers are abandoned buildings--warehouses, factories, military forts, schools--that have been occupied by squatters and transformed into cultural and political hubs, explicitly free from both the market and state control. By some estimates there are 150 social centers in Italy.

The largest and oldest--Leoncavallo in Milan--has been shut down by the police and reopened many times. Today, it is practically a self-contained city, with several restaurants, gardens, a bookstore, a cinema, an indoor skateboard ramp, and a club so large it was able to host Public Enemy when they came to town. These are scarce bohemian spaces in a rapidly gentrifying world, a fact that prompted the French newspaper Le Monde to describe the intricate network of squats as "the Italian cultural jewel."

But the social centers are more than the best place to be on a Saturday night, they are also ground zero of a growing political militancy in Italy--one that is poised to explode onto the world stage when the G8 meets in Genoa in July. In the centers, culture and politics mix easily together: A debate about direct action turns into a huge outdoor party, a rave takes place next door to a meeting about unionizing fast-food workers.

In Italy, this culture developed out of necessity. With politicians on both the left and right mired in corruption scandals, large numbers of Italian youths understandably have concluded that it is power itself that corrupts. The social center network is a parallel political sphere that, rather than trying to gain state power, provides alternative state services--such as day care and advocacy for refugees--at the same time as it confronts the state through direct action. For instance, on the night I spent at Rome's Corto Ciccuito, the communal dinner of lasagna and caprese salad received a particularly enthusiastic reception because it was prepared by a chef who had just been released from jail after his arrest at an anti-fascist rally. And two days before, at Milan's Leoncavallo center, I stumbled across several members of Le Tute Bianche (the white overalls) who were pouring over digital maps of Genoa, in preparation for the G8.

The direct action group, named after the uniform its members wear to protests, has just issued a "declaration of war" on the meeting in Genoa. It has pledged to cross police lines and held a public demonstration of the defensive armaments it plans to use (including suits padded with foam and rubber tires).

But war declarations aren't the most shocking things going on at the social centers these days. Far more surprising is the fact that, in the past few years, these anti-authoritarian militants, defined by their rejection of party politics, have begun running for office--and winning. In Venice, Rome and Milan, prominent social center activists, including leaders of Tute Bianche, are now City Council members.

Some say the trend is simply a defensive measure: with Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing Forza Italia in power, they need to protect themselves from those who would shut down the centers. But others, including Beppe Caccia, a member of the Tute Bianche and the Venice City Council, say that the move into municipal politics is a natural evolution.

The nation-state is in crisis, he argues, both weakened in the face of global powers and corrupt in the face of corporate ones. Meanwhile, in Italy, strong regional sentiments for greater decentralization have been seized by the right, often with fascist undertones. In this climate, Caccia proposes a two-pronged strategy of confronting unaccountable, unrepresentative powers at the global level (for example, at the G8), while simultaneously rebuilding a new, more accountable and participatory politic locally (where the social center meets the City Council). Which brings me back to the question posed in the suburbs of Rome's mummified empire. Though it may be hard to tell at first, the social centers aren't ghettos, they are windows--not only into another way to live, disengaged from the state, but also into a new politics of engagement.

And yes, it's something maybe beautiful.