MILAN — Italy is pushing emergency security legislation through its cabinet after four straight nights of youth-driven rioting tore through the heart of this fashion capital, with luxury boutiques boarded up, hundreds detained and the government now moving to put soldiers on the streets of a major European city for the first time in years.

What began as a cost-of-living protest organized largely over TikTok and Instagram exploded into running street battles around the Duomo and Piazza del Duomo, with masked youths hurling bottles and bins at riot police, torching trash and smashing the windows of designer stores along Via Montenapoleone. The unrest, which authorities trace to a movement calling itself "Italia in Piazza," also spread to Bologna, Brescia, Bergamo and Turin over the same stretch of nights, according to wire reporting.

The numbers tell their own story. Police say roughly 200 to 270 people have been stopped for questioning since the clashes began, with Italian outlets reporting that roughly 80 percent of those detained are minors, and that more than 100 officers have been hurt in the clashes. Shops near the cathedral shuttered early for fear of a repeat, and the city's famous shopping district took on the look of a city bracing for a storm.

Rome moves to send in the army

Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini announced Italy would dispatch roughly 500 army troops to "defend Milan," a step confirmed by multiple outlets covering the government's emergency response. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni chaired a public-order summit with interior and justice officials as the government rushed a new security decree toward the cabinet table, racing to get it approved before another weekend of potential unrest.

The draft decree, as described in Italian press accounts, would create new penalties for property damage committed during demonstrations, criminalize wearing masks or helmets to avoid identification, and allow judges to bar people convicted of serious offenses at protests from attending public gatherings for one to three years. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi and Justice Minister Carlo Nordio have both pushed for tougher tools, including extending preventive detention to minors — a proposal that has drawn pointed pushback from Italy's largely ceremonial but influential presidency.

"Every violence is unacceptable" — President Sergio Mattarella, calling for a careful, thorough analysis of who is actually driving the unrest.

President Sergio Mattarella, who must sign off on decree-laws before they take effect, has voiced solidarity with police while simultaneously signaling unease about handing military units police-style powers on Italian streets — a tension that has slowed, but not stopped, the government's push, according to Swiss press coverage of the standoff between Palazzo Chigi and the Quirinale presidential palace.

Who is actually rioting?

The identity of the rioters has become its own political flashpoint. Piantedosi has described the perpetrators as gangs of "teppisti" — hooligans — overwhelmingly minors who organized spontaneously through social media rather than any coordinated political movement, a characterization regional coverage has framed as exposing a deeper youth-gang crisis in Italy's wealthiest region. Milan's mayor, Giuseppe Sala, has condemned the violence against officers and the damage to his city, even as he has sparred publicly with Piantedosi over the government's rhetoric, according to Italian reporting on the dispute.

Opposition figures and youth advocates counter that the government is using the unrest to ram through measures — like criminal liability reaching minors — that go well beyond what the chaos actually calls for. Former European Central Bank chief and ex-premier Mario Draghi weighed in with a warning that young people "feel no one listens" to their economic grievances over housing costs and stagnant wages, a message several outlets reported as a rebuke of the government's security-first framing.

What happens next

Italy's cabinet has been racing to finalize the decree this week, with the 500-troop deployment expected to proceed regardless of the constitutional wrangling over police powers, since soldiers backing up law enforcement without arrest authority is already standard practice under Italy's long-running "Strade Sicure" (Safe Streets) program. Once signed, any decree-law takes effect immediately but must be converted into ordinary legislation by Italy's parliament within 60 days, giving lawmakers — and potentially Mattarella — another chance to strip out contested provisions.

For now, Milan is calm but tense. Shopkeepers in the Duomo district are watching the weekend forecast as closely as the news, and European officials are watching Rome, wary that a crackdown seen as excessive could galvanize exactly the kind of youth anger it is meant to extinguish.