While being interviewed, the mayor of Florence unexpectedly runs over and tackles protesters who are spray painting a city wall.
VIDEO shows an Italian mayor tackling a climate change protester who was trying to paint the city hall.
Florence’s mayor, Dario Nardella, can be seen on video rushing to physically assault an environmental activist during an interview.
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The 47-year-old mayor of the Italian city, Nardella, who has held his position since 2014, is dressed to the nines in a leather jacket and chinos as he confronts the demonstrator.
In earlier footage, he is seen giving an interview on Piazza della Signoria, where the city hall of Florence was vandalized by an activist while he was speaking to the camera.
As quickly as he turned around, he ran back to where a young man was spraying orange paint from a fire extinguisher onto the crumbling walls of the building.
As the protester is being led away by a police officer, Nardella gets in his face and shoves him until he puts down the fire extinguisher.
At the astonished man, he yells, “What the f*** are you doing, what the f*** are you doing?” in Italian.
After the fact, the mayor, a member of Italy’s Democratic Party, was seen using a power hose to wash the paint off the walls.
‘Barbarians, uncivilized,’ he was overheard saying, according to the Italian publication Republicca.
Images of the spectacled mayor in a leather jacket hunched over in front of the splattered wall went viral on Italian social media, inspiring memes likening him to Superman.
On one meme, he is shown attempting to straighten out the infamously leaning Tower of Pisa.
In response to the stunt, police say they detained two activists, ages 23 and 32.
It is believed that both are associated with the Ultima Generazione (Last Generation) group, which has organized several similar actions in recent months to highlight what it sees as the government’s inaction on climate change.
Pea soup was thrown over Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers, and mashed potatoes were thrown over a Monet.
Some have even glued their hands to well-known works of art and stood in the way of traffic to draw attention to their actions.
The protests on Friday, the group said, were in retaliation for proposed changes to Italy’s budget that would have eliminated a number of subsidies that were harmful to the environment.
The activist group was later dubbed “barbarians” by Nardella on Twitter.
To quote what he wrote: “The attack on art, culture, and beauty, which are helpless in the face of violence and which are created for the good of humanity can never justify the battle for a cause, even the most acceptable cause.”
He also criticized the climate change protesters’ hypocrisy for wasting thousands of gallons of water during the paint removal process.
On the topic of the environment and drought, he continued, “Over 5,000 liters of water were used to clean up Palazzo Vecchio from the ‘environmental blitz. There were 5,000 of them.”
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