Workers inspect the tunnel boring machine at the Telt construction site in Saint Martin de la Porte, France.
Photographer: Giulio Napolitano/BloombergThe Tunnel, the Hut and the Face-Off Menacing Italy’s Coalition
Five Star traces its origins to an environmental protest against the TAV project. Failure to block it now would be a huge blow.
You can trace the rise of Italy’s Five Star Movement to a break-in at a ramshackle Alpine hut near the French border.
In 2010, Five Star’s founder, the comic Beppe Grillo, stormed the outpost at a work site in the mountainous Val di Susa with a band of supporters to protest plans for a high-speed rail tunnel through the Alps to France.