I spoke to a group of the rioters on Friday night (from the region around Ancona on the Adriatic)- they were all under 18 - I asked them what there plans for the next day were. They said, genuinely incredulous - "do you think we will stick around after what we did today"? But on the friday too, several of the "black bloc" got into conflicts with those who they saw were not part of them - and these kids also helped reporters and photographers who had been attacked by these mysterious elements.
In Genoa the local population was genuinely disgruntled - not at the protesters - but at the police for putting their city under siege. On Berlusconi's earlier visit to view the city's defences he had complained about unsightly underwear hanging out to dry. On the Thursday many locals responded postively to the protesters demands of "mutandi, mutandi" and waved their knickers in solidarity.
Much of the violence I saw was directly insitigated by agents provocateurs and I can only imagine that the destruction of insignificant property, small shops etc. was a deliberate act by the state to justify the excessive militarisation of the city. And again it is from the locals watching from their flats, where a lot of the reports of "black bloc" demonstrators getting out of police vans or consulting with the police have come.
Another point: Carlo Giuliani was not a block bloc demonstrator and not a policeman and those that have suggested so ought to be ashamed. The "black bloc" were in a completely different part of the city at the time of the shooting, and from what I can work out Giulinai was with the group of protesters that had earlier tried to push into the red zone. Though I cant verify this for definite.
Anyway: the police were present in a number of disguises - very often dresssed in plain clothes in packs of 10 to 20 with just helmets and batons for equipment (hidden when necessary in bags). Because of the scale of the demo and the different types involved it was incredibly easy for them to mingle with the demonstrators and go unchallenged. They also used official press stickers to disguise as journalists. Careful examination of a lot of the clashes between police and protesters showed a lot of violence from crowd to police were initated by police within the crowd- this happened for definite in Barcelona too.
Erik