The six sat down on a zebra crossing on the busy Via del Tritone street leading to Piazza Barberini with “Stop Fossil” written on their backs, holding a banner saying “We Won’t Pay for Fossil Fuels”.

It is part of a campaign to stop public investment in, and subsidies of, fossil fuels, the driving force of the greenhouse emissions causing the climate crisis.

Police intervened to stop the protest.

In a statement, the group said that this week’s deadly floods in the north-eastern region of Emilia Romagna were a dramatic demonstration of how the climate crisis was having an impact on people’s lives.

“We go naked with our bodies, vulnerable like the planet,” it said.

Other protests have included splashing easy-to-wash-off paint over the front of the Senate in Rome, the La Scala opera house and the Vittorio Emanuele II statue in Milan and sticking themselves to Botticelli’s Spring at the Uffizi and the Laocoon statue in the Vatican, as well as blocking the Mt Blanc Tunnel, throwing flour over an Andy Warhol car in Milan, and throwing soup onto a Van Gogh in Rome.

Four activists have been indicted over the latter protest.

In March, UG sprayed orange paint over the walls of Palazzo Vecchio, the home of Florence’s town hall, as part of the “We Won’t Pay for Fossil Fuels” campaign.

Florence Mayor Dario Nardella was hailed as a hero by some after he rugby-tackled one of the activists involved and even lent a hand with the clean-up operation.

In the light of such acts, the government has approved a crackdown on art ‘eco-vandals’.

The cabinet approved a bill regarding “the destruction, dispersal, deterioration, disfiguring, and defacing for illicit purposes of cultural and landscape heritage”.

The bill, proposed by the Culture Ministry, envisages fines of €20,000 to €60,000  plus criminal sanctions for those who destroy cultural heritage and other administrative sanctions, and of €10,000 to €40,000, for those who deface monuments.

UG is part of the A22 network of climate civil-disobedience groups active in several countries, such as Just Stop Oil in the UK, Stop Old Growth in Canada, France’s Derniere Renovation and Declare Emergency in the United States.

ANSA