There is a particular, sickening sound that a car makes when it hits a human body. It is not the screech of tyres that stays with you, it is the thud. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Turin, that sound tore through the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, sending a different kind of shockwave through Europe's collective psyche. A minivan drove into a group of pedestrians. Four people were injured. And once again, the phrase 'terror fears' has been whispered into the microphones, the official language of a continent on edge.
We must be careful here. The investigation is in its infancy. The driver is believed to be a 35-year-old Italian man with a history of mental health issues, and police have not officially categorised this as terrorism. But the script is being followed anyway. The UK, through the rictus grin of diplomatic protocol, has offered counter-terror support. It is the gesture we have all come to expect, the institutional equivalent of crossing one's fingers and hoping it is not a trend.
But what of the street itself? The Piazza Vittorio Veneto is not a place of grand political symbolism. It is a slab of cobblestone and café culture where people walk their dogs, buy gelato, and take selfies with the Po River behind them. It is my London, your Paris, his Berlin. It is the everyplace of urban leisure. And that is precisely why we feel a particular chill. The threat is not the car bomb or the suicide vest. It is the car. The everyday object. The family vehicle. The work van. The thing we trust to get us to the supermarket.
There is a psychological cost to this, and it is paid in small, invisible instalments. Every time you step off a curb and hear a nearby engine rev, every time a driver honks and you flinch, every time your child reaches for your hand as you cross a street, a micro-tax is levied. We are being conditioned to see a potential weapon in every passing vehicle. That is not an irrational fear, it is a learned response. And the learning never stops.
The UK government's offer of support, however well intentioned, feels like a variation of the same old playbook: express solidarity, pledge resources, wait for the next one. Meanwhile, the social fabric adjusts. We have become experts at turning tragedy into routine. The attack is analysed, the flags are lowered, the hashtags trend. Then the photographs of the victims are replaced by stock footage of the location. And life goes on. But it goes on differently. A little more guarded. A little less spontaneous. The Piazza Vittorio Veneto will survive this, but the people who walked through it last Saturday will take a memory home with them, a memory that whispers 'it could happen here' whenever they visit a public square.
Class dynamics play a subtle role too. The victims of these attacks are almost always ordinary people, the ones who cannot afford to live in gated communities or travel only by private car. The public street is the democratic space, the place where all classes mix. And it is that democratic openness that has become the target. The attack is not just on bodies, it is on the idea of a shared, open society. Every time we hesitate to take a bus, every time we avoid a crowded square, we are conceding a small victory to a particular kind of nihilism.
For now, the official lines are 'let's not jump to conclusions'. And that's wise. But the unofficial lines, the ones we draw in our own minds, are being rewritten. We watch the footage. We see the bodies on the ground. We hear the sirens. And we know, with a weary certainty, that no matter what the official classification is, something has changed. Not in the grand political theatre of Whitehall or the Quirinale. But on the street. In us.
