What happened next led to questions all the way to the top of the country, with the former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato stating: "Without doubt some policemen went too hard and used their batons too easily on fans who were on the floor".
Four years ago, 200 new MPs arrived at Westminster with at least parliamentary secretaries' batons in their knapsacks.
They will have to understand the difference between their jus and their roux, as well as the finer details of palmiers, batons, dextrinisation and gas-in-air foam.
Backstage at the Bowery Ballroom, in New York's Lower East Side, beside a table containing a hacked-into roast chicken, carrot batons, hummus, bottles of wine and vodka, "but wraps, no bread, it makes me fat", John Newman is also digesting the news that his single Love Me Again is at No 20 and first album, Tribute, at No 2 in the American iTunes charts.
Former detainees and senior military sources described how detainees were regularly tortured to death, hung on poles over fires, tossed into deep pits or interrogated using electric batons.
Key graphic moments of miners being dragged and throttled on the ground, kicked and punched through police lines, of horses charging through crowds, of batons being mercilessly and deliberately aimed to cause serious injury, cannot be controverted.
Guns were pulled out, batons drawn, and soon enough a riot was in full swing.
From June 1940 and all through the first six months of 1941, the SS were keen to kill inmates – beating them to death with batons – as the simplest way to cope with the camp's overcrowding.
The movement took a violent turn on Sunday night, when police used water cannon, batons and pepper spray to thwart demonstrators' attempts to "escalate" the movement by surrounding government offices.
I pushed my way through the crowd, burst into the empty piazza, and found myself in dead space, caught in a stand-off between two battle lines – on one side police in blue-black riot gear, drumming batons on their clear, hard shields, and on the other a rough assembly of kids and young adults, mainly black or Arab, boys and girls, dressed in hip-hop fashion, singing, laughing, and throwing stuff.
Their batons hit pretty much everything that moved and, leaving the stadium after a more serene occasion on Wednesday, a few of us journalists found ourselves reminiscing about that revealing little scene once the place had cleared back in April 2007.
