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I can't remember the last time that activists were so popular. Four days after the two hundred thousand-strong march through Genoa, I turned on my television to discover that the unfolding story of the protests continues to make the first item on the national news. In print, a cynical Murdoch-owned press has paid more respect to this movement than it has to any protests in ten years. The left follows suit. Today's Socialist Worker ran its first-ever full-colour front page, to celebrate the new mood. At a big fire-fighters' meeting in Liverpool last night, the largest cheer went up for the health worker who praised the "so-called anarchists" for fighting back against the police. So what was it about Genoa that marked this campaign out as different from all the marches that have gone before?

One thing that struck me about Genoa was the total support of the local population for the protests. Along the route of the largest march, people stood clapping. Near the end, someone had hung from their balcony a huge banner, "Citizenz of the World welcome to Genoa". You could see the high level of local support, ironically, in the absence of political symbols, including papers, placards, stickers, even union banners. The people at Genoa were not the militants of existing parties. Nor had they been turned out by the main trade union federation, the CGIL. The local unions were said to have called a general strike, yet the first four banners I saw were carried like Roman flags, by middle-aged men walking alone, without a delegation. There did seem to be a contingent from the steel workers union, but the age of the people carrying them would surely have made three quarters of the group apprentices. More likely, they were the sons and nephews of shop-floor reps. Practically half the graffiti I saw -- and it was all over the town centre -- was in languages other than Italian. Call me naive, but I take the absence of Italian slogans to mean that the people on the marches did not want to do damage to the streets on which they lived.

Another feature of the movement was the support that came from outside Italy. To my left as we marched on Saturday were a contingent of Communist Kurds singing "Bella Ciao" in Italian. Behind me were socialists from Holland singing "People have the Power" in a thick Amsterdam accent. (I tried to explain to them how un-radical it sounded to an English ear!) In the two days that I was in Genoa, I spoke to pink-bloc Germans, autonomist Italians, radical South Africans, half-a-dozen veterans of the protests in Quebec, one rootless American, several Fourth Internationalists from France, revolutionaries from Sweden, even one lone socialist from Papua New Guinea. I imagine that the international contingent alone was larger than the more than fifty thousand people on the streets of Seattle in 1999.

Indeed the people of Genoa wanted us to be with them. One telling anecdote: on the Friday evening, my affinity group was cut off from the main march. We found ourselves waiting to the north of the town centre, looking down on the action. By now the first rumours had begun to circulate of the protester shot dead. The version we heard suggested that the person killed had been a local motorist, murdered by anarchist looters. At that very moment, at our lowest ebb, a woman came out of one of the flats with two bags full of cakes that she gave to us, the first protesters she could find. There was no wedge at all between the locals and the politicos.

What was most extraordinary about the movement was the way in which ideas like "unity" or "solidarity", which become cheapened in every-day usage, seemed to become vivid again, if only for a few hours. I must have met a dozen people who had been gassed or cashed by the police, and found themselves protected by genuine strangers, people with whom they shared nothing more than a vague, common feeling of injustice. In the discussions, at the convergence centre, indeed everywhere I went, there was the most impressive sense of optimism -- as if change would go our way.

There was violence at Genoa, but it did nothing to dampen this mood.

On the Sunday morning, I found myself back in Euston, with a group of seventeen activists from Liverpool, mostly autonomists and Marxists, but with one Christian debt-protester thrown in. I remember sitting in a group, with our bags, on the station floor. Suddenly it hit me that nobody there would be up till four in the morning, dancing simply from the buzz of a crowd; that if we missed our train and had to sleep rough, nobody was going to protect us against the transport police; that if we were short of food or water, then there was no collective group distributing them for free. At that moment, I think I began to understand how liberating -- all too briefly! -- Genoa had been for me.