Occupy Wall Street style protests growing in Europe

Like the return of some oscillating wave, the idea of street protests has come back to the Mediterranean.

The wave began early in the year on the southern shore of what the Romans called "our sea," as Arabs took to the streets … and eventually to the battlefield to challenge and overthrow the political establishment.

It stopped to pick up momentum in Spain with the indignados occupying the center of Madrid

It reached the shores of North America last month in the form of the Occupy Wall Street encampment.

Now it has returned to the Med.

Yesterday, a group of Italian students, workers and artists occupied a Piazza around the corner from the Palazzo Koch, home to the Bank of Italy, the country's central bank. wonder if the chief of italy's central bank, Mario Draghi, will take heed to their voices when he moves north to Frankfurt to take-over the European Central Bank next month?

In Portugal last weekend 180,000 people turned out for a major demonstration against the austerity measures the country's government has enacted to get its bail-out from the IMF.

It isn't clear how far any of these individual demo's will get. But they are happening all around … London is expecting a version of Occupy Wall Street to begin this weekend.