This month marks 800 years since Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone died at the Porziuncola, on the plain below Assisi, on the evening of 3 October 1226. He was about 44, blind, stigmatized and completely worn out. Kenneth Clark, in the third episode of Civilisation, called him a religious genius, “the greatest, I believe, that Europe has ever produced”. What was the genius?

Not doctrine. Francis had almost none, and what he had he got from hearing the Gospel read aloud and taking it literally, which is the one thing the Church has never wanted anyone to do. It was a position on property. The Franciscan Rule of 1223 puts it in a sentence: “Let the brothers not make anything their own, neither house, nor place, nor anything at all.” They are to go through the world “as pilgrims and strangers”, and they are forbidden money in any form. In his “Testament”, dictated in his last weeks, Francis added that the Rule was to be understood “simply and without gloss”, which is to say: do not let the canon lawyers near it.

The distinction the Franciscans drew, and had to keep drawing for a century, was between use and ownership: usus and dominium. A friar eats bread, wears a tunic, sleeps under a roof, but owns none of them. He has, as the theologians put it, the bare use of the thing, usus facti, while every right of property is renounced. The argument reached back way beyond Roman law to Eden, where all things were held common and nothing belonged to anyone. Ownership entered the world with the Fall. To live without property was therefore not a penance but a return: it was to live as human beings had been made to live.

The position was there before the doctrine. In 1206, in the piazza in front of the bishop of Assisi, with his father, a cloth merchant, demanding his money back, the young Francis took off his clothes, folded them, handed them over and walked away naked. There was no Rule yet. The gesture was the Rule.

This is an extremely radical position. It is communism before the word, or anarchism, or both at once, though without a program, a party or the smallest wish to seize anything, since seizing was the whole problem. It was also, as the Church immediately saw, good for business. The friars were mobile, poor, eloquent and wildly popular, and a movement like that is either contained or burned at the stake. Francis was contained. 

The Church took the celebrity and quietly dropped the message. Francis was canonized within two years of his death and the basilica was built in his memory. The Order, meanwhile, was flooded with educated recruits who wanted books, and with gifts of land and buildings from patrons who wanted to be buried in them. By the time the first generation of friars had died, the Order had tens of thousands of members and no longer resembled the man who founded it. It even rewrote him. In 1263 Bonaventure produced the official life of Francis, and in 1266 the Order ordered every earlier life destroyed.

What followed was a hundred years of argument about a single question, and it is worth being clear about the question, because people were killed over it. If the friars own nothing, how do they have libraries, churches, granaries, and a basilica? Two parties formed inside the Order. The majority, later called the Conventuals, were content to let the buildings be held for them by intermediaries, so that the friars used what they technically did not own. The minority, the Spirituals, said this was a lawyer’s trick: the Rule meant poor use, not just use without title, and a friar in a stone convent with a library was no poorer than a bishop. 

The Church kept trying to close the question. In 1230, four years after Francis’s death, Gregory IX ruled that the “Testament”, the deathbed text with its plea for no gloss, was not binding on the Order; the friars were to follow the Rule as the Pope read it, not the founder’s last words. In 1279 Nicholas III settled the ownership problem with an elegant fiction: everything the friars used, down to the bread in their mouths, belonged to the papacy, which held it on their behalf, so the friars had use and the Pope had title. He then forbade anyone to discuss the matter further. They discussed it for another 50 years.

John XXII, a canon jurist with a lawyer’s patience for paradox and love of equivocation, ended the game, in two moves. First he dealt with the Spirituals. In 1317 he ordered them to accept granaries, cellars and ordinary habits like everyone else. Those who refused were handed to the Inquisition as disobedient, which in that world meant heretical, and in May 1318 four of them were burned at Marseille. Then he dealt with the doctrine. In 1322 he renounced the papal fiction of ownership and handed the property back, so that the friars now owned what they used whether they liked it or not, and he made the point that the whole distinction was unreal: when you eat the bread there is no bread left, and a use that destroys the thing is indistinguishable from owning it. 

In 1323 he went for the root. It was declared heresy to say that Christ and the apostles had owned nothing. The whole Franciscan case rested on that claim: if Christ had had property, then poverty was not the imitation of Christ but a private eccentricity. The head of the Order, Michael of Cesena, refused to accept it and in 1328 fled from the papal court at Avignon to the protection of the Emperor, taking the philosopher William of Ockham with him. Both died as excommunicates. The rest of the Order became what it has been ever since: an institution, with houses. This is the world of The Name of the Rose, which Umberto Eco set in 1327 for a reason.

In The Highest Poverty, Giorgio Agamben argues that the Franciscans lost because they fought on the wrong ground. They let poverty be defined juridically, as the negation of a right, and so were always one bull away from refutation. What Francis had actually invented, Agamben thinks, was not a legal doctrine but a form of life, in which one does not apply a rule to a life but lives so that the living produces the rule. The naked man in the piazza is not obeying anything.

More from this author

Harry and Meghan cannot escape their fate

By Simon Critchley

And while the message was being glossed away, the monument kept going up. Each decade of the argument added another layer: the Lower Church in the 1230s, the Upper Church above it, Cimabue in the 1280s, Giotto’s cycle of the saint’s life in the 1290s, so that by the time the Spirituals were burning at Marseille the poor man of Assisi had the most richly painted interior in Italy. Brother Elias, who ran the Order after Francis and had a genius of a different sort, had raised the money and hired the builders. He also hid Francis’s body, so thoroughly that it was not found again until 1818. For nearly six centuries the most visited saint in Christendom was celebrated in a basilica that had, in effect, lost him. The church is a betrayal, of course, but I am glad of it; I would not want a world without the Giotto frescoes. But the contradiction is exact. Francis owned nothing. In death, he became the Order’s principal asset.

At least one person saw the building for what it was: Angela of Foligno, an illiterate widow from a dozen miles down the road. The most wonderfully extreme of all the mystics went on pilgrimage to Assisi in 1291 and, at the door of the basilica, fell down and began to scream, asking love why it had abandoned her. Her confessor, Brother Arnaldo of the Friars Minor, was mortified and told her never to come back. He then spent years writing down everything she said. She was canonized in 2013, by a pope who had just taken the name Francis. Angela did not dispute the Rule. She screamed at the door.

What, then, is a saint? Not a good person; there are plenty of those and no one builds them churches. Not a hero either, who acts, wins and is remembered for the act. A saint is someone whose life has become a form, legible enough that others can live inside it. The saint is the answer to the question “how should I live?” given not as a self-help book but as a being of flesh and blood. This is why saints have bodies and why the bodies matter. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that, for all the fame of his stigmata, Francis is one of only two men in the history of the Church to have claimed all five visible wounds of Christ. The saint’s flesh is a text, and an argument.

It is also why the lives of the saints were, for something like a thousand years, the most read books in Europe after the Bible. The Golden Legend, a Dominican friar’s compendium of saints’ lives arranged by the feast days of the year, compiled around 1260 and read aloud in churches and households across Europe, survives in more manuscripts than almost any other medieval book. Remember what the Order did to the earlier lives of Francis in 1266. It tells you what a saint’s life is for: it is not a record but an instrument, endlessly revised, and the revisions are where the authority lies. Nobody read the Golden Legend for information. They read it the way we read biographies of musicians: to find out whether a certain kind of life could be lived, and what it cost.

What do saints do, then? They demonstrate. They show that a form of existence everybody had agreed was impossible, living without possessions, without violence, without fear of death, is possible, because here is someone doing it, badly fed and in a filthy tunic, on the plain below Assisi. The demonstration does not require that you follow; most readers of the Golden Legend kept their houses. But it changes what the word “impossible” means.

I do not know what to do with the end-times feeling that has settled on everything, the sense that the systems we live inside are at once all-powerful and coming apart, that the weather is wrong and the politics worse and the machines have learned to talk and are about to wipe us out. But the feeling is proprietary. It is the panic of people who own things, or who thought they did, watching their title deeds dissolve: to land, to a future, to their own attention. Francis’s answer to a world that was passing away was not to save it. It was to stop claiming it. Use it, care for it, sing to it (his “Canticle of the Creatures” is the first great poem in Italian, and it is a poem about not owning the sun) and hold none of it as yours. There is a politics in that which neither Left nor Right can presently say aloud, since both are, in the end, arguments about who gets the property.

Who is the Francis of this moment? The honest answer is that you would not be told. Saints are recognized late, usually after they are safely dead, by the institution that spent their lifetime trying to gloss them. The last man to take the name, and to mean something by it, died in the Vatican, which is where popes die, and which is a vast piece of richly arrayed real estate. If there is a Francis now, he or she is doing something we currently regard as impossible, somewhere unimportant, quite possibly with no religion at all, without a rule anyone has written down yet, and is being ignored by exactly the people who will one day lay the foundation stone.

In the past year, Turin’s latest face-off — between the state on the one hand, and an alliance of anarchic, neighborhood “citizen committees” and pro-Palestinian protestors on the other — has been intensifying. Last November, one of Turin’s imams, Mohammed Shahin, was arrested and sent to Sicily, awaiting expulsion to his Egyptian homeland, though his deportation was later stopped. Turin has been twinned with Gaza since 1998, and the Torino per Gaza (“Turin for Gaza”) organization regularly brings hundreds of thousands of protestors onto the streets.

Then, on 18 December 2025, following orders issued by the Ministry of the Interior and coordinated by the chief of police, troops stormed the “Askatasuna” social center at the heart of Vanchiglia and expelled all its occupants. It brought to an end almost 30 years during which the squat — the name means “freedom” in Basque — had become a meeting-point for environmental activists. There have been confrontations ever since. When I visited for the 1 May parade, Askatasuna supporters and the riot cops scuffled. It was shields and batons against flag-poles and beer bottles, and I took my compulsory shower from a police-van power hose.

Two distinct forces are lining up against each other: the authorities receiving orders from the Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, and groups of “autonomi” and “attivisti” trying to plant as many Palestinian flags as possible. The clash is asymmetrical because Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is proving more durable than anyone expected. Elected in October 2022, she’s only a few weeks shy of breaking the record for the longest-serving government in Italy’s postwar history. Despite losing a recent referendum on judicial reform, and falling out of favor with Donald Trump, Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party seem firmly in control.

Yet if the clash is uneven, the outcome isn’t inevitable. “Governments are made in Rome,” Turin used to boast, “but fall in Mirafiori.” That’s a nod to Fiat’s mega-factory, south of Turin’s baroque heart, which used to employ over 60,000 workers. The city’s working-class heritage has vanished in recent decades, and the traditional Left is, anyway, scorned by the squatters from “Aska”. These activists don’t aspire to change a government: because they don’t believe in traditional democracy or even the political spectrum as such. Instead, they are attempting a ground-level associationism that echoes some of their city’s most radical traditions.

***

Turin is disorientating. Its overlay of four bending rivers on perpendicular boulevards makes it feel like a snakes-and-ladders board. With the Superga Basilica on the far side of the River Po, and royal palaces all around — the city’s dukes became Italy’s kings — it’s a grandiose but slippery place. Politically, though, Turin’s Left-wing credentials have always been clear, not least given the legacy of wartime resistance. Over 1,000 local partisans are buried in the “Field of Glory” in the city’s monumental cemetery.

Today, though, anti-fascism lacks definition beyond the obvious, and is anyway politically unhelpful: you can’t build the future on a negation. Besides, the mushrooming of citizen assemblies throughout Turin, not least in Vanchiglia, suggests the city’s radicals are now less inspired by Gramsci than David Graeber. The American anthropologist at the forefront of the Occupy protests, Graeber envisaged “a new, open-ended, pragmatic anarchism”, and spoke of occupied buildings as “an exercise in the politics of mutual aid, solidarity and caring. A simple, unauthorized act of love.”

In many ways, Italy pioneered autonomous spaces both in theory and practice. The first CSAs — “centri sociali autogestiti” or “self-run social centers” — were political squats organized by far-Left radicals in the Seventies. But as well as social centers, they also experimented with “back-to-the-landism”. As anti-mafia prosecutors began confiscating mob buildings and farms, many radicals won tenders to set up rehabs and farm shops.

But if Italy has been at the forefront of anarchic congregationalism, it has also pioneered repression. In Genoa, in 2001, one man was killed and a school was raided by riot police looking for an illusory anarchist “black block”. Now, Meloni has increased the pace of the crackdown. In August 2025, in Milan, the Leoncavallo social center was evicted on its 50th anniversary. In Genoa the previous summer, the Burrida, a similar center named after a local seafood stew, was raided and evicted too.

Meloni may well be feeling pressure here from Roberto Vannacci, a former army general and looming threat on her own Right flank. Yet whatever the cause of her sweeps, it’s clear that the Askatasuna case is different, not least in how it’s long been at the frontline of protest far beyond Vanchiglia. Central to this activism is opposition to the so-called “TAV”. The Italian acronym for “high-speed train”, the project eventually promises a new rail link between Turin and Lyon. But with the Alps in the way, the pristine mountain valleys around Turin have been roiled by unrest, with pitched battles between “No-TAV” activists and riot police resulting in thousands of arrests.

More from this author

Italy's past isn't history

By Tobias Jones

Perhaps because of its environmental tinge, the No-TAV movement has also gained supporters beyond the radical Left. One insider, Martina, describes it as “truly popular”, bringing together “mayors, Catholics and ordinary people”. In recent years, meanwhile, the war in Gaza has also fueled local outrage. The criminalization of protest — with certain words banned altogether — means that many Torinesi are furious. “What have we got to do?” asks an activist named Karim. “Wait until they’re all dead before we say it’s a genocide?”

Turin’s distinctive architecture provides gathering places for these varied if overlapping groups. Because of mass immigration from the South during Turin’s postwar boom, this most industrial of cities has dozens of so-called case di quartiere (“suburb halls”), as well as a gaggle of circoli operai (“workers’ clubs”) and case del popolo (“people’s houses”).

Askatasuna’s former building is only a two-minute walk from the banks of the Po. A vast, cherry-colored palazzo, squarely facing the buzzing traffic on the Corso Regina Margherita, it’s surrounded by schools. Given the intense police presence, that forces parents and children alike to cross through checkpoints every day. Yet the area behind the building is pedestrianized, and it’s here, flanked by walls decorated with portraits of anti-fascist martyrs, that Askatasuna still does its outreach.

Riccardo arrived in 2006, 10 years after Askatasuna was first occupied. “This is where I found hospitality,” he says. He’s at the end of an open-air “laboratorio” about reimagining education. Thirty people — from children to pensioners — have sat in a circle all day. The Carabinieri, Italy’s militarized national police force, rev their engines at both ends of the pedestrianized zone, making it hard to hear.

More from this author

Why Italy’s hooligans can’t kick drugs

By Tobias Jones

At the end of the workshop, Riccardo describes Aska as a kind of “bring-us-your-needs” listening point, what he and his comrades call a sportello (“help desk”). People drop by with a problem, and the group helps to find a solution. A woman who can’t afford to fix a leak is put in touch with a pro-bono plumber. A victim of eviction is found emergency housing.

Gianluca Vitale, a lawyer who represents Mohamed Shainin and a number of No-TAV activists, says that marginalized suburbs like these — often with large immigrant populations — are being squeezed for reasons of “urban decorum”. Turin is gentrifying fast, largely thanks to tech start-ups and tourism, and pockets of “marginality”, paying low rent on precarious contracts, are easy targets for Fratelli d’Italia politicians urging “redevelopment”.

Throughout all this, the activists are passionately and ideologically opposed to involving the state in their affairs. “There’s a huge problem of drug-dealing and delinquency in our suburb,” admits one. “But we don’t call the police because I know my neighbor.”

***

At its postwar peak, Mirafiori covered three million square meters of Turin’s south side, or the equivalent of 420 football pitches. Inside, some 60,000 workers glued, soldered and riveted along almost 25 miles of assembly lines. What they made were cars: millions of them. Fiat was Italy’s most important factory, and the firm’s Agnelli owners were as rich as royalty. They also owned Juventus, the footballing jewel of Turin and Italy’s most famous team.

Born in 1943, in a small town west of Milan, Pietro Perotti left school at 11. He soon went to work in a baker’s, waking at 2am and working until midday. In 1969, not much taller than he was at 11, he moved to Mirafiori, working as a repair-man on the shop floor. One day, Perotti was moving between units when he saw Southern workers start an innovative form of protest. Some, he recalls, “picked up an empty oil can and started banging on it like a drum”. Others joined in, as word spread of an injury or complaint. These former sharecroppers, newly arrived from Sicily or Calabria and bewildered by Taylorist production lines, even used their tools to start “making trumpets and whistles and musical instruments”.

In all this, Perotti saw a recreation of the “saint’s festivals” in the South, “where the sacred and the profane coexist”. It was the turning point of his life, for he realized that the order of things had to be inverted through in-situ merriment. Perotti began drawing political graffiti in the bogs. His art — Marx hung on the factory frontispiece, Agnelli with his trousers down — was made on the shop floor.

But throughout the Seventies, the atmosphere darkened. During the Anni di Piombo — the “Years of Lead” of extremist terrorism of both Left and Right, with the Italian secret services squatting murkily in between — many idealistic workers were drawn towards bombings and executions. Perotti, for his part, joined both Lotta Continua and Avanguardia Operaia, two groups later accused of funneling activists towards violent struggle.

“Here, in Mirafiori, there were seven of us in a workers’ cell,” Perotti recalls. He was ordered to go into hiding but refused. Five of his band of seven ended up in the Red Brigades, the most infamous far-Left group of all, which in 1978 would kidnap and murder Aldo Moro, Italy’s former prime minister. As for Perotti, he stayed at Fiat until 1985, organizing invisible protests like the “bodywork jump” — when for every 10 cars that passed through the production line, one would be ignored.

Perhaps because he saw the bloody Seventies, Perotti is frustrated by the confrontational nature of the Askatasuna protests. He instead argues that agitation needs irony, and that on the 1 May event, the protestors “should have taken the mick”, finding new slogans of disdain and giving “biscuits to the children to offer the riot police”.

Certainly, Perotti is a wily manipulator of the contemporary political narrative. His foam puppets Trump and Meloni have often been published by newspapers, alongside the usual images of batons and tear gas. But he’s not the only one trying to channel rage in positive directions. Ortensia, part of the Comitato di Vanchiglia, another grassroots “committee”, is a psychologist who says that she and her colleagues try to find words “that land with everyone, that are gentle, and not use words like ‘battle’.”

But the mood is darkening. Ortensia describes “a polarization” in which neither police nor protesters can back down. A friend of hers, an Englishwoman, tells me that, a year ago, the Comitato was only talking about flower-beds with the elderly; now they’re in a militarized zone having their papers checked.

At sunset, I stop in a casa di quartiere in San Salvario, a district of long streets and dense postwar apartment blocks. The casa itself used to be the old public baths, and is now another edgy village hall, all street art, table tennis, noisy teenagers, and grandmothers with pushchairs. There I meet Nicoletta, Rosa and Giulia, part of an informal organization called Mamme in Piazza (“Mums in the Square”). These mothers — about a dozen in all — came together after seeing their children criminalized during the No-TAV protests. Their intent wasn’t to excuse crime, but to understand their kids and the anger animating them. “We don’t always share the practices of the struggle,” says Rosa, “but we defend the struggle against repression.”

These mothers talk a lot about anger: anger with their children, with their spouses, with themselves, with the state and its repression. But as usually happens when mothers take to the streets, they’re listened to because they have a language that, as Nicoletta puts it, “isn’t studied: it’s emotional, instinctive, naïve if you like about certain things”. The women have megaphoned outside the city’s prison, and have gone on countless marches with their banners. They perform regular balcony concerts. “We abstain from judgment,” says Rosa, “but we do see a loop. Exaggerated and frightening repression radicalizes you. It fucks you off.”

***

The fact that even these peaceful mothers are swearing shows the degree of anger in the city. There’s a deep grievance about economic malaise and judicial persecution, and Turin’s radicals have receded from any faith that mainstream politics can offer solutions. The last time that happened, 50 years ago, many frustrated revolutionaries turned into armed killers. No one expects the chaos of the Seventies to return — but the issue of violence is where the debate almost always ends up.

For its part, the Right accuses protestors of a variety of crimes, pointing to the storming of La Stampa‘s newspaper offices, and a January attack on a policeman, as evidence that their movement is invariably brutal. But if you put that to Askatasuna members, the reply inverts the accusation. “For us,” says Riccardo, “‘conflict’ is a key term. But today, there is a system that inflicts daily violence on all the citizens living in our communities.”

Meloni’s much-trumpeted “Pacchetto Sicurezza” is meant to sort it all out. This new security legislation, passed in February 2026, allows for the creation of “red zones” with militarized presences, and legitimizes pre-emptive arrest. Turin is key to this crusade. The first capital of a united Italy, and home to kings and Fiat, it can’t be seen to fail on something as simple as “public order”.

For Vitale, the lawyer, this is dangerous territory. “We’re talking,” he says, “about particularly sensitive topics and about the manifestation of a thought.” He maintains that “an opinion might not be endorsed [by you] but it’s an opinion. An opinion can’t be punished, it doesn’t represent a crime.” “It seems,” adds Vitale, “that in Turin we’re seeing a clash between rival visions of the state: either government legislation is submitted to what is legal according to the Constitution, or else the judiciary has to obey a legislative act.”

That clash between judiciary and executive is ancient, but for those in Vanchiglia itself, the situation feels bizarre. When you talk to mothers outside schools, dropping off their kids, they say they’re insulted by police. “You have the right to shut up,” one officer apparently told Ortensia.

On a street corner I bump into Alice Ravinale, a representative of the Left-Green Alliance in the regional parliament. “This is all just show”, she says, pointing at two riot vans with blue lights flashing. “Every day we ask ourselves what they’re scared of.” The answer, perhaps, is that they’re scared of people who refuse to acknowledge the need for them. That, as Perotti knows, is the best form of attack: not to take authority figures too seriously.

***

Additional reporting by Cecilia Rigattieri.

But tonight, as they watch the opening ceremony, the Milanese will see precious little of their town and its history. Instead, they’ll see Mariah Carey, ads from Alibaba and Visa, and signs emblazoned with “IT’s Your Vibe” — the games’ motto and a painful pun on “Italy”. They may also catch a smell: a whiff of corruption that transcends the old Italian cliché and instead carries to the offices of the grandest multinationals on Earth. And, in a grim way, it all feels fitting. Like the games that it’s hosting, Milan, too, seems intent on throwing off a principled past for a fevered global future, even if that leaves it a mere conquest of capital. 

Milan has always been rich. On the trade route from Frankfurt to Rome, its commercial strength was clear even in the 13th century, when local bigwigs built the Piazza Mercanti. Helped by a fertile countryside, and a complex network of inland canals, this “Merchants Square” was soon famed for its quality wares. Henry VIII may have bought his armor from the city, and there’s a reason hatmakers are still called “milliners” today. Affluence endured long after the city’s native dukes were usurped by outsiders. First came Spanish pikemen, then Napoleon; by 1850, Milan was second only to Vienna within the Habsburg Empire, and boasted vast factories in metalwork and silk.

When it joined the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861, Milan was comfortably the most industrialized town in the country. And it’s here, perhaps, that the city’s self-conception truly starts. A relative giant in a nation of pygmies — at unification, it was larger than Rome — Milan gave its residents ample reason to feel smug, especially when recalling their cosmopolitan history. “Genoa is to Milan what Italy is to Germany,” the singer Fabrizio De André once said. He meant it cruelly, yet Milanesi reveled in their transalpine links, practically Teutonic in their devotion to hard work and haughtiness. Along the way, almost everything was pressed into marching Milan far from the dolce vita stereotype, from its winter fog to its austere and handsome boulevards. The same is true of Milan’s dialect, its bovine vowels and French and German loanwords so different from more languorous tones down south. 

More from this author

Will small nationalisms remake Europe?

By Andrea Valentino

For decades, in fact, Milan’s self-image was predicated on being a kind of anti-south, especially as millions of peasants came north in search of work. Perhaps its most famous expression is “Oh mia bela Madunina”. The city’s unofficial anthem, still sung by local football fans, is in theory a paean to the gold statue of the Virgin atop the cathedral, for centuries Milan’s highest spot. In practice, though, Giovanni D’Anzi’s 1934 tune is an excuse to compare Milan’s hard-nosed virtues with alleged — and unfair — southern vice. Mocking the melodrama of Naples and Rome, the lyrics pointedly warn that “no one’s ever lazy” beneath the icon’s gaze. D’Anzi doesn’t use the word, but implicit here is an assault on “terùn” — roughly “redneck” and a once-common slur against southerners. 

There’s an irony here. As urbane as the Milanese imagined themselves, their devotion to parochial Italian rivalries, much more than the wider world beyond, meant the city long retained a conservative air. The postwar boom was real enough — the city’s population surged by a quarter in the Fifties — but bluechip firms such as Mondadori (publishing) and Edison (utilities) were basically domestic in outlook. Pirelli gifted the city a new Madunina when its headquarters became Milan’s tallest building in 1961 — but it never really competed with Goodyear, Bridgestone and other global tire brands. 

Beyond the boardroom, though, this parochialism was clearest on the streets. As late as the 2000s, this was largely deaf to the siren calls of international capital. The Pirelli aside, skyscrapers were few. Instead, Milan was a town of Victorian apartments, wan yellow or pink, their courtyards filled with shade and bloated potted palm trees. Large retail chains were unusual. Instead, there were shoe stores with wooden shelves and terrazzo floors, and tobacconists owned by men in beards and faded English smoking jackets. There were trattorie, too, more social clubs than restaurants, where sergeant-stiff waiters served saffron risotto and a pig-head stew called cassœula. Foreign fare was hard to find. Amazingly, Starbucks only arrived in 2018, and came with a marble-topped counter. 

Now, though, this stolid world is crumbling. Over the past decade, some 5,000 foreign millionaires have made the city their home. From American tech bros to Egyptian plutocrats, they have many reasons for coming. Tired of Mayfair phone-grabbers, let alone New York’s squalor, some are drawn to the Lombard capital’s sedate reputation. Geography matters too: just as medieval merchants prized Milan for its strategic location, their successors can ski in the morning and check their Swiss bank vaults at lunch. The Italian government has also welcomed newcomers, levying a flat annual tax on foreign income and assets.

The results are predictable. House prices have leapt by 40% in a decade, costs rising as square-footage goes down. Milan’s luxury property market is proving especially wild, with American, Chinese and even Azeri financiers all racing to snatch up smart palazzi. That naturally makes life harder for lawyers and doctors and other bourgeois professionals — precisely the sorts for whom Milan’s no-nonsense reputation was made. Most middle-class Milanesi can today only dream of a Prada handbag, despite the firm’s 600 worldwide stores. 

Don’t let that last figure fool you: even if outlets in Beijing and Chengdu help soften the blow, Milanese fashion has also suffered. In 2023, a number of luxury brands were forced to abandon their traditional rivalries and face down foreign competition together. Even that, apparently, is not enough. Police have uncovered sweatshops in the suburbs. And if that hints at the ways the new Milan leaves space for malpractice, there are other examples too. The city’s construction boom has already caused scandal, with senior officials accused of taking bribes in return for rushing through permits.

Of course, Milan is no stranger to graft. The so-called “mani pulite” investigation of the Nineties — ultimately resulting in the destruction of postwar Italy’s political class — began here. Silvio Berlusconi made his millions here too. Yet as so often in the city today, it’s hard not to feel that corruption is more frantic and financialized than ever. Amid the usual claims of mafia involvement in the Olympics, prosecutors are also exploring Deloitte’s role in an over-invoicing case. Nothing has been proved, but the consultancy’s “digital services” work for the event is darkly symbolic of the city’s new economy.

More from this author

How the Mob went mainstream

By Andrea Valentino

And on the money men go. In 2024, over 1,000 manufacturing firms failed across Milan and its hinterland; countless other Milanese businesses, including the stock exchange itself, have been bought up by foreigners. They still sing D’Anzi’s ballad, meanwhile, but AC Milan supporters today back a team owned by Wall Street. There’s a new Madunina too — a gold replica was fitted atop the Allianz Tower in 2015, for a time the tallest building in Italy, and a further sign of modern Milan’s transnational sovereigns. As for hometown legend Pirelli, its largest shareholder is a chemical giant from Xiong’an, and its fame is as much in calendars as tires. 

Once again, though, this upheaval is clearest on the streets. Eighteen towers have now crossed the 100-meter mark, flanked by sleek living blocks named things like “CityLife”. The number of supermarkets has risen by three quarters in a decade, at the expense of 91 bakeries and over 150 shoe shops. Many that remain are brighter, slicker, their shelves in plastic and their tiled pavements gone. At the tobacconists, the patriarchs are out, replaced by poor migrants selling vapes. Indeed, a broader demographic transformation is also underway: one-in-five Milanese were born abroad, fomenting a culinary revolt and familiar tensions elsewhere. But if these phenomena are related — Italian business lobbies hard for more immigration — for the moment it’s capital that truly robs your breath. Milan now hosts a half-dozen Starbucks, the latecomers dumping the pioneer’s marbled flattery. There are KFCs, too, and near a wonder of a Romanesque church, a Five Guys. “The grills are hot and the doors are open,” proclaimed the managers when it opened in 2018. 

The speed and scale of this shift make Milan in its pomp seem almost touchingly naive, now it faces forces so much huger than “terùn”. Still, it’s Milan’s desperate eagerness to adopt the language and mores of a culture it thrived without for decades that’s most galling. As energetic and ruthless as the multinationals are, after all, no one forced Milan Fashion Week to partner with Starbucks. The way to understand this capitulation, I think, once more involves the city’s myopic form of worldliness. Rather like the Aztecs, lords of their valley yet broken the moment Cortés appeared, the Milanese — in their commerce, their streetscape, their very identity — are utterly helpless before the torrent of customs and cash now unleashed upon their town. Their own traditions were too slow, too aged, too reliant on rhythms lost to time, and easily replaced by servile English puns and bloodless tributes to “shared values”.

Once big money tempts you, then traps you, it’s very hard to flee. So while foreign cash may bring benefits today — jobs, investment, a certain ineffable smoothness — the Milanese should still be fearful. Of course, shimmers of the old town cling on. You can still find good cassœula, especially past the ringroad, and the courtyards will still tempt you in the August sun. All the same, you sense that something vast and special is ending. In December 2024, unhappy at their team’s New York owners, AC Milan supporters unveiled a banner at their San Siro stadium. “We give honour to our champions,” it read. “Symbols of a Milan that no longer exists!” Time, perhaps, for a new proverb.

Sciascia’s home was the small village of Racalmuto in western Sicily, the traditional mafia stronghold of dry dusty plains and empty mountains. He was, he said, able to write about the criminals because he had grown up observing the pressure put on the villagers by local bosses, and the way that jobs and positions went to those who obeyed mafia orders. He could feel the mafia in his bones, and, in some fundamental sense, felt he was a mafioso himself.

Having decided to base his book on the true story of a local contractor, murdered for refusing to give in to extortion, Sciascia resolved to deliver his message in clear, unmistakable terms. The mafia, he wrote, was not as some suggested a part of colorful Sicilian folklore — but a highly effective secret criminal organization, made up of bosses and middle men, who used kidnapping, kneecapping and execution to extort money and leverage power. It had already moved, Sciascia continued, from its original base in the Sicilian countryside into the cities, where it was feeding on Italy’s postwar building boom. And, unless checked, the mafia would keep going, up through Italy and far beyond. Sciascia then recommended a line of action: the only way to crush this organized criminality before it was too late was to follow the money, check bank accounts and tax returns, and establish why seemingly unemployed grandees were enjoying sumptuous lives.

Few, in 1961, chose to listen. Politicians, churchmen, industrialists and lawyers lined up to say that the mafia was nothing but an invention in the fevered minds of the Communists, traditional opponents of financial malfeasance. As for the author himself, Sciascia was dismissed as a malevolent critic of his beautiful island home, and interested only in the sales of his books. It would take 20 years and the deaths of many brave and principled investigators, some of them his personal friends, before Sicily began to come to grips with its mafia. By then, the mafia had spread just as Sciascia warned it would, digging its tentacles into every corner of Sicilian life, dominating first the fish, meat and citrus markets, then water, then cigarette and drugs. Its bosses were very rich men — with yachts in Palermo harbor and vast estates in the hills beyond — and would soon become wealthier still.

Suggested Reading

How the mafia infiltrated Germany

By Max Daly

From boyhood, Sciascia had been fascinated by the idea of justice. As he saw it, Sicily had been overtaken, since soon after the unification of Italy, by corruption at every level. He railed against ministers who took bribes, contractors who made their money through kickbacks, priests who condoned what their parishioners were doing. He kept turning out his gialli, targeting the Church, politicians both in Rome and Palermo, bureaucrats and industrialists too readily seduced by mafia money or  intimated by threats.

Il Contesto — published in English as Equal Danger — was about the venality of the political and legal establishment and its “degraded and impenetrable” power. Todo Modo, One Way or Another, is partly about the Christian Democratic Party. Dominating postwar Italian politics right until the Nineties, Sciascia always hated it for its endless compromises and corruption. Todo Modo is also about clerics, depicted as accomplices in crime. Readers loved him, praising the honesty of this outspoken, melancholic, tenacious man, scourge of Italian immorality. In political and judicial circles he had few friends. He lost even more when he turned his attention, in 1978, to the kidnap and murder of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists. Once again, Sciascia assailed the Christian Democrats, rightly accusing the party, which feared incriminatory revelations by Moro, of wilfully failing to save him. When it was published, The Moro Affair sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

From the first, Sciascia built his gialli around a single figure, usually a carabiniere detective, sometimes an intrepid magistrate. These were lonely men, staunch, skeptical, obsessive upholders of the law, highly cultured and above all incorruptible. They read the world using their considerable intelligence, deciphering secret, buried things, even when they seemed capricious and every trail led only deeper into the undergrowth. They solved their cases, identified the killers, challenged mafia henchmen and their political backers. But they never won. In no Sciascia novel is a culprit brought to book. This has not stopped a generation of young carabinieri recruits attributing their choice of career to their admiration for Captain Bellodi, the detective in The Day of the Owl.

Suggested Reading

How the Mob went mainstream

By Andrea Valentino

As violence in Sicily intensified through the Seventies and early Eighties, bringing bodies to Sicilian streets as clans fought for supremacy, Sciascia went on writing and accusing. Asked why it was that he was never murdered, he would simply say that the mafia did not read fiction. Some of his books dealt with cases of past injustices. These he called inchieste — investigations — where he delved into unsolved stories about disappeared scientists and wrongly accused prelates. Watching the growing number of attacks on prosecutors who grew too close to the truth, Sciascia followed the long corteges of grieving Sicilians bearing their coffins through the streets of Palermo, mourning them all. By now he had become one of Italy’s best-loved writers. One of his last books, translated as Open Doors, was about a “piccolo judice”, a little judge, who refuses to obey the order given him by his superiors to pass a death sentence, though he knows that this will spell the end to his career. The little judge was a “uomo solo”, a man alone, the kind of man that Sciascia loved most, and someone very like himself.

Sciascia died in the autumn of 1989. He lived long enough to see much of what he had written and warned about confirmed. The mafia had indeed moved north, to spread the trade in drugs throughout Europe and cause epidemics of addicts. Three years earlier, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two immensely brave magistrates who spearheaded the battle against the Sicilian mafia, had managed to bring 471 mafiosi to trial, in a “maxi-processo” (mega-trial) that took place in a concrete bunker built specifically inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. They had done so largely by pursuing the money, as Sciascia had proposed, through bank accounts and international financial transactions. Sciascia was in court to watch proceedings and noted that, finally, the immunity that had long protected the mafia had been lifted.

Towards the end of his life, questioned repeatedly for his opinions, Sciascia would say that he had grown afraid of his own prescience, and that in any case the old mafia, retaining a code of honor amid the brutality, was gone. As bad as things were in the Sixties, killings back then were controlled, and senior mafiosi obeyed, something which vanished as the violence spread and more and more players arrived.

By the end, Sciascia claimed he no longer understood what had replaced the mafia of his youth. Just as well, perhaps, that he was no longer alive when Falcone and Borsellino were murdered by mafia bosses enraged at the success of the maxi-processo. Yet Sciascia also didn’t live to see the Italian state finally act against the corruption endemic at the heart of national life, when the “Mani Puliti”, the “clean-hands” group of Milanese magistrates, uncovered and prosecuted a vast number of politicians, civil servants, army officers and industrialists on charges of bribery, fraudulent accounting, kickbacks and misuse of government funds. Among them were many Sicilians.

Yet even now, with the Sicilian mafia paralyzed, Sciascia’s grim premonitions proved accurate. Falcone and Borsellino’s killers were jailed — but since the author’s death, Italian organized crime has spread its wings still further, moving seamlessly into money laundering, prostitution and the smuggling and trafficking of people, using cryptocurrency to conceal its transactions. Along the way, the ‘Ndrangheta, operating out of Calabria, in the remote, impoverished toe of Italy, overtook the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in power and wealth. A loose association of some 500 clans, with over 60,000 members in 84 countries, the ‘Ndrangheta is said today to have an annual income of £49 billion. Perhaps 80% of Europe’s drug trade is channeled through Gioia Tauro, on the coast of Calabria and Italy’s largest container port.

And on it goes. Recent prosecutions have uncovered operations involving shell companies, white-collar intermediaries, prepaid untraceable cards and online foreign exchange platforms — all to launder millions of euros acquired through cocaine, extortion, gambling and human trafficking. Indeed, as prophetic as Sciascia was, he certainly never envisaged the complexity and reach of the modern mafia, a phenomenon that embraces not just Sicily and Calabria but Campania, home to the Camorra, as well as many other associations operating both independently and together, in every continent. In 2023 police across Europe, having staked out an ice-cream parlor in Germany, arrested 108 members of the ‘Ndrangheta for traffic in drugs and weapons. Using Chinese money brokers in Italy, the Calabrians were found to have been running weapons to South America, supplying Brazilian criminal gangs in exchange for cocaine. In response to what is now a global phenomenon, an international police alliance, bringing together 13 countries, has been set up, financed by the Italian Ministry of Public Security.

No Sicilian writer has claimed Sciascia’s mantle as scourge of the mafia — though Andrea Camilleri, a fellow island novelist, often said he imbued his hero Montalbano with Sciascia’s deep shyness. Even so, other brave prosecutors have followed Falcone and Borsellino. One is Nicola Gratteri, who has staged his own mega trial of 331 ‘Ndrangheta suspects in Calabria. Like his famous predecessors, he lives in fear. “I often talk to death,” Gratteri told a journalist not long ago, “because you have to rationalize fear in order to move on”. As the gangs spread yet further, moving into new markets, exploiting every new twist and turn in technology, their crimes copied by loosely associated groups, it is as Sciascia feared: unless checked, in law and in culture, the mafia will always be one step ahead of its pursuers.

***

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul is published by Chatto and Windus on 2 February, 2026.

The loss of any profound sensibility — whether in fashion, philosophy, physics, film, literature, politics, music, or engineering — is cause to think about its absence and its impact. Valentino’s passing shows us that high fashion has become a feckless and heartless enterprise, afraid of the poetry of universal forms, and, in particular, of the masculine appraisal of the female form and of the synergistic relationship between the male eye and the feminine as a civilization-enhancing ideal.

What Valentino stood for — what his work manifested — was the apprehension of beauty, rather than the presentation of an ideology. His reign from the 1960s through the late 1980s, and his decline through the 1990s and aughts, almost perfectly tracks the radical aesthetic break after 1989, when a confident, gendered view of both men’s and women’s fashion gave way to the shiftless, formless, deconstructed grunge aesthetic that has, in one form or another, predominated for the last 30 years. 

At the street level, the apotheosis of this drab, ideologized style are the hideously baggy women’s sweatpants and jeans that have come to prevail in the post-#MeToo era: low-rise or otherwise garishly revealing — but, crucially, without celebrating the female form.

Valentino’s gift — visible in dresses for stars from Elizabeth Taylor to Julia Roberts, and most radiantly evident in the dresses he made for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — was for framing his subjects in a way that enhanced their elegance without reduction to plainness or over-simplicity. The essence of a Valentino dress might be summarized as decorated elegance, the suggestion that there could be more, that there is more, that the designer could have done. Valentino’s dresses hover at the edge of restraint, just over the line of good taste. 

More from this author

Have we forgotten how to do Christmas?

By Matthew Gasda

To borrow from the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, Valentino’s dresses were some of the last miracles of a European tradition that risked, aspired to, and was drawn toward transcendence (or what Sloterdijk calls “verticality”). Valentino never fell from grace or respect in the fashion world; rather, the civilization that he designed for ceased to exist. 

The fall of the Soviet Union, especially, freed the West from the reliance on tradition that it formerly used to draw a clear contrast between itself and a revolutionary utopian enemy. During the jaded ’90s, fashion was flattened and became “horizontal.” The red carpet, which represents what a culture wants to see about itself, lost interest in the female form as a miracle and final flower of civilization, and Valentino’s very Catholic vision of beauty, which was not open to deconstruction and moral nagging, fell out of fashion.

To borrow another key idea from Sloterdijk, fashion over the last 30 years, and especially in the last decade, seems to have become more and more armored, as if clothes were an immune response to a chaotic and dangerous world. Celebrity fashion’s strategic shift toward the ugly, oversized, and ironic might be described as so many inoculations against judgment — protection against any accusation that the wearer might be secretly allied to the old, pre-social justice cult of sumptuousness epitomized by house Valentino in its heyday.

Valentino’s death this week coincides strangely with the eruption of public drama between Brooklyn Beckham and his family — in particular his mother, Victoria, the pop singer-turned-fashion designer whose minimalist, wearable brand, which is clean, neutral, and risk-free, embodies the very horizontality that Valentino must have abhorred. The strange thing about the intra-Beckham spat, however, is that it seemingly began with the choice of Brooklyn’s betrothed Nicola to wear Valentino, rather than Victoria Beckham, at the couple’s 2022 wedding. The younger Beckhams didn’t just reject their aesthetic matrilineage; they embraced something like an aesthetic nostalgia, a desire for a fashion absolute.

And yet the Beckham family beef, which has played out on Instagram, also demonstrates that nostalgia for the vertical, Catholic sense of beauty has no chance of reaching escape velocity. It will be dogged and enchained by the puerility and ugliness of social media culture and, by extension, a celebrity culture that has lost all connection with iconography and ritual.

If the women that Valentino dressed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s stood for aspiration toward a distant and beautiful absolute, then the celebrities who will undoubtedly line up to wear vintage Valentino in the coming weeks and months will stand for nothing other than the lust for clicks and attention. Jackie Kennedy, dressed in Valentino in the ’60s, could only be glimpsed by the public in snapshots that still contained a sense of scarcity, yearning, and symbolism. Images of celebrities on red carpets today are subject to endless recirculation, memeing, commentary, and now AI recreation and modification. If you don’t like how a celebrity is dressed on the red carpet, you can use AI to realistically redress or undress them, destroying any vestigial sense of the sacred, and degrading yourself in the bargain.

The coincidence of Valentino’s death with Brooklyn Beckham’s break from House Beckham, in the context of our menacingly tasteless algorithmic era, suggests that a rebirth of Valentino’s aesthetic spirit will not, ironically, have much to do with celebrities or celebrity culture. Valentino’s greatest designs came about during an era of analog media, before imagery overload became too profound. My guess is that the designer working in Valentino’s mode — with an eye toward the splendor of the human form, the splendor of clothes, and the union of the two — must serve private audiences away from cameras and screens. He must seek after the limited eternity of private memory, not terabytes. Fashion in the future, ironically, might resemble the anonymous design of the pre-celebrity, premodern era: it will be for aristocrats and salons removed from public consumption and opinion. 

“I love beauty. It’s not my fault,” Valentino said in 2008. It was not a fault, but a virtue, and his legacy will long endure for it.

The man born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, in 1226, has been defied ever since, and not merely by Franciscans. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni recently announced that his saint’s day, 4 October, is to be celebrated as a national holiday, a just reward for the man she called an icon of Italian identity. The move is partly economic — an extra day off implies a buoyant economy — but also represents the latest phase of a wider nationalist agenda. Over recent years, Meloni’s ruling party has cut taxes on Italian art, cut English from Italian documents, and even banned lab-grown meat in an attempt to defend the nation’s culinary heritage. 

This is hardly the meekness Saint Francis had preached. But, then, Meloni isn’t the first to politicize the friar either. Since Italy was united, over 150 years ago, Il Poverello (“The Poor Little One”) has been revived again and again, his story defaced for a shifting polemical present. And if that makes him vulnerable to any regime in need of a hero, it also obscures the real Francis: a medieval mystic who bathed in frenzied piety, and one who anyway seems snubbed in a land where the local still reigns. 

More from this author

Why Meloni is rewriting Italy's constitution

By Andrea Valentino

The modern obsession with Saint Francis began on the 700th anniversary of his birth, in 1882. That year, barely a decade after unification, the fresh-faced monarchy recalled the friar with gusto. There were new biographies and new magazines, such as The Echo of Saint Francis, which called him “Italian of heart and mind”. Art told a similar tale. One sculpture from 1882 shows the friar arms-outstretched, blessing a triumvirate of Dante, Giotto and Christopher Columbus. 

Equating Saint Francis with these well-worn civic heroes makes sense, given the 19th-century state’s awkward relationship with the Catholic Church. By 1870, as they united the peninsula under the tricolor flag, Italian troops had besieged the Papal enclave in Rome. Twelve years later, anticlericalism remained strong, with many nationalist leaders condemning the Church for its venality and obscurantism. But if they loathed the Church — Giuseppe Mazzini famously asked if priests really knew the Gospel — they couldn’t ignore the fact that most normal Italians disagreed. Embracing Saint Francis was therefore a way of integrating the Church into the new state. And if, to borrow a phrase, that made turning peasants into Italians slightly less challenging, Saint Francis was a plausible icon in other ways, too. For one thing, his modesty was the perfect foil to Papal pomp. For another, he wrote his famous Rule in an Umbrian vernacular familiar to Dante, meaning he could be retroactively cast as the father of modern Italian: helpful when roughly nine-in-ten subjects knew only dialect. 

If the Francis of the 1880s was a thoughtful theologian, font of the Renaissance and model for an enlightened kingdom on the make, other elements of his story would prove helpful in the following century. Before he embraced destitution, helping lepers and rebuilding churches, Francis was a knight. As a young man, he joined his native Assisi in a war against Perugia and was captured and imprisoned for a year. Later, deep into his ministry, he crossed the Mediterranean on a daring mission to convert a Muslim sultan. 

Not quite a ruthless killer, but certainly enough to be conscripted by fascism. That was obvious even before the Blackshirts seized power. In 1919, for instance, the poet and rabblerouser Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the town of Fiume. This Yugoslav port, now Rijeka, was claimed by Italian patriots, and D’Annunzio invoked the friar as his hoodlums ran riot. “Are not the poor of Fiume the favourites of Saint Francis?” His successors were even starker. Just as the constitutional monarchy he destroyed needed the support of the clergy, so too did Benito Mussolini. Hence the first 4 October holiday swiftly following, with Francis designated an Italian patron saint in 1939. The propagandaists got started too. Comparing Francis to Mussolini, one said they had the same liveliness of gaze and nobility of bearing. The only thing missing from Il Duce, he suggested, was a halo. 

As the dictatorship became more aggressive, it also imagined Francis as a rifle-toting crusader. When Italy attacked Abyssinia, in 1935, the mayor of Assisi argued the invaders were following the “bloody footsteps of the Franciscan missionaries”. And just as the 19th century remade Saint Francis in chiseled stone, the fascists employed the new medium of film. One excellent example is Frate Francesco, a 1927 biopic that blends Franciscan unity with national pride. “It must be a very Italian film,” said the director, “a triumph of faith and beauty to demonstrate that we Italians are still capable of standing up to foreign competition.” 

Saint Francis has proved just as flexible since 1945. His love of charity made him a hero of postwar socialism, his love of animals the patron saint of ecology. By the time you reach Margaret Thatcher’s famous speech, which wrongly attributed a later prayer to Il Poverello, Francis begins to feel less like a real historical figure — and more like a cipher, a vessel for whichever statesman needs him at the time. 

There’s an irony here. On the one hand, Francis’s supple biography, made suppler still by the passage of time, means he can easily be twisted this way or that, by Romantic liberals, or jackbooted thugs, or indeed by Right-wing populists whose approval ratings are down. At the same time, however, that very impermanence means Francis, whatever his guise, can never truly enter Italian hearts. For whenever he does, someone else will soon recast him. Explaining the importance of Meloni’s holy day — itself reviving one axed in 1977 — a member of the ruling party claimed it would restore “to the public sphere a pillar of our collective memory”. That’s unsurprising from yet another government that values good relations with the Pope. But the question remains: which public sphere, and which collective memory? If Francis’s posthumous journey tells us anything, it’s that polemic by one ideologue will only be usurped by the next. 

But if echoes of the flesh-and-blood friar endure, in his elegant prose and his lust for adventure, the cleric as a whole was far more arcane. He was, after all, a man who had a dream-time revelation to remake the celestial city here on Earth, and who gave up his possessions so freely that his merchant father disowned him; a man who then stripped to his skin, and declared he’d own nothing, and who fled to the woods singing a French ballad — yet who emerged to found an order that conquered all Europe. The real Francis, as far as we can tell across the chasm of centuries, was a man who blessed captured rabbits, and who admonished the birds to thank God for their wings. 

I’d love to see Meloni describe these hair-shirt passions to her voters, if only because it would force her to ground Francis in something more interesting than politics. It would be funny too: that this bewildering world of medieval devotion could accommodate anything as prosaic as Giorgia Meloni is laughable, particularly when churchgoing is far lower now than it was in 1882. And yet, in another irony, freeing Francis from the vagaries of modern discourse might actually make him a more appealing national figure. 

The fact is that, whatever the shrill insistence of Meloni and the rest, many are simply unwilling to embrace a truly Italian identity, new books proclaiming Francis a proto-nationalist notwithstanding. According to a 2021 poll, just 20% of citizens identified primarily as Italian, an 8% drop from a decade earlier. Another survey found that half feel closer to their city or region than they do the country as a whole. 

Suggested Reading

Italy's past isn't history

By Tobias Jones

Perhaps that’s to be expected in a nation so young. But what’s undeniable, too, is that these sentiments are reflected in practice. Regionalism remains common from the Alps to Sicily, both politically and across the wider culture: not least when it comes to sainthood. In 2017, to give one example, officials in Rome tried to ban the Venetian authorities from flying the Banner of Saint Mark, an artifact of the city’s ancient republic. “It’s a flag with more than 1,000 years of history,” lamented one local politician. 

And if the evangelist is more admired here than Saint Francis, you can spot the same pattern across the peninsula. The Milanese are sometimes called “Ambrosiani” after their patron Saint Ambrose. In Naples, Saint Januarius Day is a time for frantic celebration, as his blood-stained relics are paraded through the streets. John the Baptist is the patron saint of Florence, where like equivalent days elsewhere, his feast is an unofficial holiday. Taken together, anyway, it hints again to the enduring power of the local in a land where Rome remains weak — and explains once more why centralizers are so desperate for a Francis. 

And what of Il Poverello himself? From a purely religious perspective, he doubtless remains popular. Visit Assisi, with its vast double church, and you can find plenty of trinkets for sale. But unlike Francis’s political cult, these commemorations feel wholly unstudied, a universe away from that pompous talk of public spheres and collective memory. Think of it as a kind of revenge, for a man who only ever wished to be forgotten, with his ballads and his rabbits and his birds. 

Draghi is often praised for his rare bluntness in assessing Europe’s condition, a quality that has earned him a reputation as one of the continent’s most insightful thinkers. And, certainly, he is right in arguing that the neoliberal architecture of the EU — grounded in “a conscious reduction of the power of states” in favor of rules-based market mechanisms — has left Europe woefully unequipped to navigate a world where military and economic power are increasingly deployed to protect national interests.

The problem is, Draghi’s so-called analyses usually amount to little more than stating the obvious — facts that are evident to anyone not blinded by ideology or vested interests. The acclaim, in short, says less about Draghi’s brilliance than about the poverty of European public debate. But even more importantly, while Draghi may correctly grasp the surface symptoms of Europe’s malaise, he consistently fails — deliberately so — in properly diagnosing their underlying causes.

For if he is right to say that the EU’s neoliberal framework — based upon state retrenchment, fiscal austerity, wage compression and an obsession with boosting exports — has weakened Europe, it’s a policy cocktail that he himself helped blend. He was an architect and enforcer of that model. Already in the early Nineties, when he was director general of the Italian finance ministry, he emerged as a leading advocate of the concept of vincolo esterno (“external constraint”) — the idea that only by “tying the hands” of national governments via a political-economic straitjacket could neoliberal reforms, which lacked popular support, be forced through. That external constraint was, of course, the European Union, and above all the single currency, whose roadmap was laid out in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. In that position, Draghi was also instrumental in driving forward the large-scale privatization of Italy’s state-owned enterprises.

Over the next three decades, moving between the private sector (notably Goldman Sachs) and senior public posts, Draghi established himself as one of the foremost champions of neoliberal orthodoxy. This role reached its fullest expression during his tenure as president of the ECB from 2011 to 2019, and the act that symbolically marked the beginning of his tenure couldn’t be more paradigmatic.

In August 2011, at the height of the so-called “euro crisis”, Draghi and his outgoing predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet sent a letter to the Italian government. Intended to remain secret, it was subsequently leaked. The letter claimed that Italy’s post-crisis deficit-cutting plan was “not sufficient”, and set out detailed demands, including “the full liberalization of local public services”, “large scale privatizations”, wage reductions and even “constitutional reform tightening fiscal rules”. Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s then-minister of economy and finance, later privately told a group of European finance ministers that his government had received two threatening letters that year: one from a terrorist group, the other from the ECB. “The one from the ECB was worse”, he quipped.

Draghi must have concluded that the conditions set out in the letter had not been met, because a few months later he “forced” (to quote the solidly neoliberal Financial Times) Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favor of the unelected Mario Monti. Draghi achieved this by discontinuing the central bank’s Italian bond purchases — thus deliberately causing interest rates to rise above safety levels — and by making Berlusconi’s ouster the precondition for further ECB support of Italian bonds. This was belatedly admitted by none other than Monti himself, who claimed in a 2017 interview that, in late 2011, Draghi “decided to stop the purchases of Italian government bonds, which had kept the Berlusconi government afloat in the summer and autumn of 2011”.

It is hard to imagine a more disturbing scenario than a supposedly “independent” and “apolitical” central bank using monetary blackmail to oust an elected government from office and impose its own political agenda. Yet all evidence suggests that this — a monetary coup d’état — is exactly what happened in Italy in 2011. Just a few years later, Draghi deployed the same tools against Greece, effectively shutting down the country’s banking system to force the government to comply with EU-demanded austerity policies, which Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s then-finance minister, likened to a form of “economic waterboarding”.

More from this author

The real winner of Europe’s Russia policy

By Thomas Fazi

Even in his brief role as Italian premier, between 2021 and 2022, Draghi continued these policies. The few “structural” measures enacted by his government were all aimed at promoting privatization, liberalization, deregulation and fiscal consolidation — while he imposed on his country some of the most draconian Covid policies in the world.

Overall, then, few figures over the past decades have been more unwavering in their commitment to advancing undemocratic neoliberalism than Mario Draghi. But his responsibility for Europe’s downward spiral extends well beyond his role as neoliberal enforcer-in-chief. In his speech last week, he effectively conceded that the EU had been vassalized by the United States. Yet, once again, Draghi omitted any mention of his own role in bringing about this sorry state of affairs: he has always been a staunch Atlanticist, and as such has played a key role in ensuring the EU’s structural subordination to Washington.

The EU’s response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis is a good case in point. In his much-discussed report on European competitiveness, published a year ago this week, Draghi highlighted high energy costs as one of the main reasons for the EU’s loss of competitiveness. The report emphasized that European companies face significantly steeper prices compared to their US counterparts, seriously hindering industrial growth and investment.

Fair enough — yet this was hardly an act of God. Rather, it was a direct consequence of the EU’s decision to decouple from Russian gas, which before the war accounted for almost half of the bloc’s supply, in favor of much more expensive American liquefied natural gas (LNG). More to the point, this policy was vehemently supported by Draghi. Shortly after Russia’s invasion, he defended as prime minister the EU’s decision to impose a gas embargo on Russia, from which Italy imported around 40% of its gas. “Do you want air conditioning or peace?”, he asked, the logic stark in its dubiousness. Draghi was likely suggesting that sanctions would soon cripple the Russian economy and force an end to the war — a scenario that anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economic and geopolitical realities could have dismissed from the outset.

Suggested Reading

How Merkel fuelled the AfD

By Katja Hoyer

A few months later, in a speech at the UN that in retrospect appears almost comically misguided, Draghi doubled down, claiming that the sanctions had imposed “extremely harsh costs on Russia” and had “a disruptive effect on the Russian war machine and on its economy”, making it “harder for Russia to respond to the defeats piling up on the battlefield”. As we know, none of this came to pass — the Russian economy proved resilient, the war machine kept churning, and the defeats mounted not in Moscow but in Draghi’s delusional forecasts. All of this was easily predictable, and indeed was predicted by many of us.

All this raises an obvious question: how is it that Draghi continues to be an enlightened statesman for denouncing the consequences of flawed policies he himself promoted? In a normal world, he would be laughed off the stage — or pelted with rotten eggs. That he so easily evades accountability is the clearest expression of the kakistocratic nature of EU politics, where failure is not punished but rewarded, and where incompetent leaders routinely fail upwards.

But if Draghi’s refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the EU’s problems is bad enough, his proposed solutions are worse still. For Draghi, the cure for the EU’s dysfunction is — to give the EU even more power. “The European Union will have to move towards new forms of integration”, he declared in his latest speech. Translation: yet more political, fiscal, military and technological centralization. In other words, then, Europe’s problems, in Draghi’s view, can only be solved by transferring still more authority to Brussels and further sidelining national governments and parliaments.

But the last thing Europe needs is to give even more power to people like Draghi. On the contrary, if the continent is to have any chance of reversing its decline, it must reject the delusional dogma of “more Europe” and finally hold to account the very technocrats who built the crisis-ridden order they now pretend to diagnose.

It’s a fair point. For if tourism powers the bloc’s otherwise torpid economy, more galleries and restaurants is not what Europe needs. Squeezed by a conservative business culture, and an elephantine welfare state, genuine entrepreneurs increasingly seek exile in the Anglosphere, while the workers that remain wallow in low-paying service jobs. Especially as the shock of Trumpism forces the continent to defend its fading interests, it’s a recipe for economic catastrophe, with the EU expected to encompass just one tenth of global GDP by 2100.

Yet if the Old World needs to reclaim the magic of the Medici, the continent’s redemption will come far from Florence. Rather, Europe’s periphery is leading the way, with places like Portugal and Greece offering sunny business prospects dashed with pleasant weather. Combined with similar dynamism in the former communist states of eastern Europe, it’s increasingly possible to talk of a European Sun Belt. For just like the former Confederacy, once disdained and now booming, the continent’s future will be made on its edges — if, that is, the EU’s reactionary status quo can finally be vanquished.

Suggested reading

How Gen Z fell for Poland's memes

By Michal Kranz

Europe’s economy is broken. Over the past 15 years, the Eurozone has grown about 6% in dollar terms. The US has jumped 82%. The biggest gap is in tech: of the top 50 tech firms, only three are located in Europe, with the list unsurprisingly dominated by Silicon Valley. Not that Europe’s entrepreneurial deficit is not only in ones and zeros. MIT researcher Andrew McAfee has shown how, over the last 50 years, the US has created “from scratch” companies with market cap of over $10 billion five times faster than the EU. No wonder some observers now quip that Europe is “a museum as a continent and a museum as a stock market”.

Faced with this malaise, and geopolitical upheavals from Kyiv to the White House, it’s little wonder that Europe’s leaders, in Paris and Berlin, are rushing to reindustrialize. That’s clear enough militarily, with the Bundestag promising €500 billion for new tanks and missiles. Yet if the German defense minister claims his countrymen have an “erotic relationship” with weapons — and we agree that bolstered self-sufficiency is necessary given Trump’s rising isolationism — it’s unlikely that Europe can thrive in the 21st century through force-of-arms alone.

Certainly, you shouldn’t count on Brussels, prime mover of the continent’s decline, to reverse the slide to irrelevance. Mario Draghi’s much-ballyhooed response to the current crisis followed the old patterns of green obsessions, social “inclusion” and ever greater conformity with Brussels edicts. Europe’s grandees believe that money fleeing Trumpian chaos will head to a permanent economic shift towards the Old World. But that ignores the fact that Europe is far more dependent on exports than the US, and lacks new industries that can compete with either America or the rising powers of the developing world.

Instead, the best hopes for European revival lie not in the old heartlands of the Ruhr or Picardy, but in enterprising economies of the south and east. “France and Germany are not good for startups, while places like Spain and Portugal are catching up and far more open to new firms,” suggests Giacomo Gentili, founder of the Pack digital mentoring firm, itself based in Barcelona. Other tech experts agree. For Andrea Zorzetto, co-founder of People Rank, a Milanese social media outfit, the European periphery offers ample opportunities for ambitious startups.

To a large extent, these transformations can be understood in fiscal terms. As traumatic as the great financial crisis doubtless was for countries like Greece and Spain, EU strictures did oblige them to finally reform their internal markets. “They were forced to change and reform while others did not,” says Veronica de Romanis, an economist who advises the Italian ministry of finance. “After 15 years they are the ones that [are] growing.”

An example to the contrary is de Romanis’s native Italy, which retains high costs and eye-watering tax rates. School teachers in Naples or Milan can expect to pay upwards of 60% of their income to the state, while sales taxes squeeze them even more. Despite its handsome piazzas and educated population, no wonder Italy today boasts far less venture capital funding per head than either Portugal and Spain. Eastern Europe, too, continues to bask in its post-Soviet sun. Big new IT investments are taking place in Polish towns like Wroclaw, where Intel is building a $6.4 billion semiconductor facility. Google, for its part, plans to invest up to $2 billion in a Romanian data center.

As these examples imply, much of this investment is happening in tech. Three of the EU countries with the highest proportion of IT workers are all found on the continent’s edge: Ireland, Malta and Lithuania. People with advanced degrees in places like Poland are far less likely to be unemployed than their counterparts in the UK and France. According to Nima Sanandaji, a Swedish economist, traditional tax-and-spend havens just can’t compete, especially when their obsession with EU climate policies tend to mean energy costs are much higher.

Taken together, it’s little wonder that peripheral Europe is now growing faster than its more established rival, with a so-called “regional inversion” set to upend cliches of Nordic verve. It helps, of course, that much of southern Europe is blessed with the so-called “Mediterranean premium”. From the weather to the food, much of southern Europe is a delight, another neat echo of California in its 20th century pomp. Though not quite as stunning as my adopted home state, states like Georgia and Florida are similarly attractive. The summers might be sticky, but lower energy prices also allow for the generous use of air conditioning.

It’s unsurprising, too, that the European Sun Belt has become popular with digital nomads, while Barcelona and Lisbon now host digital hubs for Danone and Carlsberg respectively. “The quality of life here attracts people,” says Gentili, whose staff includes Spaniards, Italians, Japanese and Argentinians. The wages help too: a software designer in Portugal is a third cheaper than in France, while similarly skilled workers in eastern Europe are as much as half the price. All told, offshoring to low-cost tech hubs in Europe can lower project expenses by up to 70%.

Yet if these strengths have seen even Greece’s tech sector grow by 15% in a single year, this model is not without challenges. In cities like Lisbon, an influx of digital nomads has driven up prices for local residents. The southward flow also threatens the very authenticity that attracts people to these spots to begin with. Troops of US graduates may make good techies, but they risk undermining the Old World charm of southern Europe in much the same way as mass development in California has sapped away its laid-back character.

There are broader questions, too, about the viability of Europe’s periphery, something that goes well beyond tech and other bluechip firms. At the grassroots level, the number of European self-starters has actually dropped in recent years, even as their counterparts in America are thriving. “In Europe people are afraid to fail and take risks like in the US,” Zorzetto argues. “Europe has become a continent of old money. We have to get back to our entrepreneurial, artisanal DNA.”

More from this author

America's destiny lies in the New South

By Joel Kotkin

Considering the continued legacy of welfarism from Porto to Piacenza, it’s a reasonable point, even if the communist legacy doubtless bestows the continent’s east with more collective grit. “We are hungrier, and western Europe has a high level of comfort,” says Gabor Szanto, a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter. “We had nothing, so we worked harder and risked more.” To explain what he means, Szanto describes the remarkable rise of the region’s film industry, with Hungarian studios alone now employing some 20,000 workers.

For both established Europe and the upstarts, events in America are, at least, shaking things up. “I think we should see Trumpism as a historical opportunity for Europe,” says Ermelinda Campani, director of the Breyer Center for Overseas Studies, a Stanford-affiliated institution in Florence. But Campani sees a future where Europe capitalizes not on its huge welfare state, but on its technological nous as well as its artisanal skills in design, fashion and food.

To be sure, such a transformation wouldn’t be unprecedented. Throughout its history, Europe has seen economic power shift from Italy in the Renaissance, to the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, to industrial Britain, Germany and France in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, again, is time for something new, with Kraków and Alicante happy to oblige.

Of course, Europe’s powerful progressives will resist any such shift. The Guardian predictably calls for Europeans to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime. Certainly, this approach is central to the European Commission, which remains wedded to net zero and continent-wide green initiatives. Essentially, then, they are reaffirming the formula that has brought Europe to the brink of economic irrelevance. Yet doubling down on this approach, combined with low fertility rates, will inevitably ensure that spots like Florence remain what they are now — lovely museums, but museums nonetheless.

Short Tony’s death was just the latest in a long line of ultra murders. An “ultra” is an extremist football fan, sort of a cross between a hooligan and a Hell’s Angel. Any murder in that netherworld is newsworthy, but this one more than ever: as his dialect nickname implies, Bellocco was a Calabrian mobster, sent north to offer muscle to Inter’s Curva Nord ultras: in return for a slice of the gang’s lucrative businesses.

Bellocco had been one of the key mercenaries in an ongoing battle with a rival Inter crew, the Irriducibili. When that battle was won, Bellocco had become one of the top bosses of Inter’s terraces. Many of us had thought the ultras had already touched rock bottom in August 2019, when Lazio’s top boss, a drug-slinging stoner called Fabrizio Piscitelli, was shot dead as he sat on a park bench in Rome. But what’s happening in Milan takes the ultra story to a darker place: they are now essentially narco-crews, ready to greenlight mergers with organized crime to dominate Milan’s suburbs.

All this is particularly poignant because Milan is the city that claims to be the cradle of ultra ideology. AC Milan’s famous Fossa dei Leoni (“Lions’ Den”) and Commandos Tigre (“Tiger Commandoes”) both claim to have been founded around 1968, before any other ultra group in Italy. Back then, the ultras were not considered criminals so much as teenage scallywags. The real Milanese outlaws came from the Ligéra. Meaning “The Light” in the local dialect, it encompassed an assortment of petty crooks: pickpockets, pimps, bookies and fences that graduated onto kidnappings and bank jobs.

These days, though, the city is bossed by the ultras. Milan and Inter share the San Siro stadium, its helix staircases looking like springs whatever the angle. The teams’ respective ultras take it in turns to skim off the top of the tens of thousands of punters who come to the stadium every week.

Suggested reading

The football hooligans fighting for Ukraine

By David Patrikarakos

It all started when the ultras turned their collective back on a sacred tenet of ultradom. Until the early Eighties, it had been a foundational principle that being an ultra meant fighting your enemies — above all enemies from the same city. But when, in 1981, an Inter fan was stabbed to death by a Milan fan, the Milan and Inter ultras negotiated a non-aggression pact.

The major ultra groups from both sides — Nord Kaos and Viking for Inter, the Brigate Rossonero and Commandos Tigre for Milan — began using their sheer force of numbers to make money. Organized hierarchically, these crews started taking over the curtilage of the San Siro, selling fake merch, hiring out parking spaces, levering beers and bapping burgers. A few of them also began offering à la carte highs: coke, speed, weed or E.

Though the Milanese ultras didn’t fight each other, they did fight almost everyone else. Nazzareno Filippini was an Ascoli fan killed by Inter ultras in 1988. Vincenzo Spagnolo, a Genoa supporter, was stabbed to death by a hot-headed Milan fan in January 1995. After those killings, there were more peace conferences.

Some talked of returning to the old days when, they claimed, being an ultra was just a way for waifs to get off their faces and stage-manage the Sunday afternoon spectacle of confetti and pranks. I interviewed hundreds of “purist” ultras for my book on the subject, and most of them lovingly recalled tipped-over cars with number plates from rival cities.

They would speak late into the night about their most memorable striscioni — the long, often witty, banners they unfurled on the terraces. “It truly, truly hurts me to see what happens on the terrace now,” one retired head ultras told me back in 2018. “It makes me suffer greatly… we’ve gone from fist-fights to knives, from knives to… ambushes, to Molotov cocktails, to bombs and to pistols. It keeps getting worse.”

This is partly a symptom of politics. In the Sixties, the ultra movement had used names echoing far-Left liberation movements across the globe (“Fedayeen”), or else evoked Italian partisan bands from the Second World War.

During the Eighties and Nineties, however, many crews turned to the far-Right. The full name, for instance, of Inter’s “Boys” gang was “Boys-SAN”, a reference to Mussolini’s paramilitary Squadre d’Azione.

Giorgio Triani is a sports sociologist who wrote two great books about Italian fans in the Nineties, just as the ultra movement was becoming a crucible for the far-Right. “The Left became disinterested in the terraces,” he says, “and very quickly they became perfectly aligned with the far-Right. They had a need to dominate the vulnerable, the opposition, the losers, the blacks…”

Soon enough, it became commonplace for thousands of supporters to grunt at black players, to interrupt silences for drowned migrants in the Mediterranean, to taunt enemies with allegations they were Jewish and would share the fate of Anne Frank. Lazio, Inter and Verona ultras were at the forefront of this political radicalization, often doing straight-arm salutes and waving swastikas. It even infected the players, with Paolo di Canio unable to resist raising a fascist salute to the Lazio faithful in 2005.

All the while, each passing year made the violence of yesterday seem quaint by comparison. It was money that fed the bloodshed: a police wiretap heard Vittorio Boiocchi — an Inter ultra murdered in 2022 — boast that he made €80,000 a month.

Cash sums that size always attract professional mobsters. And so, long before Bellocco arrived in Milan, there were attempted mergers between Calabrian families and northern ultras. About a decade ago, Juventus’s main crew, the Drughi, allowed a Calabrian family to become part of its racket. Ciccio Bucci, one of these Drughi, was also a fan-liaison officer, and was suspected of having snitched on the group. He was promptly beaten up and ostracized. When he returned to Turin, after a year away in Puglia, he jumped from a famous viaduct outside the city.

It’s not entirely clear who approved Bellocco’s entry to the terraces. But he was fortunate that his ascension occurred just as Inter was bossing Italian football, with the team winning seven trophies so far this decade. The deeper a team goes in a tournament, the more tickets get sold, not just for the stadium but for the planes and buses. Ultras bulk-buy accommodation and food, becoming informal travel agents.

When Inter and Milan met in the semi-final of the 2023 Champions’ League, they agreed to share ticket revenues from the final whoever won. Inter went through, but Milan ultras still made money. Rather than going all in — as ultra philosophy insists you always should — they had essentially “shorted” their own team.

It’s anyway unsurprising that the ultras now cover Milan like a spider’s web: if you want to trade, borrow or buy on the streets of the city, the chances are you’ll cross paths with an ultra. Luca Lucci, an AC Milan hooligan who has done time for drugs-trafficking and GBH, has provided “event-management” services — everything from body-guarding to ticket sales — to rappers like Fedez and Emis Killa. Lucci has also opened a chain of tattoo parlours called Italian Ink. It’s a world no more controlled by teenage tearaways but by old men with names like “Il Barone” (The Baron). When he was shot dead, Boiocchi was 69.

There are advantages to both sides of the mafia-ultra merger. When an ultra finds himself needing to overcome rival groups on the terrace, it’s tempting to call in those pros. And for the mercenaries, there’s the lure of a cash turnover in the low millions for which the punishments are negligible. Ticket-touting, for instance, is only given a custodial sentence if accompanied by more serious crimes.

But Andrea Beretta had apparently grown resentful of his thrusting Calabrian colleague, always in his space and living just around the corner. Bellocco had sought to assert his dominance over Beretta, showing him what he called his family album. “My mother has done 25 years in prison,” he was heard on a wire-tap. “She’s still in prison and she’s 74!”

More from this author

Italy's corrupt beach politics

By Tobias Jones

It’s a story that isn’t over yet. Bellocco was a made man, and his murder will not be without consequences for his alleged killer. Beretta will either enter witness protection and turn on his mates, or else risk a revenge killing. “It was unthinkable 30 years ago that it would have reached these levels,” says Triani. “Back then the terraces were unhealthy, sure, but now [the ultra world] has become a parasitic cancer completely decontextualized from football and sport.” No wonder it’s a movement now more studied by criminologists than sociologists.

Nineteen ultras from both sides were arrested in the aftermath of Bellocco’s killing last autumn. Most are charged with assault, extortion and being part of a “criminal association” (essentially a gang). The Inter ultras are also accused of having “abetted” the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia of whom Bellocco was part.

This incremental professionalization of ultra gangs goes against another shibboleth of the faith: that no individual makes money from the group. Lucci’s revealing defense is that he’s “only ever made money from drug-dealing, never from being an ultra”. He would rather plead guilty to something the state considers a crime than to betraying the gang, namely by dipping his fingers into his own crew’s till.

Not for the first time, in other words, money and power have flipped a counterculture. And now, commanding voters and consumers by the thousands, they’ve even entered mainstream politics. Again, there’s an overlap of interests: politicians gain street cred from association with organized fan groups, and organized groups can shift electoral results.

Lucci, now arrested, has enjoyed deliberately public handshakes and hugs with Matteo Salvini, the former interior minister (now deputy prime minister), and himself a die-hard Milanista. The former mayor of Catania, Salvo Pogliese, and Daniele Belotti, a former League parliamentarian, have also played on their terrace notoriety to rally fans to the ballot box.

It all feels a long way from those early Sixties days. Back then, the first commandment of ultra faith was fidelity to the borgo, about fighting for your hometown, even if it was just a crappy suburb without hope. But the movement is now as globalized as any multinational, and the striscioni feel like an afterthought.

The bizarre details of the crime — Kercher was raped, stabbed multiple times, then covered tenderly with a duvet — and the Italian prosecution’s proposal, on no physical evidence, of a Satanic sex ritual orchestrated by Knox, created an international media firestorm that has flared up again with each new legal development. Knox was freed on appeal in 2011 and has been exonerated by Italy’s highest court. But the legal wrangling continues (she has sued to have additional minor convictions overturned), and she remains an object of bizarrely intense public fascination. Her new memoir (she also wrote one shortly after her release) is well-written, persuasive, and genuinely insightful.

It’s also occasionally tone-deaf in a way that seems to expose the reasons the story gripped us so in the first place.

Knox, who was 20 in 2007, has steadfastly maintained her innocence ever since her brief, obscure time in Italian police custody directly after the murder, when she made a series of damaging and incoherent statements that were used against her as a confession. She has always maintained the plausible and evidence-supported theory that Rudy Guede acted alone, and that the Italian police took advantage of her youth and naivety to juice up a salacious case.

Today, she is 37, married, and a mother of two, and lives once again in her hometown of Seattle. She has become a writer, hosts a successful podcast with her husband, the author Christopher Robinson, and is an activist for criminal-justice reform and media ethics. If she was once dangerously naive about her predicament, she is no longer. She explains that her first book, written shortly after her release, was “the story of what Rudy Guede had done to Meredith, and of what the Italian justice system had done to me. It was the story of what happened to me, and it left little room for anything I actually did.” Free is a corrective whose dual mission is to tell her personal story and to defend her right to tell it.

More from this author

How the world fell for ‘romantasy’

By Valerie Stivers

White, female, American college students from solidly middle-class families haven’t contributed much to prison literature to date. But the combination of Knox’s intelligence and unique situation is a genuine addition to the genre. As she tells it, she arrived in prison so innocent that “it took me a while to realize that the room I was kept in was in fact a cell, my cell…” As the days and months passed and the gears of justice turned (very slowly, provincial-Italian-style), she had the experiences we would expect: she was scared, alone, isolated, and mistreated by the guards and other inmates (who disliked her as the privileged and famous one).

But she also had experiences we don’t expect: when she was allowed out to exercise in a small courtyard, she jogged, did jumping jacks, skipped, and sang at the top of her lungs, anything to feel free. When she was scared and lonely, she would call up a vision of herself as the happy, innocent, tough little girl she once was, and then she would talk to her younger self about their current troubles. Her raw youth pours off the page.

She was aware, even at the time, that much “invisible luxury” set her apart from her fellow prisoners. She had family to support her and visitors at every visiting hour. She didn’t suffer from the combination of trauma, mental health, and addiction that is common among female prisoners. Nonetheless, she was a prisoner, and accepting the situation as it was, especially after her conviction and sentencing to 26 years, helped her survive. The story of a young girl’s slow, painful grasp of the human essentials is powerful: we always have agency; there are things we possess that can’t be taken away; we must accept the life we actually have, and not pine for the one we wish for.

Suggested reading

What prisons teach us about democracy

By Ian Birrell

After four years of incarceration, Knox was freed on appeal and returned to America, only to discover herself in a different kind of prison. She was traumatized from her ordeal, had panic attacks, and found it difficult to reconnect with family and friends. She was — and is — notorious, a public figure and media sensation, a frequent target of hatred and death threats. For defending her innocence, asserting the value of her own story, or even just being OK, she is perceived as denying the awfulness of what happened to Meredith Kercher. The tabloids, especially in England and Italy, continue to distort her every action into something sinister. “Amanda Knox Wears Bizarre Yellow Outfit as She Marries Poet Boyfriend”, ran a Daily Mail headline from 2020. Once again, she faces the challenge of accepting the life she has, trying to make sense of her experience and to make something good out of something terrible.

The middle section of the book explores the social and cultural factors at play in her case, skillfully woven into the events of her life post-release. She was, she theorizes, the first cancellation of the social-media era and the first person to be subject to the kind of prolonged public shaming that has now become commonplace. She was also a victim of prurience, and the virgin-slut narrative, and the time-honored tradition of pitting women against each other. Cultural factors came into play: the Italian investigators couldn’t comprehend her behavior in the days following the murder, and created a narrative of her guilt as a result. The case became not about the facts, but about her character.

I was moved by the book, and went to see Knox in discussion with British journalist Jon Ronson at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on Wednesday night without lingering doubts about her innocence. I understood why the people who still believe she is guilty, not least the Kercher family’s lawyer, find her ongoing notoriety to be ghoulish.

If you think she did it, Free is very provocative name for a book. And that “extraordinary” from the opening anecdote has a third valence: Knox has had a more extraordinary life than most people because she has benefited, and not just spiritually, from her hardship. She writes books about it; she befriends other famous people (Monica Lewinsky became a pal); she just executive-produced Blue Moon, a Hulu series about the ordeal set in Perugia, expected to debut this year. But I’d been convinced that these perceptions were not her fault, and that she had no moral obligation to cater to them.

And yet a strange thing happened: the longer she talked, the more it seemed possible that this small, cute, physically unimposing, nerdy-chic Seattle mom in platform boots could have done it. To be clear, I don’t believe she really did it. More important, there has never been any evidence that she did. But there is something about her affect and demeanor that gives off the eerie vibe that if any totally unlikely young woman could secretly be a crazed killer, it’s this one. The more she laughed and said how absurd it was, the more I could see why the police were suspicious.

She mentioned some photographs in a particular situation made her look like “a flippant psycho”, cackling at the ridiculousness to a crowd of fans, but that was exactly what she looked like in that moment. She argued that such perceptions are the awful legacy of suspicion, media-distortion, and our dirty minds. Perhaps greater self-knowledge would come in realizing that it is a mysterious quality of hers, unfortunate to be sure, that was visible to Italian investigators, and has been visible in photography since the early days of the case. I suspect it’s the real cause of our unstoppable slippery fascination with her.

Suggested reading

How safe is the Letby verdict?

By David Rose and Cleuci de Oliveira

And there are reasons for it. Knox doesn’t quite know how to treat other people. Her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, for example, has only a minor role in Free, mainly as a person whose life was, unlike hers, permanently derailed by the wrongful accusations. He’s still single, Knox writes. He’s a pariah in Italy, and he’s never been able to get steady work. Someone brought him up at the event, and she retold an anecdote from the book about how sad he was during their meeting in Italy in 2022, when a passer-by mistook her baby for his.

I thought Sollecito would have been unlikely to feel good about himself if he were sitting in the audience. Knox’s right to tell her story suddenly seemed more complicated than it had in the memoir. If you’ve come through an awful catastrophe, with multiple victims including yourself, and your ultimate success highlights your fellow survivor’s failure, do you really have every right in the world to promote it far and wide? There are some situations — many, actually — where we can’t say whatever we want, and this in order to protect the feelings of other people. Or we can, but we’ve chosen ourselves over them, and it’s going to look bad.

There’s also Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor of Knox’s case, with whom she strikes up an unlikely relationship in the book’s third section. The narrative slows down a bit here, as Knox enters into an endless wrangle with what she wants from the man — which somewhat contradicts her claim to have found peace. Mignini is willing to engage with her and offer her his friendship, but he won’t say he was wrong about her case. Her final epiphany comes from accepting that there is greater value in just forgiving him. It’s true, and it sounds good (and makes her sound good), but she also mocks him in the book and did so again during the event for being more invested in the relationship than she is. At the event, she tacitly agreed with Ronson, her interviewer, that Mignini is a narcissist. Again, I wondered how he would have felt if he were sitting there, and again I doubted Knox for promoting her own virtue at someone else’s expense.

One of the many themes of the case has been Knox’s ordinariness. She fascinates us, supposedly, because what happened to her could happen to anyone. But Free proves in many ways — both its insight and intelligence, and also its odd failures and lack of self-awareness — that she’s never been ordinary.

In one sense, the country commemorates like no other. Ever since I first moved to Parma, in 1999, I’ve been struck by the number of plaques, on streets and bridges, in parks and churches, marking events and occasions. It’s as if there’s a history lesson on every corner. Walking up one of the towers in Bologna, you see signs every few metres marking the names of the builders who fell to their deaths. “Memory, incessant memory,” as Giuseppe Ungaretti, the 20th century poet, once wrote.

Much of this commemoration is localised and deeply-felt, but nationally there seems to be no such emotional connection. The country’s most sacred monument, the gargantuan “Altar of the Fatherland” in Rome, is the most ridiculed building in Italy. With its creamy tiers and steps, it’s been nicknamed “the wedding cake” or “the typewriter”.

That’s echoed by the country’s broader refusal to settle on an established historical narrative. “Every time public attention is drawn back to the past,” the politician and academic Pietro Scoppola once wrote, “polemics arise that almost result in a wish to dissolve the consciousness of national identity”. Those polemics are evident in the many books about the country’s discordant commemorations, from John Foot’s Italy’s Divided Memory to Giovanni Contini’s La Memoria Divisa.

Much of this stems from the First World War and its immediate aftermath. In Britain, the mud and the trenches, the poppies and the poetry, are hewn into our collective consciousness. But in Italy there was a ferocious debate about whether to enter the war at all (it eventually did in 1915). Afterwards, there was an often bloody battle about the meaning of all that sacrifice. During the so-called “Biennio Rosso”  — two years of acute political polarisation when strikers and workers were met with brutal repression, often courtesy of proto-fascist gangs — a “war of memorials” began.

Suggested reading

Is Meloni enabling Italy's new blackshirts?

By Andrea Valentino

Many anarchist and socialist councils erected plaques and monuments that blamed Italy’s 650,000 dead on fat cats and warmongers. The town council of Albano Vercellese, between Milan and Turin, erected a monument that said bluntly: “To the dead who unsuspectingly gave their youth to the cause of capitalism.” Throughout 1919 and 1920, fascists began bombing, shooting or otherwise removing monuments that seemed too anti-militarist. As a result, many plaques were given armed guards. When Aldo Milano, a fascist footballer, tried removing that anti-capitalist commemoration in Albano Vercellese, he was shot dead.

After Mussolini’s March on Rome, in 1922, warfare and its victims were again glorified. The result was Redipuglia, not far from the battlefields where so many Italians lost their lives fighting against Austria-Hungary in the country’s far northeast. It’s a vast monument, housing the remains of 40,000 named combatants, as well as the bones of 60,000 unknown soldiers. When you go there today, you feel like an ant, dwarfed by cypresses and vast steps disappearing into the sky. You can still see the fascist insignia of the “fasces” — wooden rods and an axe wrapped together. On the distant horizon, there are three crucifixes like Golgotha.

Redipuglia became a symbol of the brief union between fascism and Christendom and — with a central tomb containing the remains of the Duke of Aosta, the king’s cousin — the union between an extremist insurgency and the established aristocracy. Just as important, it’s a union of the living and the dead: every step is covered, in that familiar Thirties font, with one word: presente. It’s the standard reply to a military roll call.

Yet Redipuglia, only completed in 1938, soon became an embarrassment. After Mussolini was ousted by the ​​Grand Council of Fascism and the King, in 1943, that immense royal tomb was awkward. After the Allied victory in 1945, the fascist insignia was even more uncomfortable.

Commemorating the fallen of the Second World War was equally fraught. Italians had fought on both sides, both for Mussolini and against him. In the post-war consensus, partisans once labelled “terrorists” and “criminals” became “liberators”. The country became covered with tributes to Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist politician murdered by Mussolini’s henchmen in 1924. Countless streets were named after other martyrs: near my home in Parma is Via Sette Fratelli Cervi, named after seven brothers killed in nearby Reggio Emilia.

Not far from Redipuglia, the Risiera di San Sabba became one of the country’s central exhibits of remembrance: this red-brick rice warehouse was a concentration camp, where political and Jewish prisoners were either murdered or transported to Nazi extermination camps. The Risiera, it’s thought, was responsible for the deaths of up to 5,000 people, and became a national monument in 1965.

Yet here, again, Italy was ambivalent. Although the post-war republic was officially keen to distance itself from Mussolini, criminalising the reconstitution of the Fascist Party, Italian monuments and buildings never faced anything like German denazification. Today, you can still see a 55-foot marble needle outside the Stadio Olimpico in Rome: “Mussolini Dux” is written on the side. There are fascist slogans in the mosaics nearby and a forest, the size of 15 football pitches, that spells out “DUX”. Iconography here doesn’t really get eradicated or cancelled, merely over-written.

It’s in the country’s northeast that the lack of a national narrative is felt most keenly. The vast majority of Italian casualties during the First World War were along the Isonzo, north of Trieste, as troops attempted to reclaim “unredeemed” Italy from both the Habsburgs and local Slavs. And it was here, at the tail end of the Second World War, that Italians suffered retribution: some, controversially, call it “ethnic cleansing”. As Tito’s communists advanced, around 5,000 people were killed, with many thrown into the deep foibe, the narrow gullies that sink into the mountains around Trieste.

For years, the foibe killings were forgotten. The exodus of 300,000 Italians from Istria and Dalmatia — including my grandfather-in-law’s family — was also largely ignored. It was only after the collapse of Italy’s post-war consensus, in the early 1990s, that the issue of foibe became another conundrum for Italian commemoration. With communism discredited, and the Christian Democratic party swept away by corruption scandals, Silvio Berlusconi forged a new coalition with the country’s post-fascist rump. Slowly, the story of the foibe was transformed into a narrative that fascists were actually martyrs.

The settled consensus around what happened during the Second World War quickly shifted. Berlusconi and his coalition partners often avoided or derided the traditional celebrations on 25 April, a national holiday marking Italy’s liberation from Nazi-Fascism. Partisans were once again scorned as “criminals” while Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace near Bologna, became a Disneyfied fascist theme park. The town is now a Mecca for Italian toughs, where you can visit Mussolini’s tomb, guarded by true believers, and buy endless paraphernalia: busts of Benito; Il Duce wine; replica uniforms. Ignazio Benito La Russa, currently president of the Italian Senate and proud of his middle name, is one of the country’s most assiduous collectors.

Commemorating the dead from Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI), when fascism became indistinguishable from German Nazism, has become one of the most controversial aspects of November remembrance. Each year, modern blackshirts descend on a section of Milan’s Cimitero Maggiore, where fighters from the RSI are buried. That recently removed plaque in Parma had been erected in 2011, lauding “the fallen and missing military and civilian members of the Italian Social Republic (1943-45). Italy before everything! Italy above all!”

The clearest example of this shifting narrative is Berlusconi’s government’s passing of a law, in 2004, to institute a “Day of Memory” commemorating both the foibe and the Istrian and Dalmatian exodus. It is now marked on 10 February every year, and Giorgia Meloni’s government recently approved legislation to build a foibe museum in Rome. In these initiatives there is, one hopes, a noble desire simply to commemorate the dead. But there’s clearly also political calculation: the foibe allows the far-Right to paint its ideological ancestors not as perpetrators, but as victims; and Italians not as sinning but sinned against.

So commemoration has become a provocation, a way not to honour the dead but to needle the living, and indeed Italy’s neighbours. In 2019, in Trieste, a new statue of Gabriele D’Annunzio was unveiled. A proto-fascist and the illegal occupier of Fiume (today Rijeka in Croatia), he’s unsurprisingly a disliked figure in both Zagreb and Ljubljana — let alone among the thousands of Slovenes who still live in this corner of Italy. In 2017, meanwhile, officials in Rome named a park after Rodolfo Graziani, a fascist and war criminal who used poison gas in Ethiopia.

At least the facts about people like Graziani are essentially known. But sometimes even the basics become blurred. In July 1944, 55 people died while sheltering in the local church in the Tuscan town of San Miniato. A fierce debate ensued as to whether the Germans had planted explosives, or the Allies had accidentally bombed the building instead. As a result, locals put up no less than four plaques, each with different wordings. A later atrocity, the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, has seen six separate plaques.

More from this author

Italy's bridge to nowhere

By Tobias Jones

Sometimes, uncertainty can become sheer fantasy. In Rome, for instance, there’s a street named after a mayor, Leopoldo Ruspoli, who never actually existed. Many of the most cherished heroes of Italian history — the revolutionary Giovan Battista Perasso; the mariner Flavio Gioja; the medieval warrior Alberto da Giussano — are immortalised in statues even though their identities or achievements are very uncertain. Everyone knows that truth is the first victim of war, but in Italy even peacetime seems shorn of simple facts.

Quite who is remembered or forgotten clearly reflects contemporary political choices, and there’s a large section of Italian society that has, traditionally, been entirely absent from all remembrance: its women. But here, too, “memorialisation is changing,” says Patrizia Sambuco, author of Transmissions of Memory. In Abruzzo, in 2018, local women partisans were officially commemorated for the first time, with several streets renamed in their honour.

In some ways, there’s nothing new to all this. Italy is a notoriously schismatic country, constantly fracturing into ever-smaller tribes and borghi: Guelph against Ghibelline, then Black Guelph against White Guelph; Catholics against anti-clericals; fascists against communists. Siena’s Palio is just the most obvious example of a small city splintering into tiny neighbourhoods, providing pageantry and polemics aplenty.

Perhaps the difficulty in creating a national memory is more a state of mind. In sharp contrast to Britons’ love of pomp and circumstance, Italians scorn the state, its laws and its servants. It’s hardly surprising that a national narrative, or a truly inclusive war memorial, prove hard to find in a country with such startling, cynical proverbs. My favourite says simply: “Never trust a person whose nose has two nostrils”.

Those days are long gone. Since her triumph in 2022, and as some of us foresaw, Meloni has eased herself into the Euro-Atlantic consensus. Adopting a conciliatory attitude towards the EU, she’s also ensured Italy’s full compliance with the bloc’s austerity-driven economic framework. Meanwhile, the Italian premier also became a vocal supporter of Nato hawkishness in Ukraine, building strong ties with Joe Biden.

Taken together, then, you get the sense that Meloni gambled her political survival on shedding her populist image and rushing in the opposite direction, becoming more pro-European and more pro-American than your average European centrist. Now, however, the liberal media is aflame once more. Chatter about Meloni’s political journey started in September, when she was presented with a “Global Citizen Award” at the Atlantic Council in New York. Beyond the think tank’s Atlanticist flavour, what really got politicos talking was who gave Meloni her prize: one Elon Musk. This has fuelled speculation about a potential political (re)alignment with Trump on Meloni’s part. Given the mercurial South African’s financial and political support for Trump’s presidential run — and the (denied) allegations of a burgeoning romance between the businessman and the Prime Minister — these claims don’t feel completely fanciful.

More from this author

Starmer is turning Britain into a vassal state

By Thomas Fazi

Meloni, for her part, hasn’t done much to dampen the rumours of a reactionary revival. She’s admittedly been careful not to endorse either candidate in the US election, stressing she’ll work with whoever wins. But it’s also clear that she’s well-positioned to become one of Trump’s key European partners should he reclaim the White House in November. In part, that’s thanks to her long-standing ties to the broader MAGA movement. In 2018, to give one example, Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon was a keynote speaker at a political festival organised by her Brothers of Italy party. 

That’s reflected by more recent moves too. In a clear nod to national conservatives in Washington, Meloni told her audience at the Atlantic Council that “we should not be ashamed to use and defend words and concepts like nation and patriotism”. At the same time, Brothers of Italy’s recent decision to vote against a European Parliament resolution allowing Ukraine to use Western weapons on Russian soil should also be seen as a nod to MAGA’s scepticism of Western support for Ukraine — and an indication of Meloni’s willingness to shift Italy’s foreign policy if Trump wins in November.

Taken together, and especially given the looming American elections, Meloni’s decision to receive her prize from Musk could therefore be part of a wider strategy. Aimed at rekindling ties with American conservatives, that surely makes sense, especially when Musk’s influence is expected to be significantly boosted by the tycoon’s re-election. As Francesco Giubilei, a Meloni acolyte, lately told Le Monde, the Prime Minister must be both “a force for struggle” and a force for government. “She’s very cautious, waiting to see who will win the election and maintaining her ties with Trump’s world to benefit should he win.” 

So could Meloni’s recent moves be signalling a return to her radical roots? I think not. At its core, rather, this story is less about policy — and more about cold hard cash, both in Italy itself and further afield. That’s clear enough if you put aside the trees, Meloni and Musk, and instead focus on the woods: the Atlantic Council that offered Meloni her prize. The think tank euphemistically describes itself as a nonpartisan organisation that “galvanises” US global leadership and encourages engagement with its friends and allies. In plain English, that means that the Atlantic Council exists to promote the interests of US corporations — and American imperial interests more generally. Founded in the Sixties, to boost political support for Nato, today it remains active on transatlantic security issues. 

More to the point, the organisation’s corporate partners and funders include many of the US’s largest firms, operating across finance, defence, energy and tech. A range of Nato governments also supports the Atlantic Council, as indeed does the alliance itself. No wonder it’s gained a reputation for aggressively lobbying for American financial and corporate interests worldwide. In 2014, for instance, FedEx teamed up with the Atlantic Council to build support for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a proposed trade agreement between the EU and US aimed at shielding transnational corporations from public oversight, and which was ultimately abandoned in the face of public opposition. 

More recently, WikiLeaks’s US diplomatic cables leak revealed that the Atlantic Council worked closely with Chevron and ExxonMobil to undermine a Brazilian legislative proposal to grant Petrobras, a local state-owned corporation, chief control of the oil fields off the country’s coast. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, meanwhile, the organisation has distinguished itself for its very hawkish approach to the conflict, perhaps unsurprising given the number of defence companies among its backers. 

Given all this, one might reasonably speculate that the Atlantic Council’s grooming of Meloni has little to do with US partisan politics — the organisation is, in fact, quite distant from Trumpism — and more about expanding the influence of US capital in the Bel Paese. Even Musk’s cosy relationship with the Prime Minister seems to be about more than just “shared values” and soft feelings. In June, the Italian government approved a new regulatory framework that grants foreign space companies permission to operate in the country. It’s no secret that, in this context, Musk aims to make Starlink the country’s main “white area” internet provider, in other words for places not covered by wired or mobile alternatives. That, in turn, has the potential to displace domestic rivals like Open Fiber and Tim, which Musk accuses of obstructing the rollout of his high-speed internet.

Nor is Musk the only US investor ingratiating himself with Meloni. After returning from her bash in New York, she also met with Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. With assets worth $10 trillion, the firm boasts the equivalent of Germany and Japan’s combined GDP. In Italy itself, BlackRock is comfortably the largest foreign institutional investor on the Milan Stock Exchange, owning substantial stakes in some of the country’s largest listed companies. The firm is bolstering its Italian presence elsewhere too. Earlier this year, for instance, Meloni oversaw the sale of Tim’s entire fixed-line network to KKR, a US fund that boasts BlackRock among its main institutional investors. 

Beyond the fact that the network represents a strategic national asset, with its sensitive user data now effectively under foreign control, these varied moves represent the culmination of a long sequence of privatisations and selling-off of Italian public and private assets beginning back in the Nineties. Once you dovetail that with BlackRock’s future plans — among other things, it hopes to snatch up Italy’s highway and railway networks, currently under public or semi-public control — the country looks set to become little more than an outpost of American capital, losing what little is left of its economic sovereignty. 

That this should be happening under a nominally “sovereigntist” prime minister is remarkable enough — but what really matters is the way US investors, notably BlackRock, are using Italy as a Trojan horse to expand their influence right across Europe. Consider the example of Germany. Unlike other countries, companies in Munich or Hamburg largely remain in the hands of the families that founded them. Local investors have substantial influence too, as does KFW, the public bank dedicated to supporting the Federal Republic’s industrial development.

More from this author

Kamala Harris is a neocon in disguise

By Thomas Fazi

In practice, that means the penetration of BlackRock and other US mega-funds in the German economy remains relatively marginal. That’s an anomaly that US capital now seems intent on fixing, using Italy as its battering ram. Last month, for instance, Milan’s UniCredit bank announced a surprise hostile takeover of Commerzbank, effectively becoming the Frankfurt outfit’s largest shareholder. Though this caused some patriotic fervour among Italian commentators — an Italian bank taking over a German rival! — the reality is that the move was likely spearheaded by BlackRock itself, which executed the move with the help of other Anglo-American funds, all to consolidate its control of Germany’s financial system. No wonder Larry Fink welcomed the move. “Europe,” he said, “needs a stronger capital markets system and a more unified banking system.” 

What we are witnessing, in short, is the economic cannibalisation of Europe by US capital. Not that we should be surprised. As Emmanuel Todd, a French historian, writes in his latest book: “As its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power.” With European industry crucial to US interests, Todd continues, we should expect more “systemic exploitation” of Rome and Berlin from the imperial centre in Washington. The fact that this is happening under the auspices of a self-described “patriot” like Meloni only highlights the grotesque weakness of European politics. 

Half an hour before kick-off, an ugly grey-yellow cloud drifted over the ground and unleashed a ferocious hailstorm, worsening conditions significantly. But the decision had been made. A large crowd was already inside. The game was going ahead. Charlie Hurley, Sunderland’s revered captain, missed an early penalty. Even 50 years later, he was asking himself whether things might have been different had he converted it. Then, with 27 minutes played, Clough chased a slightly overhit through-ball. Had Sunderland been 1-0 up, might he have been slightly less aggressive?

Clough stretched for the ball and collided with the Bury goalkeeper Chris Harker. As Harker’s shoulder crunched into high right knee, Clough flipped over the top of him and hit his head on the icy ground. For a couple of seconds, there was darkness. Then he tried to get up but his leg would not respond. He crawled hopelessly and then collapsed; both medial and cruciate ligaments were torn. Clough’s career as a centre-forward was over.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Clough from stomach cancer at the age of 69. Yet he remains a surprisingly constant presence in the mind of English football, the ideal of a particular type of manager, irascible, unpredictable and charismatic, a leader who inspired his teams largely by force of personality. He lives on in countless clips in which he is outrageous, charming and funny, most notably the episode of Calendar on the day he had been sacked by Leeds in which he and his predecessor Don Revie go toe-to-toe.

More from this author

Sven-Göran Eriksson, English revolutionary

By Jonathan Wilson

It’s extraordinary television and has drawn comparison with the debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when those who listened on the radio thought Nixon had come out on top, while those who watched on television believed the handsome Kennedy had run rings around his sweating opponent. Here too, if you actually listen to the words, Revie makes some good points, but it doesn’t matter, because he is ponderous and thickset, while Clough is nimble, sharp and amusingly provocative. He is also, fairly obviously, pissed.

It wasn’t until the late Nineties when the Arsenal captain Tony Adams spoke publicly about his struggles with addiction that football began to take its relationship with booze seriously. That Clough descended into alcoholism is well known but it tends to be an addendum to his story. His appearance in his final season at Nottingham Forest, when he oversaw their relegation 16 years after he’d led them to promotion, couldn’t be ignored, his skin turned now red and blotchy. It happened to be the season of great change in English football when the First Division switched to the Premiership and the sense was that the new football had no place for mavericks like Clough.

It was a convenient framing. The iconoclast who, armed with little more than a sharp wit, dragged himself up from Hartlepools, got Derby promoted and won the league with them, blew up at Leeds, served his time in the wilderness at Brighton and then returned to lead Forest in the space of four seasons to promotion, a league title and two European Cups, before finding the economics of football had rendered obsolete his brand of messianic unorthodoxy.

And it wasn’t untrue. But there is another way of looking at Clough’s story. He was a prolific and brilliant goalscorer for Middlesbrough then Sunderland, scoring 250 goals in 271 league games before the injury, all in the Second Division. His only top-flight goal came in one of the three matches he played as he attempted a comeback in 1964-65 before accepting, aged 29, that his career was over. Even in the second flight, though, he’d forced his way into the England reckoning; there’s a not especially fanciful alternate reality in which he didn’t get injured, Sunderland were promoted in 1962-63 (rather than missing out by a single point having played half a season without his goals) and he was in the England squad when they won the World Cup in 1966.

Suggested article

The ghosts of the Munich air disaster

By Kester Aspden

Before the injury, Clough was almost teetotal. “He never had a smoke or a drink — well, maybe a half, you know, when he went out,” said his Middlesbrough team-mate Derek McLean. Clough and other Boro players used to go to a café owned by popstar Chris Rea’s father, Camillo, who persuaded him to replace his regular milkshakes with Oxo as a healthier option.

But the injury changed him. After an operation, Clough was in plaster for three months and admitted he would lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of how little he had to offer. Brian alone among the eight Clough children who survived to adolescence had failed his 11-plus. He then failed an apprenticeship at ICI. Without his goals, he was just somebody who hadn’t been able to cut it as a turner-and-fitter. He went through arduous rehab, running up the steps in the stadium and along the beach at Roker, but it wasn’t enough. He showed some promise coaching the youth team but Sunderland, desperate for the insurance money that would come when it was confirmed his injury was career-ending, were callous in letting him go. He became embittered and began to drink.

Clough clearly idolised his mother who, at least in his telling of the story, prioritised academic achievement over anything else. Failing his 11-plus clearly hurt, and he seemed never quite to forgive his brother Bill for mocking him over it on the day he got his results. The “immaculate” Bill, he said, “was Mam’s favourite son. I never was. Perhaps it was because he won the teapot in a ‘lovely baby’ competition and I didn’t. Still… I had a reasonable consolation prize by winning the European Cup — twice.”

It’s a strikingly odd comparison, but it’s one that recurs. “I don’t have any O-levels, I don’t have any A-levels,” he said in a TV interview after his retirement, “and when my children chastise me and give me stick… I put my European Cup medals on the table, my Championship medals. I’ve got a tableful — they’re my O-levels and A-levels.” Throughout his career, Clough was reliably anti-intellectual, and yet his 11-plus clearly haunted him. There’s a sense even that his entire managerial career was an attempt to make up for that failure with his mother.

Clough’s Derby County were controversially beaten by Juventus in the semi-final of the 1973 European Cup. In both his autobiographies and countless interviews, he spoke of his distress that night, coming home and receiving the phone call that his mother had died. But it wasn’t true. She had actually died a month earlier, on the night that Derby had beaten Spartak Trnava in the quarter-final. Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if he conflated the events because he had vowed in his own mind that winning the European Cup would earn his mother’s approbation, and that, as he saw it, cheating Italians had stolen that from him?

If that is the case, if winning the European Cup to honour his mother’s memory became a grail, then suddenly his otherwise incomprehensible decision a year later to take over at Leeds United, a club he had repeatedly attacked, becomes explicable: as league champions, they were in the European Cup and so offered an immediate pathway to his ultimate goal. As it turned out, he lasted just 44 tempestuous days at Leeds and the European Cup wins came in 1979 and 1980, with Nottingham Forest. 

The achievement was remarkable, but behind it all lay booze. When a friend visited him in his hotel in Leeds to help look for a house, Clough preferred to lie on the bed, drinking cans of beer, watching the cricket on television — as though perhaps he knew even then that there was no point buying property there. There was booze to calm everybody’s nerves on the night before major finals, booze to celebrate wins, booze to deal with the eternal grind of one game after another, booze to deal with the pain of his break-up with his old friend and assistant Peter Taylor and, in the end, booze just to get by.

The European Cup in 1980 was Clough’s last great success. There were League Cups after that but by the early Nineties, idiosyncrasy and eccentricity had become unreliability and rudeness, his genius had curdled into cantankerousness. After relegation came treatment, excruciating television appearances, illness and death.

Clough’s brilliance is undeniable. Only three other managers have ever won the league with more than one club, and nobody has done it with two medium-sized provincial sides; he had an extraordinary gift. But he never escaped the shame of his 11-plus, never got over the knee injury that denied him playing glory, never perhaps felt he had earned the love of his mother. And his response was to drown himself in alcohol.

His story was one of greatness, but behind the charisma and the outrageousness, it is also one of tragedy.

Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies pondered the idea of a bridge as long ago as 1840. More recently, Silvio Berlusconi emerged as its greatest champion. His building plans were twice thwarted by political rivals who deemed it an absurd vanity project — but his vision still inspires devotion in Italian politics today. The Strait of Messina Bridge has come to symbolise a powerful and modern Italy. In a country fretting that its days of breath-taking building are over, the bridge is seen as sign that contemporary leaders can match not just the grandeur of ancient Roman viaducts and Renaissance churches, but also Mussolini’s creation of entirely new suburbs (a project later adopted by Berlusconi).

The politics of the bridge are intriguing: Giorgia Meloni’s government has recently augmented fiscal autonomy for the regions, which will almost certainly benefit the north more than the south. The bridge promises the opposite: it’s a nationalist symbol uniting the country and showing the south that Rome cares. The EU likes the idea because it would complete its Scandinavian-Mediterranean corridor. The transport minister and leader of the Right-wing Lega party, Matteo Salvini, has also gone all-in. In five years, as Meloni’s star has risen, Salvini’s popularity has crashed. And so despite opposing the bridge until 2016, he has now bet the entirety of his dwindling political capital on its completion.

“This project is very elevated in the public imagination,” says Guido Signorino of the Invece del Ponte group. “It’s like the pyramids, and Salvini wants to enter the history books as the visionary who made it happen.” The man who has journeyed from communist to neo-fascist, from secessionist to nationalist, now appears to see himself as Italy’s Pharaoh.

Architects envision a bridge 3.6 kilometres long, bookended by two main towers higher than the Eiffel Tower. With three vehicle lanes in each direction plus train tracks down the middle, 6,000 vehicles could pass over per hour and 200 trains per day. This won’t, of course, come cheap. According to the Italian Treasury, €1.2 billion has been spent on feasibility studies since 1965. The estimated cost of building the bridge has increased exponentially: in 2006 it was calculated to cost €3.9 billion; by 2011 that figure had rocketed to €8.5 billion. Now it stands at €13.5 billion.

Will it be worth it? Salvini has claimed that the project will create 120,000 jobs, but this figure has come under scrutiny. The company responsible for the project suggests that the real figure is more likely to be between 4,300 and 7,000, while one association opposing the bridge thinks that only 2,230 jobs will be created.

The main objection isn’t the vast cost or the blurry figures, but the inevitability that portions of the budget will be syphoned off by the Sicilian and Calabrian mafias (Cosa Nostra and the ‘Ndrangheta respectively). The anti-Mafia campaigner, Don Luigi Ciotti, has warned that the bridge “won’t only link two coasts but also two mafias”. That criminal infiltration takes hundreds of forms: financial investment, courier services, supply of raw materials, security, earth-moving, waste-removal. Every aspect of a major project is vulnerable to the mafias: they can make it all go smoothly or cause complications for decades. They might only gather breadcrumbs, but it’s a near-certainty that they’ll end up with a little of the loaf.

“The bridge won’t link just two mafias, but 20 different gangs,” Daniele Ialacqua, of the No Ponte Capo Peloro organisation, told me. “I worry we’re going to find ourselves in a situation like Chicago in the Thirties: there are too many interests, too many contracts.” The opposite is perhaps more likely, that rival gangs will cooperate and pool strengths: “in order to carry out major [building] projects in Calabria,” crime expert Anna Sergi recently wrote in Il Post, “the ‘Ndrangheta clans have always teamed up to strengthen their entrepreneurial capabilities. They will do it again.” Police wiretaps have already picked up on mob bosses negotiating how to share out the future juicy contracts.

More from this author

Taxi drivers are corrupting Italy

By Tobias Jones

But objections to the bridge go much further. The Strait of Messina has always been troubled: Homer’s mythical sea monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, lurked on either side, symbols of the jeopardy of sailing between them. Hence the idiom “between Scylla and Charybdis”, the original version of “between a rock and a hard place”. The passage was risky not just because of snares and high winds but because of devastating earthquakes. The Straits are in Italy’s Zone 1, the most dangerous area for seismic risk. In December 1908, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake killed around 80,000 people and caused tsunamis that devastated the nearby coastal areas.

Even those in favour of the bridge have expressed concerns about the wisdom of building on that faultline. On 3 May, the Order of Engineers of Messina wrote an open letter stating that, although the bridge should go ahead, there was “deep concern” about the superficiality of the project’s earthquake-protection measures. They insisted that the research behind this would “require months of commitment, not days or weeks!”

Part of the problem is that the design of the bridge is very old: a consortium called Eurolink won the tender in 2005 with a design by the late British bridge designer, William Brown, dating from 1993. Brown remains an admired architect — he was responsible for the Severn, Humber, and Forth Road bridges in the UK, and plenty of others around the world. But the central span of his Italian bridge is due to be more than one kilometre longer than any other bridge span in the world. “That’s a huge jump in scale,” says Signorino, “but there’s been no jump in technological know-how. Our current knowledge doesn’t allow us to state that this is wise.”

There have been enough infrastructure disasters in Italy over the years to justify Signorino’s concerns. In August 2018, the Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed, causing 43 deaths. In 2014, just nine days after it was inaugurated, the Scorciavacche viaduct in Sicily also caved in. The company responsible for building that viaduct, Bolognetta, is a member of the Muratori Cementisti cooperative that has a 13% share of the Eurolink consortium. The other construction giants involved in the project aren’t renowned for their probity either. In 2022, the Spanish construction firm Sacyr, which has a 18.7% share of the Eurolink project, was fined — along with other firms — more than €200 million by Spain’s anti-trust regulator for rigging public tenders between 1992 and 2017.

More from this author

Italy's corrupt beach politics

By Tobias Jones

The bridge risks creating other problems, too. It may well obstruct the tallest container ships on their way to the vital Port of Gioia Tauro, forcing them to make a 500-kilometre detour around Sicily. And then there’s the displacement of locals: in Torre Faro in Sicily and Villa San Giovanni in Calabria, around 400 homes will be demolished in total. Environmental organisations — from the World Wildlife Fund to Legambiente — have also opposed the destruction of uniquely biodiverse lagoons and migration routes. “Living in these protected areas,” one weary resident told me, “we’re not even allowed to change the colour of our houses, but now they want to move millions of cubic metres of earth and build two Eiffel Towers!”

There’s also a sense that the bridge is futile unless the rickety public transport on either side is improved. The effective rail speed in Sicily is an astonishingly low 26-28 km/h, so placing a multi-billion-euro bridge at one end of the island seems superfluous to most Sicilians: “You can’t reduce a bottle-neck when there’s no bottle,” says one Sicilian I spoke to.

It’s anyone’s guess whether this mythical bridge really will be built. Work had been due to start this month, but in April the Environment Ministry requested an additional 239 documents to clarify a variety of critical issues. It turned out that the 318-page environmental impact document submitted by the Stretto di Messina firm overseeing the bridge in April had drawn on out-of-date statistics and many of its tables were gobbledygook. Even if the bridge does get started, one gets the impression it might be a very slow build.

The reaction among most Japanese to Mishima’s speech and subsequent ritual suicide — he plunged a samurai sword into his belly back in the commandant’s office, before one of his comrades beheaded him — was one of mystification and sadness. Others, both in Japan and around the world, found that Mishima’s message resonated.

Among them was the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, by this point in his early-70s. Disappointed by the demise, 25 years earlier, of what he regarded as the “miracle” of Japan’s fascist theocracy, Evola saw in Mishima’s final act a courageous call for his country to awaken from the prosperous slumber into which it had been cast by the United States, first as post-war occupier and then as partner in an uneven alliance.

Born in Rome in 1898, Julius Evola frequently looked to Asia for inspiration in helping to rescue the Western world from its malaise. In this, he was not unusual. Any number of Romantics, from Goethe through to Coleridge, found in Indian drama and philosophy a depth and vitality that Europe appeared to have lost. And from the second half of the 1800s, Japan became a source of inspiration: its people and landscape, paintings and woodblock prints, calligraphy and kimono, Zen Buddhism and tea ceremony.

But where much of this interest was focused on spiritual and aesthetic renewal, Evola’s engagement with Asia was defined by the intertwining of the spiritual with the political. And where the personal politics of many Western enthusiasts for Zen or India’s Vedanta philosophy skewed towards the progressive, particularly in the post-war era, Evola was a leading thinker of the far-Right, whose ideas inspired figures within Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (albeit to a lesser extent than he would have liked) and later many others around the post-war world.

Although often overlooked amid the peace-and-love associations of “the East”, Asian ideas and practices have been used to buttress Western ideologies with elitism, racism and conflict at their core. Much depended on what a given commentator thought was wrong or lacking in Western life in the first place. Where many a 20th-century critic of the modern West focused on the recent past, and on the damage done by industrial capitalism to European scenery and souls, in countries such as Germany and Italy one could find writers reaching back further: beyond what they regarded as the disaster of Europe’s Christianisation and into the realms of Nordic myth, ancient German folklore and Imperial Rome. They managed to combine these interests with investigations into the occult and Eastern thought, as additional sources of inspiration in battling modernity and recovering lost values and human capabilities.

In Germany, an emerging theme in the country’s search for its cultural and racial roots was a peaceful, bucolic past, full of life, from which Germans had since become alienated. In fairy tales collected and published by the Grimm brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob, German peasant life was depicted as happy and wholesome yet constantly under threat from violent interlopers: witches, vampires and demons. India became woven into this tapestry as a pastoral paradise — German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder lauded “gentle Hindus [who] nourish themselves with the most innocent of foods, milk, rice, the fruits of the trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses” — and as one of the supposed homes, long ago, of an Aryan civilisation from which Germans could rightly claim descent. In the hands of Nazi ideologues, all this congealed into the drama of an Aryan race in the here-and-now, pitting itself against decadent, vampiric Slavs and Jews.

In Italy, Evola’s particular sense of Western decline was shaped by his aristocratic Sicilian background and his experience, as a young man, of a yearning to transcend the emptiness of everyday life. He volunteered for the army in 1917 and briefly saw active service before turning to Dadaist painting and poetry after the war. He studied engineering at university but did not complete his degree — on the basis, he claimed, that academia’s bourgeois conventions were not for him.

Having rejected his Catholic upbringing, Evola tasted something of the transcendence he sought via hallucinogens, magic and what he understood of Buddhism and Taoism. His reading of Buddhist scripture helped him through a period of feeling suicidal in 1922. And in the teachings of Lao Tzu, Evola found the path to becoming what he called an “Absolute Individual”. This was a state, he wrote, of “magical, luminous impassability”, in which a person becomes strong, purposeful and free from material and cultural constraints.

The French philosopher René Guénon helped to give shape to Evola’s ideas, through his reading of global history as shot through with cosmic purpose. Guénon claimed that primal truths about the “Absolute”, from which the rest of reality emanates, had been transmitted down the ages via initiates within the world’s religious traditions. Those truths had been lost in the modern West, he argued, because of an over-emphasis on materialism, reason and progress. They could still be found in places like India, however, in particular the Vedanta school of philosophy, which was also much beloved of German Romantics including Herder and Goethe. Guénon hoped to see a new elite of spiritual intellectuals trained in primal truths via “Oriental doctrines”, going on to restore the West as a civilisation centred around the sacred.

Guénon’s ideas and programme came to be called “Traditionalism”, from the Latin tradere, suggesting something — in this case wisdom and a particular way of being in the world — that is “handed down” from one generation to the next. Evola became an important voice in the movement, but unlike Guénon his vision of a future spiritual elite — comprised of Aryan-Germans and Romans — owed a great deal to Nietzsche’s ideal of the Übermensch.

Evola believed that hierarchy within humanity is part of the order of the cosmos. It takes physical, racial and social forms, but its roots lie in the spiritual realm. Some — himself included — are born into a spiritual elite, and must use a variety of demanding spiritual and physical disciplines to progress in wisdom and move ever closer to the Absolute.

Europe’s tragedy in recent centuries, for Evola, was the steady undermining of this cosmic hierarchy. Power had been passed to ever-lower levels: from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie and latterly to the masses via an expansion of the democratic franchise. He held Christianity largely responsible. Imperial Rome had been a far closer reflection than Christendom of the true cosmic order. The rise of Christianity, with what Evola called its “proletarian spirituality”, marked a victory for the forces of disintegration and disorder. Evola found this expressed so well in the Hindu idea that we are living at the lowest point in the cosmic cycle of time — Kali Yuga, or Dark Age — that he included the term in the title of perhaps his best-known work: Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion and Social Order in the Kali Yuga (1934).

Evola’s radical elitism shaped the inspiration that he drew from Buddhism. From the late-19th century onwards, Western writers had conjured the historical Buddha variously as a Victorian gentleman, an Asian Christ, a gifted psychologist and a trailblazing democrat who rejected India’s caste system. Evola, by contrast, emphasised the Buddha’s noble origins as a member of the kshatriya (warrior) caste. It was from this noble birth, claimed Evola, that the Buddha — or “Prince Siddhattha”, as he refers to him in The Doctrine of Awakening (1943) — drew the strength required to engage in the asceticism that led to his enlightenment.

Suggested reading

Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy

By Aris Roussinos

The Buddha’s accomplishments were also, for Evola, a matter of “blood and spirit”. He regarded Buddhism as an Aryan doctrine, an expression of the genius of the “ancient Aryo-Mediterranean world” whose stand-out figures included Plato and the Roman Stoics. He also had great admiration for Zen. Here, for Evola, was a path characterised by serious individual effort, master-disciple transmission and strong links with Japan’s “warrior nobility”. Across long centuries, the samurai had been able to impart their vigour and imprint their values upon an entire people. Unfortunately, Zen had been introduced to the West by teachers, including D.T. Suzuki, who were too keen to connect it to modern Western thought and preoccupations. The result, thought Evola, was a concern with psychology over spiritual realities — self-improvement over transcendence and the awakening of the Absolute Individual — and with the misguidedly egalitarian notion that enlightenment is available to all.

In the end, Evola failed to sell either Italy’s Fascists or Germany’s Nazis on the Traditionalist project, not least because the deep elitism within Traditionalism made it an awkward partner for populist ultra-nationalism. He remained influential, however, in the post-war world. After a series of attempted bombings by Italian neo-fascists in 1949-50, some of them with links to Evola, he was arrested and charged under new laws against glorifying Fascism and promoting the revival of the Fascist Party. At his trial in 1951, Evola denied any links to Mussolini’s Fascist Party (he never joined it), but said that if one defined fascism in terms of being against democracy then Dante Alighieri would stand condemned and Evola himself could be regarded as a “superfascist”.

Evola was acquitted, but questions remained over whether he bore responsibility for terrorist attacks inspired by his ideas, when so many of Italy’s neo-fascists praised his writings and visited him at his apartment in Rome. Those questions became particularly pressing during and after Italy’s “Years of Lead”: a period running from 1969 to 1988 during which extremists on the Left and Right mounted thousands of attacks and killed more than 400 people.

Sales of Evola’s work received a boost in the mid-2010s, when Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon revealed himself to be a fan. Evola would have had little time for Bannon’s advocacy of Judaeo-Christian values and the free market. But part of his enduring appeal seems to lie in the big-canvas case that he made against modernity: the wrong people are currently in charge, and the right people have not just history but some combination of a racial-biological, moral and even cosmic order on their side. Sympathetic readers in an age of algorithm-driven anger — righteous, performative or some combination of the two — can draw on Evola’s outspoken confidence and chauvinism here while cherry-picking the details. Contemporary fans of his include Right and far-Right European political parties such as Hungary’s Jobbik and Greece’s Golden Dawn. He also appears to be an influence on writers including Bronze Age Pervert, author of the influential Bronze Age Manifesto (2018).

This weekend’s European elections have become a focal point for fears that disaffected young men seeking radical change — much the same demographic as the neo-fascists nurtured by Evola in his final years — are helping to drive a surge in support for far-Right parties. Europe’s Right-wing parties differ among themselves on some things: economic libertarians versus protectionists, pro-vs anti-Putin. But on migration and culture-war issues, they have much in common and plenty that they might draw from Evola’s thinking on tradition, race, the threat of social collapse posed by modernity, and politics not as technocratic tinkering but as a grand salvation project — witness the frequency with which the need to “save” a country or Europe as a whole is now invoked in political rhetoric.

Fans of the softer, more recessive side of Asia’s influence on the modern West should not get too comfortable at this point. The appeal of Asian ideas and practices to Evola in many ways resembled their attractions for Beats, hippies and contemporary practitioners of mindfulness, yoga and wellness more generally. They offer, we have been told, an enhanced clarity of seeing, beyond our tarnished cultures and ailing institutions. They promise to take a person beyond the mere accumulation of yet more knowledge, and instead to transform them — mind, body and spirit. It would be a stretch to say that yoga risks turning you into a fascist. But take a look at how wellness shows up on social media — exalting strength, suppleness, focus, vigour, stoic calm and a sense of superiority — and suddenly here, too, the darker sides of the 20th century don’t seem quite so far away.

In November 2023, Giorgia Meloni announced plans to reform Article 92, making the President of the Council of Ministers, otherwise known as prime minister, directly elected by the public. Combined with changes giving the winning party an automatic majority in parliament, Meloni argues her reforms would finally halt her country’s infamous political merry-go-round, a funfair that’s seen Italians endure dozens of governments since 1945.

Given her own political journey, and unpleasant memories of previous constitutional reforms — together, it must be said, with the usual cynicism of politicians everywhere — opposition figures have derided her proposals. Yet if her reforms remain dubiously vague, and may anyway fail to become law, both her backers and critics risk missing the point. From stagnant wages to illegal migration to unstable executives, Italy’s struggles run far deeper than any constitution can hope to solve — and ultimately require genuine action, not theoretical revolutions.

As with so much of modern Europe, Italy’s constitution is a child of 1945. That summer, as a defeated Wehrmacht finally shuffled north, a mix of anti-fascist politicians began debating their country’s political future. The following year, they gathered in the Constituent Assembly, expressly tasked with crafting a new constitution. Reflecting both their ideological spread, and perhaps the presence of foreign troops on Italian soil, members were influenced by a range of foreign models. On the Christian Democratic Right, for instance, Egidio Tosato looked to France and its strong executive rule. Eager to develop a robust judiciary, others borrowed from the Supreme Court in Washington. Given his party’s heritage — and the fact he’d spent much of the war in Moscow — Palmiro Togliatti’s Communists were unsurprisingly inspired by the Soviet Union. Even today, the very first line of Italy’s constitution affirms it as “a Democratic Republic founded on labour”.

But if they disagreed on what the new Italy should be, and ultimately built a constitution that straddled Left and Right, everyone at the Constituent Assembly agreed on avoiding past mistakes. Living amid the literal ruins of Mussolini’s fantasy, they battled, in the words of the long-serving Prime Minister, Alcide De Gasperi, to draft a document where “the law is respected” — especially when they saw constitutional skulduggery as vital to il Duce’s triumph. In 1923, the Italian parliament passed the Acerbo law. Supported by the National Fascist Party, as well as some conservatives and liberals, it gave two-thirds of seats to any party that won 25% of the vote. Combined with violent crackdowns of his enemies on the street, Mussolini exploited this provision ruthlessly. Passing the so-called leggi fascistissime (“most fascist laws”), he banned opposition parties, subsumed parliament to the Grand Council of Fascism, and in 1939 abolished the lower house entirely.

In practice, this history helps to explain the modern Italian constitution. Coming into force in 1948, it strictly limits the authority of any single group. For one thing, the two houses of parliament are co-equal. For another, and per Article 92, the prime minister is appointed by the president, even as the president himself is elected by parliament. That’s echoed by the power of the judiciary: the Constitutional Court is all-powerful when interpreting the constitution, but can only act when granted the relevant authority. The electoral system limited executive power too. Based on proportional representation, and in force until 1993, it boosted the bargaining power of smaller parties.

As the disappearance of the electoral system implies, however, Italy’s constitutional settlement was never truly settled. As early as 1953, for example, De Gaspari’s Christian Democrats passed their own electoral reform. Known to history as the legge truffa (“scam law”), it promised bonus seats to whichever party or coalition won over 50% of votes. Too reminiscent of fascism even for its supporters — shamelessly aimed at increasing the power of the Christian Democrats, the Minister of the Interior supposedly admitted they would soon be known as “swindlers” — the legislation was soon repealed.

Yet with the implosion of the Christian Democrats, alongside other corruption-stained parties through the Nineties, recent decades have seen lawmakers experiment further. Enforceable via regular legislation, electoral changes have been especially popular here. Though some were later judged unconstitutional, 1993, 2005, 2015 and 2017 all saw tweaks to the voting system, each generally aimed at strengthening ruling coalitions. By contrast, thoroughgoing constitutional reform is rather harder to pass. Thanks to the anti-authoritarian legacy of the 1948 document, advocates must garner the support of two-thirds of parliament, or else put their ideas to a referendum, and even then they could ultimately be rejected by the Constitutional Court. All the same, politicians have tried their hand — with varying success. While a 2020 referendum cutting the number of MPs passed, for instance, Matteo Renzi’s 2016 attempt to limit senatorial power was rejected by almost 60% of voters.

Can Meloni succeed where they failed? Listen to her opponents, and her reforms sound like they’re tugging Italy back to the age of the jackboot. “We will use every available dialectical tool in parliament to oppose a project that we consider to be dangerous,” declared Elly Schlein, leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, attacking the plans as a “distortion” of the constitution and the republic. Yet as innovations like the legge truffa imply, and later alterations confirm, that feels like partisan exaggeration: constitutional tinkering has been an (admittedly shabby) staple of the country’s politics for decades, even if the checks and balances of the 1948 document have basically endured.

No less important, Meloni’s proposals do tackle genuine issues. Given the notorious instability of local politics — with 70 governments since the war, Italian administrations enjoy shorter lifespans than the average lab mouse — strengthening the executive feels reasonable. And if that offers credence to one Meloni reform, whereby the winning party (or alliance) automatically gains 55% of seats, other recommendations look superficially sensible too. The president’s ability to choose the prime minister, central to Article 92, has occasionally landed Italians with unelected technocratic governments. That’s what happened in 2021, when President Mattarella summoned the economist and banker Mario Draghi to form an emergency administration. Mattarella has made other interventions too: in 2018, he refused to accept Paolo Savona as finance minister, explicitly due to the latter’s anti-euro statements.

Suggested reading

Taxi drivers are corrupting Italy

By Tobias Jones

To the extent that it bolsters the link between the prime minister and their public, Meloni’s rewriting of Article 92 feels refreshingly democratic. All the same, there are reasons for scepticism. That starts with Meloni herself. She may, after all, have softened her politics, and toed the line on establishment shibboleths such as Ukraine. But as an alumna of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, and retaining a certain ambiguity about Mussolini’s regime, some Italians are queasy about Meloni’s enthusiasm for strong government, particularly given the grim historical precedents.

These are further shadowed by specific legal concerns. Because Meloni’s plans don’t require winners to win a minimum share of the vote, coalitions securing around 25% support could still enjoy that 55% seat boost. And while those directly elected prime ministers should theoretically come from winning coalitions, nothing would apparently stop Italians from splitting their votes between several parties. Even if these worries were assuaged, meanwhile, there’s no guarantee that Meloni’s reforms will ever become law. As Renzi discovered in 2016, drab constitutional debates can easily be squeezed by more pressing voter concerns, whether around unemployment or migration.

Combined with Meloni’s own politicking — her election-winning manifesto promised Italians would get the chance to vote for their president, not their prime minister — it feels fair to agree with another opposition politician who described her programme as “bungled and sloppy”. But what if skirmishes over vote shares and elections are actually mere distractions, and Italy’s structural troubles can’t be solved by constitutional bickering?

Suggested reading

The coming civil war on Europe's Right

By Thomas Fazi

There are two ways of thinking about this. The first is that, antics like the legge truffa notwithstanding, Italian politics for much of the post-war period was dominated by a few main parties: the Socialists, the Communists and especially the Christian Democrats, which ruled almost continuously from VE Day to 1994. To put it differently, the preponderance of dysfunctional coalitions is likely due to wider trends, notably the decline of class-based politics, rather than with the constitution itself. In any case, though earlier alliances certainly tumbled too, Italy’s 1948 constitution remained the canvas on which economic miracles were drawn.

That’s important for the second point. Italy obviously has problems: poor GDP growth; crumbling birth rates; high numbers of illegal migrants. But it’s unclear that any of these challenges would immediately be solved by directly elected prime ministers, or indeed why they can’t be fixed under the existing constitutional framework. There’s evidence, in fact, that thoughtful investment and political leadership can do much here. In the South Tyrol, a mountainous region near the Austrian border, local politicians have bucked national trends and encouraged residents to have more babies. They didn’t achieve this by legalistic fiddling — but rather by intelligent policies around paternity leave and paid childcare. Migration offers similar lessons. Brutal it may be, but Meloni’s recent deal with Albania, which rehouses some asylum seekers across the Adriatic, will likely do more to stem the flow than any change to Article 94.

In short, before she goes to the nation with her fresh constitution, Meloni should consider how else she might improve Italy’s lot in the real world. Rush ahead and she risks losing the job she loves, directly elected or not.

But then came the sting in the tail familiar to all Italians: there were no taxis for the final three miles of the journey. The buses were done for the day, so I just stood with them in a state of astonishment, waiting in line behind dozens of frazzled commuters and bewildered tourists for white cabs that arrived once every 10 minutes. It was more than an hour before we got a lift.

In Italy, passengers queue for taxis rather than vice versa. In the whole of Abruzzo, a region with almost 1.3 million residents, there are only 97 licensed taxis. Rome has only 28.5 taxis for every 10,000 citizens. And Palermo has a mere five licensed taxis per 10,000 residents. The comparable figure for London, with a far more extensive public transport network, is 106.

The reason for this dearth is the refusal to issue new licences. In Genova, no new taxi licences have been issued by the city council since 1980. In Livorno, none have been granted since 1977, and in Napoli, despite its explosion in tourism, taxi licences haven’t increased since 1997. Rome hasn’t increased its taxi numbers for nearly 20 years.

It’s hard to ignore the problem. At peak times outside every major railway station, there’s a 50-metre or so queue of people waiting in vain for a lift. According to AGCM, Italy’s Competition Authority, in June last year, 46% of all calls to Roman taxis went unanswered. That same month in Milan, the figure was 42%. In July 2023, 49% of all requests for a taxi in Napoli were ignored. AGCM has since launched an investigation into monopolistic, cartel practices, denouncing “the significant shortfall of supply in relation to demand”.

“The current situation is disastrous in the main cities,” says Carlo Rienzi, President of the consumer-rights organisation, Codacons. “As soon as foreign tourists arrive in Italy, they suffer a malfunction that is unparalleled in the rest of the world.”

More from this author

Italy's corrupt beach politics

By Tobias Jones

But there’s more at risk than the serenity of tourists and commuters. Night-clubbers here rarely take taxis home. Some risk drink or drug-driving, leading to what has become known as the stragi del sabato sera — the “Saturday night massacres”. Others, including my three teenage kids, just call their parents when the fun is over. Though it’s not only parents who double as cabbies: some cities have experimented with deploying buses as cabs, resulting in the odd spectacle of a 40-seater vehicle driving across a city to pick up one person.

Naturally, this shortfall of supply suits cabbies perfectly. The basic laws of economics — that prices rise as supply dwindles — doesn’t quite apply to Italian taxis because there are set tariffs: a starting day-time price of, for example, €3 in Rome, or €3.40 in Bologna. There are no algorithms that push higher prices according to demand, as is the case with Uber. But the scarcity of taxis does mean that drivers are never idle; there is always money to be made.

Crucially, they are paid mostly in cash. In December last year, a survey by Altroconsumo — a consumers’ rights publication akin to Which? — discovered that 18% of taxi drivers refused card payments. That figure rose to 30% in Naples and 40% in Bari. A female friend of mine who was on a book tour in Naples a few years ago was violently insulted when she insisted on paying with a card. And every month or two, a similar story crops up in the press: in August 2022, for instance, two Australian tourists had their souvenirs smashed by an irate cabbie when they tried to pay by card.

The reason is obvious: tax-avoidance. According to the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), the declared average earnings of licensed taxi drivers in Rome is €12,817 per annum. In Palermo, it’s €9,489; in Napoli, it’s a laughably low €6,275.

Even if no one believed those figures, it was, until recently, hard to disprove them. Then, in May last year, a renegade taxi driver from Bologna, Roberto Mantovani — who uses the moniker “Redsox” — started publishing his daily earnings on social media. He put everything out there: cash payments, card payments and a daily total. On most days he earned between €500 and €600. In the three months of May, June and July of 2023, during which time he worked 47 days and nights, his gross earnings were €25,091.

“Within a week of publishing my earnings, my tyres had been slashed,” Mantovani tells me. “It was an almost Mafia operation to shut me up. I know it was my colleagues; I recognised one of them from the CCTV.” There are, obviously, many variables, but he estimates that his peers earn between €5,000 and €9,000 gross a month.

An affable man with a bald head and trim white beard, Mantovani has been the target of a sustained hate campaign. “I receive excrement in the post,” he says, “I get rubbish left on my car. My colleagues hate me profoundly, they spit on me and my car.” He was even suspended for a week for “damaging the honour of his [taxi-drivers’] cooperative”, called Cotabo, and was excluded from a refresher course about defibrillator use because his colleagues refused to attend if he was present.

Their fury is hardly surprising: Mantovani’s transparency has cost his colleagues tens of thousands of euros in lost earnings. The discrepancy between his earnings and theirs is too vast to be credible, and so they’ve had to increase the amount they declare to the tax authorities. “I’m undermining that block of €4,000 to €5,000 placed in cash on the family table every month,” he says.

Yet the real money isn’t being made from tax evasion, but from selling coveted taxi licences at inflated prices. Recently, undercover reporters from Le Iene, a satirical TV programme, filmed a Bologna driver offering to sell his licence for €285,000. Mantovani tells me that he paid €250,000 to acquire his licence eight years ago (from a cabbie who wanted a change of career). Now, though, he calculates its value has probably fallen to around €200,000, reflecting the recent 10% increase in the size of Bologna’s taxi fleet.

A taxi licence is a lucrative investment, guaranteeing years of tax-free earnings. “The business plan is straightforward,” says Gabriele Grea, a Professor of Economics at Milan’s Bocconi University. “An upfront investment in a licence must pay back in a reasonable number of years of activity in a regulated market, where competition is limited by law. The licence keeps its value in order to guarantee a serene retirement.” That business plan, however, relies on vetoing any new licences. If, as AGCM has urged them to, city councils do increase the number of taxi licences by 20%, the value of the asset will fall. In which case, taxi drivers would find their cushy retirement plans under threat.

As a result, every time a city council attempts to issue more licences, the city risks being grid-locked by thousands of taxis either on strike or a go-slow, which involves driving at 5-mph through the city en bloc. Mantovani calls the taxi-drivers’ lobby “a great economic and military power. We’re an economic power because we bought a part of the public service. We’re a military power because we’re a small army. We can block the roads. Everyone’s scared of taxi-drivers, we’re the last of the untouchables.”

Perhaps this explains why politicians are reluctant to act. “Taxi drivers are greatly feared by the political class,” says Rienzi. “They have an absolute supremacy compared to other workers. With their protests they’re able to hold in check millions of citizens.” While there are only around 35,000 taxi drivers in the country, their relatives — who also benefit financially from protected privileges — swell to around 150,000 the number of people who will fight any political party that attempts to change the status quo.

More from this author

The fairy tale that freed Napoli

By Tobias Jones

Taxi drivers also have a trapped audience upon which they unleash their opinions and prejudices. I’ve frequently been monologued to by taxi-drivers who use their cabs as soapboxes, ranting against a particular mayor. It’s easy to imagine that local politicians live in fear of this loquacious lobby.

As a result, legislation regarding taxi drivers is invariably in their favour. Despite hard lobbying, Uber has been unable to enter the Italian market in any meaningful way. Uber drivers are obliged to have a “luxury car”, making them more costly than the white cabs. And while in the past, taxi drivers shared between themselves 80% of all monies from the issuing of new taxi licences, new legislation from last summer, the “Decreto Asset”, decreed that that proportion will now rise to 100%. It’s been estimated that, if licences were increased by 20%, each extant licensee would receive €35,000.

I’ve found it almost impossible to find anyone willing to defend the taxi drivers. Of all the various taxi unions, only Federtaxi replies to my enquiries. “If you say to me,” says Claudio Gianandrea, a Federtaxi representative, “that there’s a situation of distress, I would agree with you. But I’ve been in service for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like last year.” He believes that the problem lies not in the lack of taxi licences, but in a post-Covid tourist invasion combined with widespread roadworks and municipal upgrades across Rome as it prepares for the 2025 jubilee. He points out that, despite runaway inflation, taxi fares haven’t risen for 12 years.

In many ways, though, this isn’t a niche story about transport blockages, but about Italy’s flat-lining economy. One of the major factors behind Italy’s economic woes is its tendency to protect professional cartels. Although such privileges have been chipped away in recent years, there are still many professions — including notaries, chemists, and notoriously beach-front bagni — that keep prices eye-wateringly high, standards low, and competition at bay. One city councillor I spoke to said that in his southern town, the local chemist was “richer, more respected and more powerful” than the mayor.

The EU has repeatedly attempted to force competition on this sclerotic economy, but the country artfully ignores all such edicts. In some ways, its ability to resist market forces is almost admirable. If Italy often feels enchantingly medieval — with luthiers, leather-workers and book-binders toiling away in city cellars — it’s partly because it has been able to shelter artisans and their medieval guilds from the gale-forces of globalisation. But if you come here for such other-worldly charm, don’t be surprised when you can’t find a taxi to take you to your hotel.

If we add those MEPs from Right-wing parties that are currently not affiliated with any group, such as those from Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, a Right-populist coalition could potentially emerge for the first time in the history of the European Parliament, unseating the “super grand coalition” of the three centrist groups (EPP, S&D and Renew Europe) that currently rule the EU institutions. That’s easier said than done, however. Aside from the near impossibility of an alliance between the EPP and ID, Europe’s Right-populist parties are far from a united front. In fact, with polls showing a very tight race between the ECR and ID for the position of third-largest party in the European Parliament, the two groups — and their respective unofficial leaders, Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen — are currently engaged in a fierce battle for the leadership of the European Right.

This was brought into stark relief earlier last week, when the ID group — which includes Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany and the Freedom Party of Austria — gathered in Rome for a convention. Salvini and Le Pen reaffirmed their refusal to support a second mandate for EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (VDL) and slammed Meloni for not ruling out a deal with the EPP over VDL’s re-election.

Over the past two years, Meloni has developed a close relationship with VDL, even joining her on European diplomatic visits to Tunisia and Egypt to curb migration. The reason is rooted in self-interest: Meloni sees the prospect of maintaining a powerful ally in Brussels as vital to her government’s survival, even at the cost of disappointing voters and her own coalition ally. Le Pen’s concerns, on the other hand, are very different: as she gears up for a showdown with Macron, she needs every disgruntled vote she can get.

“Giorgia… will you support a second von der Leyen term or not?”, Le Pen asked in a broadcast to ID delegates. “I believe so. And so you will contribute to worsening the policies that the people of Europe are suffering from so much.” In her message, Le Pen also urged Italian voters to oppose Meloni and vote for Salvini’s League. André Ventura, the leader of the rising Portuguese party Chega, also backed Salvini at the congress. “We’re not going to lie to ourselves: we’re watching ECR’s support for von der Leyen very carefully because it’s going to be a very, very divisive element,” concluded Mathilde Androuët, president of the ID Foundation.

For her part, Meloni continued to dodge the issue: “The problem is not the president of the Commission, the problem is the majority that supports the president, because it is this majority that decides policy in Europe,” she said. The important thing, Meloni argued, is to achieve “a centre-right majority” within the European Parliament — even at the cost of a possible compromise with VDL.

Despite her best attempts to paint a rosy picture, the episode was indicative of the growing strains within Meloni’s coalition: being the junior partner of an increasingly pro-establishment government has been a disaster for Salvini’s popularity, hence his recent efforts to boost his populist credentials by marking his distance from Meloni over the EU — and enlisting the endorsement of a populist heavyweight like Le Pen. But there’s more to the Le Pen-Meloni spat than mere electoral calculus.

Suggested reading

The EU's American Queen

By Lily Lynch

The question of VDL’s re-election is exposing deep rifts within the European Right — and not just between the EPP and the Right-populists. Even within the ECR group, many of the largest national parties — including the Law and Justice party in Poland, Vox in Spain and Reconquête in France — are strongly opposed to a second VDL mandate. Even more strikingly, VDL is facing opposition within her own group. The Republicans party, which represents France within the EPP, has also come out strongly against VDL’s re-election, denouncing her as “the candidate of Mr Macron and not the Right”. It’s thus easy to see why many of Meloni’s Right-wing “allies” are concerned by her relationship with VDL. Having one of Europe’s largest and most powerful Right-populist parties endorse a new “Ursula coalition”, together with Macron and the Socialists, would be a huge symbolic blow to any claim that Right-populism represents a viable alternative to the European political mainstream.

And yet, it would be a mistake to lay all the blame for this on Meloni. The reality is that the row over VDL’s re-election also reflects fundamental ideological disagreements between Europe’s Right-populist parties, particularly on geostrategic issues. The parties that make up the ECR, for instance, all generally have a strong transatlantic, pro-Nato orientation, and have come out in favour of military support for Ukraine. The firm criticism of Russia by the ECR group as a whole was recently illustrated by the co-signing of a joint declaration on further military support for Ukraine in January 2024, together with the EPP, S&D, Renew and the Greens.

The ID group, meanwhile, is deeply split over the issue. Salvini’s League, which had previously sought close ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin, has now aligned itself with the political mainstream over Russia-Ukraine, while the Finns Party last year left ID for the ECR, largely due to disagreements over Russia. In contrast, both the National Rally and the AfD have taken a much more critical stance on EU-Nato support for Ukraine, while many parties within ID have either abstained or voted against every resolution relating to Nato relations. Similar fundamental differences exist in both groups on other crucial strategic issues — such as EU membership, European enlargement and China — as well as on social and economic matters.

Ultimately, however, the biggest obstacle to the emergence of a united European Right-populist front has little to do with the parties’ ideological differences, but is related to the nature of the European Union itself. Due to the degree of economic and financial control that Brussels exercises over member states, especially those that are part of the eurozone, even “populist” governments have little choice but to go along with the EU’s diktats.

After all, the EU has had no qualms about resorting to financial and monetary blackmail in the past, including against countries that are not part of the eurozone, as it recently did with Hungary after Orbán threatened to veto the bloc’s latest Ukraine support package. Brussels’s threat to sabotage Hungary’s economy was telling of the neocolonial mentality that dominates the EU establishment — and of how far the EU will go to bring recalcitrant governments to heel. The result is that populist parties, particularly in the eurozone, can afford to be radical only insofar as they are in opposition, but are forced to betray their electoral promises once they get into power.

Suggested reading

Trump is not Nato's biggest threat

By Thomas Fazi

This goes a long way towards explaining the differences between the ECR and ID groups: while the former includes several parties that have been or are currently in government, ID member parties have largely played an opposition role in their respective countries. If they were to get into government, they would quickly shed their radicalism, as others have done before them. Indeed, for all her criticism of Meloni, the truth is that Le Pen herself, in her bid to become France’s next president, is already undergoing a process of “Melonisation” — abandoning her anti-euro platform and softening her position on Russia-Ukraine and Nato.

All of which is to say that it would be naïve to assume that a Right-wing majority in the European Parliament would change this state of affairs, given that the real power in the EU is exercised elsewhere — in the Commission, in the Council and in the European Central Bank. Nor is there any guarantee that electing more Right-populist governments would create the conditions for “changing the EU from within”. Despite all the top-down efforts to “Europeanise” politics on the continent, European politics is still driven by national economic, geopolitical and cultural dynamics — and these will continue to differ starkly among nations regardless of the ideological affinity between governments. By refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the room — the fundamental and irreconcilable incompatibility between the EU and democracy — Right-populists across the continent are, once again, setting themselves up for defeat.

To understand Meloni’s ambivalence, and indeed the brazenness of the new blackshirts, you must do more than understand the turmoil of the Years of Lead in the Seventies and Eighties, or even the bloody legacy of the Second World War. Rather, you must instead grasp an idea: Italiani brava gente; Italians are good folk. It is one of the founding principles of the modern nation, expressed in books, films and even street signs, and is now burrowed deep into the popular consciousness. And there it still lingers, excusing the crimes of the past, and justifying the politics of the present.

It has its origins in the 19th century: even then Italian politicians saw themselves as different from their European rivals. Not for them the gore-soaked victories of the French in Algeria or the Germans in Namibia. In 1885, the country’s foreign minister justified its conquests in East Africa by claiming that Italy couldn’t remain on the sidelines “in the battle between civilisation and barbarism”. Encouraged, perhaps, by the cultural glories of earlier centuries, or else by a national reputation for conviviality, these ideas soon trickled downstream. In one 1902 story, for instance, the popular adventure writer Emilio Salgari introduced his readers to a character freed from pirates by Italian sailors. “Me love Italians,” the “Little Moor” stammers in pidgin. “Italians good people.” The truth, it hardly needs saying, was rather less simple. Italy may have been late to the colonisation game, but they got stuck in by the late-19th century, and in much the manner of their European rivals. In 1911, for example, their troops butchered at least 1,000 people in Libya, revenge for an earlier massacre during the Italo-Turkish War. They may have gifted the world Boccaccio and Brunelleschi — but Italians could be vicious.

Even so, a sense of national mildness endured through the foundational experience of modern Italy: fascism. He may have proclaimed that it’s better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep, but in practice Benito Mussolini saw his compatriots as rather less ferocious. “The Italian race is a race of sheep,” he admitted on the eve of Italy’s entry into the Second World War. “Eighteen years aren’t enough to transform it: you need 180 years, or maybe 180 centuries.” This self-conscious moderation is reflected elsewhere, particularly if you examine fascist propaganda. After Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, one cartoon shows a group of baby-soldiers light-heartedly singing. Elsewhere, cartoonists gently mocked the infatuation of the conquerors with local girls. The Ethiopians themselves were drawn as crude racist stereotypes — but it’s hard to imagine Goebbels tolerating similar banter in the General Government.

But the best explanation for the persistence of Italiani brava gente is the way Italians could compare themselves to Nazi Germany. As the Holocaust became the axial moral crime of Western civilisation, it helped that Italian fascism was not intrinsically antisemitic. Through the Twenties, some enthusiastic fascists were themselves Jews, while Mussolini dismissed Hitler’s obsessions as late as 1932. And while his regime eventually aligned itself with Nazi racial theories, the Duce never organised industrial slaughter on the scale of Treblinka or Auschwitz. Until Italy’s surrender in 1943, Italian officers generally refused to back the genocidal instincts of their allies — at least when it came to Jews. This was especially notable in Yugoslavia. In the portion of the country occupied by Italy, Jews found a refuge from Nazi and Ustashe destruction, and could apparently even celebrate Yom Kippur.

None of this washes away the fields of blood undoubtedly spilt by Mussolini’s regime. Spurred by anti-Slavic bigotry, and irredentist claims in Slovenia and Dalmatia, the Italians deported some 18% of Ljubljana’s population to concentration camps. At one site, on the Croatian island of Rab, the death rate may have been worse than Buchenwald. Italian behaviour in Abyssinia was just as dreadful, with the use of mustard gas the most infamous crime among many. Nor were Italians free from blame when it came to the Holocaust: at least 200 Roman Jews were denounced or arrested by their gentile neighbours.

Suggested reading

The fairy tale that freed Napoli

By Tobias Jones

Despite this barbarism, events would intervene to give Italiani brava gente new strength. After Italy capitulated in September 1943, the Wehrmacht invaded. Hitler established a puppet state in the north, commonly known as the Republic of Salò, and Italians thereafter fought a vicious civil war, with the pro-German rump battling a mix of Allied troops, antifascist Italian soldiers and Leftist partisans. When the bloodletting ceased two years later, the country was shattered. As an Allied officer remarked in July 1945, Italians wished to be freed “from the war, fascism, and themselves”. Local politicians agreed, and Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Communist Party and minister of justice after the war, declared an amnesty for the vast majority of former fascist officials in June 1946.

Soon enough, these legal machinations blended into a wider principle: Italian officials, and Italians generally, were the unwitting and unwilling dupes of Nazi totalitarianism. As a government spokesman told a Belgian journalist shortly after the war ended, the authorities tasked with enforcing antisemitic laws actually worked to “sabotage” them. And with much of Italy lately and brutally occupied by the Nazis, claims to victimhood enjoyed some plausibility. The amnesty law may have been passed by a communist, meanwhile, but the post-war dominance of Christian Democrats meant that vengeful Leftist partisans were marginalised. Cold War logic played a role too. With Trieste the southern end of the Iron Curtain, the West had little appetite to interrogate Italy’s dubious past.

As in earlier periods of Italian history, this new iteration of Italiani brava gente would mark the country’s culture. Memoirs such as The Sergeant in the Snow are important here — but the phenomenon is clearest in Italian cinema. As early as 1945, Rome, Open City shows courageous partisans tortured by the Gestapo. Films like The Monastery of Santa Chiara (1949) told similar tales, and scripts that dared tell more complex stories were stymied by self-censorship. Italiani Brava Gente, a 1964 film, crystalised these attitudes. Starring apolitical conscripts on the Eastern Front, they’re appalled by German cruelty. By the late-20th century, the theme had echoed abroad: in the 1994 novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and the 2001 adaptation with Nicolas Cage, the Italian occupation of Greece is painted in distinctly mellow tones. For her part, Hannah Arendt claimed that just 10% of Italian Jews died in the Holocaust. We now know the figure was closer to 20%.

Every country mythologises its past: nationhood would probably be impossible without it. Nor, to reiterate, are the stories Italians tell themselves entirely false. Like the fictional Corelli on Kefalonia, many really did fight the Germans, and others acted decently, from France to the Russian Steppe. But a failure to reflect frankly on history, both the bad and the good, has afflicted the bel paese for far longer than its neighbours. Where Germany was roused by the Eichmann trial, and France began to reconsider Vichy from the Seventies, Italy has been remarkably reluctant to follow suit. As one 1986 documentary stated — and many since have continued to claim — “Italians behaved better than everyone else in Europe.” Countless towns boast plaques commemorating “martyrs for freedom” executed in the civil war. Learning who killed them, however, is often much harder.

Suggested reading

The Berlusconi I knew

By Edward Luttwak

Beyond robbing Italians of historical nuance, these ideas continue to have a deep impact on the country’s politics. With Italiani brava gente at their back, leaders can paint their country as the victims of Nazism — while dismissing their own authoritarianism as half-baked or harmless. As Silvio Berlusconi (wrongly) claimed in 2003: “Mussolini never killed anyone.” Beyond gaffes like that, Italians far to Berlusconi’s Right have been able to embrace neo-fascism wholesale, knowing it doesn’t enjoy the opprobrium Hitlerism did in Germany. That goes for violent paramilitaries like Ordine Nuovo, but also more respectable politicians. He later moderated his position, but in 1994 Gianfranco Fini, leader of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), publicly stated that Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the century.

Even today, Giorgia Meloni, another MSI alumna, is not exempt. Quite apart from her sympathy for the dead at Acca Larentia, she’s suggested that the victims of a notorious 1944 massacre, perpetrated by the SS outside Rome, were killed simply for being Italian. Contrary to the Italiani brava gente myth, that wasn’t really true. For one thing, many of the dead were specifically resistance fighters or Jews. For another, the Gestapo chose their victims with the help of the Republic of Salò’s interior minister and Rome’s police chief — Italians and fascists both. A similar thread of ideas has seeped into Meloni’s government. Defending the so-called “Mattei Plan” — aimed at controlling migration from Africa — a minister in Meloni’s government has argued that Italy could be trusted on the continent because its colonial history proved it had a “civilising culture”.

At the same time, the ambivalence of many Italians towards their fascist heritage has allowed extremists to prod the limits of legal standards of behaviour. And this is why the display of fascist salutes at Acca Larentia in January are still possible: though it was implicitly founded as an anti-fascist state, the Italian Republic takes a far milder approach to far-Right symbolism than Germany or Austria. In the aftermath of the commemoration, an Italian court decreed that the Nazi salute was only illegal if it threatened public order, or risked reviving the outlawed National Fascist Party. “Of course”, cheered a spokesman for the militant CasaPound group, “we will continue making the Roman salute”. For some Italians, it seems, the dark symbolism — and darker ideologies — of the short 20th century have lasted well into the 21st.

Luckily, there’s a cure for our heartache: Venice for Pleasure. This irreverent guidebook by the English art historian J.G. Links promises “a guide to the pleasures of Venice without its pains”, which, in our era of frantic mini-breaks — of Instagramming and TikToking our way around as many must-see landmarks as possible — is a marvel and a revelation.

“Very few travellers seem to enjoy their first visit to Venice,” Links cautions. “They are awed, dazzled, overwhelmed… [but] above all, they are exhausted by it; physically, mentally and emotionally, its assault is too much for the ordinary human being to withstand.” This is a book for that wild curiosity: a tourist in pure pursuit of pleasure. If they follow Links, they may end up skipping their three-hour tour of the Doge’s Palace, but “Venice will have woven its spell around them, and they will be captives for life.”

Links asks just one thing: that everyone be a walker, “or, at least, a dawdler”. And that is because his guide consists of four narrated walks around Venice, from the shimmering Zattere to the lonely Cannaregio. The streets, Links says, have “a miraculous spring in the paving which makes fatigue almost impossible”. And he is careful to stop at “as many cafes as possible” for coffee or apéritif, from where he enchants us with stories and architectural details about nearby palaces, churches and bell towers contemplating collapse.

Suggested reading

The fairy tale that freed Napoli

By Tobias Jones

With Links as a guide, the idea that Venice is somehow not real — that it is a circus, a Disneyland, a fossil — is banished. On my own strolls, I have seen drowsy postmen loading Amazon parcels onto little delivery boats at dawn; babbling Venetians spilling out of a bar onto the canal, eating baccalà mantecato and drinking wine from paper cups; families fleeing the stink of the summer to the furthest beach on the Lido; a seagull losing a brawl with a lagoon squid, turning the water jet black; a distressed elderly gentleman who has misplaced a valuable miniature he was hoping to sell. This is not a city without a soul.

There is another side to Venice: the merciless tour guides; the menageries of Murano glass animals; the overpriced, often-disappointing food (there is nothing worse than that fearful “delicacy”, the Venetian soft-shell crab, plucked from its squalid existence on the lagoon floor for your displeasure). Even Jan Morris, a lifelong admirer, admitted to feeling that tourism was “in some sense a prostitution of a great city, a degradation, a shame”.

But who’s to say that this carnival of profit isn’t real in its own way? The Venetians have been playing this same game since the 16th century, when, long after their blood-soaked earnings from the Crusades dried up, Venice devoted herself to readying pilgrims for the Holy Land. The piazza was full of Venetians flogging guidebooks, insecticides, and religious tat. Five centuries on, they’re still at it — and next Spring, we’ll be charged €5 entry to the city.

Earlier this year, my devoutly romantic friend took a photograph of a gondolier teaching his son to row in the moonlight: passing down his trade to the next generation. If he were canny, he would have also advised his boy on how to squeeze the most money out of unsuspecting tourists. But would this have made the scene any less remarkable? Any less Venetian? Certainly not.

There is a strong case in Venice for leaning into the artifice, for ditching our snobby disdain for anything that feels touristy. It is the burden of the Brit in Italy to live in dread of encountering a fellow countryman: to be sat next to another British tourist in a restaurant is the ultimate catastrophe. But what do we gain from this manic pursuit of authenticity? And what counts as an “authentic” experience abroad anyway? Is it to surround yourself with Venetians chatting and drinking in Campo Santa Margherita — even if the most you can say in Italian is ciao bella? Perhaps we’re simply chasing an illusion.

Suggested reading

Italy's corrupt beach politics

By Tobias Jones

Nowhere is this question more relevant than in the gold-leaf excess of Florian’s Cafe in San Marco. I went there one morning on the advice of Links (whose book is, admittedly, now a little behind on the cafe scene), and was so horrified at the thought of paying €12 for a hot chocolate, only to sit amid a throng of fellow tourists goggling and waving selfie sticks, that I upped and left. I later regretted it. Florian’s, I imagine, has been fleecing foreigners for 300 years. It is hardly inauthentic.

In fact, having lost her empire, Venice revelled in her duplicity, fashioning herself a new role as entertainer of the world. “Venice had given herself over to pleasure — but she still made it good business,” Links writes of the 18th century. “Her pageants and carnivals, her theatres and balls, were as much designed to attract the tourists as to make the Venetians themselves forget past glories.”

Yet Venice never let herself fade completely into gilded irrelevance. Even now, she is more than just a honeymoon city, a reliquary of bygone beauty. She is the home of the Biennale, the Film Festival, the Peggy Guggenheim collection, and a mother to the finest exhibitions of Venetian art. It is part of the fun to walk into a prim-looking church, only to find soft-porn playing above the altar, with humourless aesthetes watching from Play-Doh beanbags. Venice is both the art world’s greatest muse — and its harshest critic.

For Jan Morris, this was never enough. She dreamed that the city would once again become a noble marketplace. “East and West might meet once more,” she writes in Venice, “to fuse their philosophies at last, and settle their squalid bickerings… Venice is made for greatness, a God-built city, and her obvious destiny is mediation. She only awaits a summons.” It’s a beguiling vision, and one that could perhaps inspire Britain too, as it struggles to accept its waning status in the world.

As for the “perennial tourist”, we have begun a love affair with Venice that will last a lifetime — unless, like all the great romances, she sinks before we do. We can choose whether to drink hot chocolate at Florian’s or to amble along the quiet streets of Dorsoduro, knowing that each experience is just as authentic; just as Venetian. Because Venice has always been an exhibitionist. And in Venice, as in life, it is often the performance that is most real.

What began as a trickle in the early 2000s had, by 2011, become a flood, when, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, tens of thousands of migrants arrived on the island. Lampedusa very quickly came to represent a sort of inverse Ellis Island: the unwanted arriving in a country from which millions had once left. So much so that Pope Francis chose to visit it in 2013 to show solidarity with the arrivals. Ten years ago, a Libyan fishing boat carrying more than 500 people sank off its coast. Last month, more than 12,000 migrants, twice the island’s population, arrived by sea. The decade has felt, to Lampedusa’s inhabitants, like a new chapter in history.

But how different is this chapter? In France, Germany or Italy, footage, often from Lampedusa, plays in the news studios.  There is a pattern to what happens next. The host then introduces his guests. After casting them as the Right and the Left, the pundits will then be pitted against each other, to answer a simple question: what does this migration mean?

Their answers are often the same. For those on the Right, the migration flows are a historical break — in their scale, nature and intensity. They require “Fortress Europe”. For those on the Left, they are nothing of the sort, but part of a long history — both colonial or gastarbeiter. It is fundamentally more of the same, requiring, if not open, then flexible borders.

A historical lens is more rewarding. It was in the early Seventies that the British literary critic John Berger understood that Europe was being remade by immigrant labour. Together with Jean Mohr, he wrote A Seventh Man, a psychological portrait of a gastarbeiter in continental north-western Europe. The title itself reflects the importance that migrants already had in the European economy: even then, one in every seven manual labourers in Germany was born abroad.

The first striking difference is the process itself. Berger’s migrants were recruited by government agencies — Germans seeking Turks — with their transport organised from the fringes of Europe to its centre. Control not chaos. The European state was in the driving seat. That is not how it feels in Lampedusa: here, the migrants themselves have driven the migration. The work of countless individuals — the officials call them smugglers — who have built up the routes. The European state feels as confused and powerless as to Berger it seemed strong.

But it is the different nature of the migrants that is most striking. Berger’s reporting led him to build an everyman in 1975 that is more reminiscent of a rural-to-urban migrant in 1875 than a passenger through Lampedusa in 2023. His subjects are uneducated rural men — from the village, clueless about the city, without words, politics or a worldview that will help them navigate their destinations.

Reading A Seventh Man and comparing it with my own recent reporting, I was struck first by the huge continuity in the scale of the migrant economy. Already, according to the statistics in Berger’s dispatch, some 25% of industrial workers in France, Switzerland and Belgium were foreigners. But then I was hit by the psychological difference. Because the hundreds of migrants I interviewed were not village boys.

If I were to construct, as Berger did, an everyman, a Lampedusa Man, he would come from the lower middle class that has emerged in Africa and Asia. They almost always speak some English. They have WhatsApp, a Facebook account and a smartphone — though they might have traded it on the way. They were born in the city. They have grown up watching Friends and The Simpsons. And they certainly have a politics: both a keen sense of their country’s exploitation at the hands of the West, but also a longing for the freedom they believe only Western institutions can guarantee them. The same applies whether or not they are refugees.

More from this author

Our divine monarchy is finished

By Ben Judah

Unlike the men Berger and Bohr painstakingly photographed, there is no expectation, or even myth, of return. Those young men, in 1975, talked of feeling ripped from their natural environments — a premodern Turkish or Portuguese village. For the young man arriving on Lampedusa, it feels rather different. This 20-something Nigerian or Egyptian is as much a product of the internet as his European counterpart; entering the developed world is partially a homecoming.

Yet his destination is as changed by the internet as himself. The journey’s end of Berger’s everyman was the Fordist factory, and he liberally quotes Marx, Engels and the unvarnished words of Henry Ford himself to describe their conditions. The point Berger was making would have been obvious to his readers. The fundamental conditions of the industrial working class had not changed much since the late-19th century. They were still the proletariat, but of a different nationality.

This is not how our Lampedusa Man has come to experience Europe. Now, a few years on from his arrival in Paris or Berlin, he is to be found cycling for Deliveroo or delivering for Amazon. He has no foreman; there are no line workers; there is no weekly dance. He is alone, inhabiting a technological structure he cannot see and does not understand.

Berger spends much of his book castigating the trade unions for not extending solidarity to the gastarbeiters. This can only be read with a certain sadness today. The shoulder-to-shoulder life of the urban working class that Marx would have recognised — full of weak ties woven across the city and Christmas cards for the milkman — no longer exists. For Lampedusa Man, his experience of the city is provided by an app, which becomes more and more enraged as it hurries him to a door that eventually opens to no eye contact.

Suggested reading

Hard truths about Britain's immigration crisis

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Above all this hangs Europe’s shifting geopolitics. It is true that, 50 years ago, there were already 11 million migrants in north-western Europe. It is also true that the migrant and his life have changed utterly. But the deeper change is about Europe’s position in the world.

When John Berger wrote A Seventh Man, he did so at the start of a revolution in public and political concern for human rights. This was part of a bigger trend, as the struggle for human rights around the world replaced class or national struggle as the great cause of a Western Left-liberals.

The same decade would see the breakthrough of Amnesty International, the organisation’s membership leaping from 15,000 in 1969 to 200,000 by the end of the Seventies. It saw both the group and the Soviet dissident Andrey Sakharov awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The two were intertwined: as political incentives to push human rights in the Soviet Union grew, it dovetailed with a growing public campaign which ended up reinforcing Western geopolitics. It drove an increasing radicalism in call and response, between the public and politicians, which fuelled interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and, of course, Libya.

Ten years on, Lampedusa confirms that this historical era is over; that the prioritisation of human rights and the priorities of European politicians no longer align. The recent visit of European Commission chief Ursula Von Der Leyen with the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stands in stark contrast with that of Pope Francis a decade ago. Their visit was part of a wider flurry of Mediterranean diplomacy with Tunisia — a neat distillation of a new geopolitics which has turned democracy on its head to try and curb migration.

Visiting Tunisia, European leaders have dangled more than €1 billion to support the increasingly autocratic leader Kais Saied, who, facing immigration pressure himself, has embraced anti-black rhetoric about “hordes” and “the Great Replacement” — supposedly of Arabs by Africans. This is a sharp shift from 2011, when European leaders welcomed a revolution in Tunisia and joined a US-led intervention in Libya. Today they are buttressing authoritarians. Where they once welcomed European pressure on North African autocrats, human-rights NGOs now decry Europe’s partnership with a regime which has practised desert “push backs”.

More from this author

How American Jews lost themselves

By Ben Judah

Even so, it seems likely EU governments will be forced to hand over more money, as their voters demand hard borders and Africa’s population soars. It is easy, for instance, to imagine Meloni and Le Pen’s recent call for “a naval blockade” being succeeded by a demand for boots on the ground to enforce what North African border guards have promised.

But this is not the only way the pressure to disconnect human rights from foreign policy will grow. When it comes to China, in order to compete for influence, Western governments led by the US are also downgrading human rights. Consider Equatorial Guinea, led by the notorious Obiang kleptocracy, where, in order to prevent the installation of a Chinese Naval base, the Biden administration was forced to send a senior National Security Council aide to deliver gifts for its leaders, including a silver platter, with the US national deal. The same pattern can be seen from India and Turkey to the Philippines.

Meanwhile, decarbonisation, the geopolitical implications of which have yet to be fully understood, entails a whole new set of relationships in which Europe will be compelled to talk less about human rights. Essentially, pursuing Net Zero requires a global mining revolution for critical raw materials such as lithium and cobalt — and Europe, it appears, is poorly endowed in these. To ensure regular supplies, it will be forced to downgrade human rights while forming a whole set of new ties with emerging mining states from Indonesia to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There is, therefore, nothing inevitable about the centring of human rights in Europe. They didn’t precede our current era, nor will they succeed it. Perhaps, as we think of the rocky coves of Lampedusa, and the growing indifference to the thousands that land there, or who die trying, it is not a question of whether we will fail to see them in the future. Lampedusa is telling us we are already close to blind.

In yesterday’s election, which confirmed Vox as the country’s third-largest party, Spain came close to joining Hungary, Poland, Italy, Finland and Austria and electing a Right-populist party to government. In Germany, meanwhile, the AfD has just elected its first mayor and district administrator, after surging into second place in the polls; in the Netherlands, the newly formed Farmer-Citizen Movement won its first provincial elections in March; in Austria, the Freedom Party is leading the polls; and in France, polls suggest that Le Pen would now win a run-off with Macron.

This shift to the Right will no doubt affect the make-up of the next European Parliament, due to be elected next June. And Right-wingers across Europe are feeling giddy. At a recent rally in support of Vox, Giorgia Meloni couldn’t contain her glee, claiming that “the hour of the patriots has arrived”, announcing  “a change in the politics of Europe”.

It seems inevitable that Right-populism will play an increasingly influential role in the coming years. But exactly what kind of “change” should we expect from these “patriots”? From a cultural standpoint, such parties could not be further from the liberal-progressive mainstream: they share an attachment to Europe’s traditions and religious heritage, a dislike for eurocrats and an opposition to all things woke — immigration, gender ideology, green fanaticism. So we can definitely expect a pushback on these fronts, within individual countries as well as at the European level: more relaxed climate policies, more restrictive immigration policies and less talk about gender.

On other, arguably more important issues, however, these so-called populist parties are peculiarly aligned with the mainstream. In terms of economic policy, for example, almost all of them are wedded to the neoliberal orthodoxy embedded in the EU: with few exceptions, their economic agendas revolve around pro-austerity, pro-deregulation, anti-worker and anti-welfare policies.

Consider the new Finnish government’s economic programme, which includes wide-ranging welfare cuts, rules to make it easier for companies to lay off employees, limitations to the right of collective bargaining, and fines for workers on strikes. Similarly, Vox’s economic programme is rooted in what Miquel Vila has called “a special kind of Spanish neoliberalism [which favours] economic deregulation while supporting a conglomerate of big corporations dependent on government contracts”. The same (with slight variations) goes for several Right-populist parties — from Austria’s Freedom Party to the AfD to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.

There are exceptions, of course. Le Pen, for instance, believes in a moderate redistributive programme of Keynesian orientation based on state interventionism, social protection and the defence of public services; in the past she has castigated the “neoliberal” logic of many of Macron’s proposals. Even Viktor Orbán’s economic policies — which have included capping the prices of basic goods in response to galloping inflation — have defied the orthodoxy in certain respects.

Yet overall, there is little reason to believe that this Right-populist wave will result in any major economic policy shift. And this is highly problematic, given most of the support for these parties doesn’t come from voters who are tired of wokeness — though that certainly plays a role — but from those who are anxious about their socioeconomic situation and lack of economic security. At a time when millions of Europeans are struggling with inflation and falling real wages, any party that wants to survive the next electoral cycle will also need to provide answers to the majority of voters who expect a material benefit from their vote. In this sense, the fact that most of these parties are wedded to the economic orthodoxy doesn’t bode well for their future — or that of the millions of Europeans struggling to get by.

That said, even those parties who would choose to defy the economic status quo have to contend with the very limited autonomy that countries have today, especially in the eurozone. This relates to an even more striking aspect of contemporary Right-populism: as much as they love to rail against the “Brussels bureaucrats” and the “globalist elites”, they have virtually all ditched any mention of leaving the EU and/or the euro from their programmes (to the extent that they ever made that claim). Nowadays, Right-populists are all euro-reformists who speak of “changing the EU” from within. This represents a significant change compared with the first European populist wave of the mid-2010s, when many of the then-leading populist parties — the National Front, the AfD, the Northern League, the Five Star Movement, even Brothers of Italy — openly called for their respective countries’ exit from the EU or euro.

This development was effectively formalised in July 2021, when all the major Right-populist parties from across Europe signed a document whereby they agreed to work within the framework of the EU. This inevitably entailed a shift in focus from socioeconomic issues — over which member states have little control over — to more cultural ones: by retreating from the battle for national sovereignty, they had little choice but to couch their challenges to the status quo, and to the EU itself, in strictly cultural and identitarian terms. Hence the document called for the need for European nations to “be based on tradition, respect for the culture and history of European states, respect for Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage and the common values that unite our nations”. The point is not whether one agrees with this or not, but rather the way in which the EU has succeeded in shifting opposition from the socioeconomic terrain to the identitarian one — in other words, to the culture wars.

Suggested reading

Boomer Europe is dying

By Aris Roussinos

This emphasis was brought about by several factors, but a crucial one was the EU’s crushing response to the first populist government which attempted to challenge its rule: the League-Five Star government that emerged from the 2018 Italian elections. At the time, the EU resorted to a wide array of tools — including financial and political pressure — to prevent the government from deviating from the economic status quo, eventually causing the coalition to collapse in just over a year. The experience showed that the margins for an individual country to challenge the EU’s economic framework are close to zero — at least within the context of the euro.

From “nationalist” and “patriotic” parties allegedly devoted to taking back control from Brussels, one might have expected an increased awareness of the need to break away from the EU — something that Brexit had shown to be feasible. Instead, they reached the opposite conclusion: that the EU is so powerful that there is no alternative but to accept its existence. The tragic consequences of this are exemplified by the Meloni government: a nominally “sovereigntist” government which has no choice but to go along with the policies dictated by the European Union (and Nato), while engaging in empty culture-wars rhetoric. She symbolises the inevitable fate of Right-populism within the framework of the euro: that of becoming an anti-woke version of the economic mainstream.

Such hopes of changing the EU “from within” through the European elections are equally delusional. They might make sense if the EU were a fully-fledged federal state with a truly sovereign parliament. But it is not. In fact, the European Parliament has relatively limited powers: unlike national parliaments, it doesn’t even have the power to initiate legislation. This is a power reserved almost entirely for the EU’s “executive” arm, the European Commission, which is unelected and promises “neither to seek nor to take instructions from any government or from any other institution, body, office or entity”. And even though the European Parliament has the power to approve or reject (or propose amendments to) the Commission’s own legislative proposals, this doesn’t change the fact that it has relatively little control over the actions of the Commission. It has even less control over the European Central Bank, which ultimately exercises the power of life and death over euro area governments.

Yet even if economics were not a factor, there is a greater reason to be sceptical of the Right-populist wave’s life expectancy. On perhaps the most important issue concerning Europe’s future — the war in Ukraine and the bloc’s geopolitical positioning — the parties are deeply divided. Most Nordic, Baltic and Eastern parties, just like their mainstream equivalents, are strongly in favour of greater ties with Nato, though the same goes for Vox and Meloni. Then there are those who are strongly opposed and favour a renormalisation of relations with Russia — most notably Orbán, Le Pen and the Austrian Freedom Party. And then you have those which are deeply split on the issue, such as the AfD.

At their root, these divisions simply reflect the often divergent or even conflicting economic and geopolitical interests that characterise the EU’s member states. If the Right-populists think that these differences can be cancelled in the name of anti-wokeness — and synthesised into a common European policy — they are operating under the same Europhile delusion that the mainstream has been peddling for the past 30 years. Ultimately, there is only one project capable of delivering a truly populist agenda, in material and not simply cultural terms: one focused on reclaiming national sovereignty and democracy from the EU. It is a tragedy, then, that Europe’s Right-populists have all but given up the project.

According to the news, however, I should be terribly concerned — terrified, in fact. Everyone’s running headline stories about the “extreme”, “record-breaking” and “deadly” hot weather sweeping across Asia, the US and, most notably, Europe. Here, the heatwave was unofficially named Cerberus, the multi-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, before being replaced by Charon, the man who ferries the dead there. Rome is being called the “infernal city”. To be honest, I can think of several much more hellish places around the world at the moment — cities plagued by poverty, terrorism and war. And yet we are told that the current heat waves are a taste of the “hell” that awaits us as a result of climate change.

Such sensationalism is revealing of the climate hysteria that has gripped the West — and the way in which it is seriously hindering our ability to devise rational solutions. Many seem convinced that if we don’t drastically reduce CO2 emissions (or eliminate them altogether) by our unmoveable deadline of 2030, climate change will extinguish humanity, if not all life on Earth. We’re told this is because “the science tells us”. This is bonkers.

Yes, climate change and global warming are real — and yes, they are largely a result of human activity — but the planet is not about to be “uninhabitable”. The science is, in fact, much more nuanced: according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is far from clear whether the world is actually experiencing more drought, flooding or hurricanes, nor the extent to which any changes are influenced by human behaviour.

Scientists aren’t even sure what the impact on agriculture will be: one 2011 study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that by mid-century climate change might reduce global crop output by less than 1% of today’s output. As the UN climate panel put it: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers [such as] changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development.”

While the overall impact of climate change on humanity will be negative, nowhere does the science tell us that life on Earth will perish if we don’t go Net Zero by 2030. These deadlines are conjured by politicians, not scientists. As a result, the apocalyptic narrative currently dominating the climate debate is completely unfounded — and unethical. In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman warned about the “futility thesis” — how people will reject preventive action due to a fatalistic belief that it is simply too late to make a difference. Today, this phenomenon can be seen in the thousands of young Westerners who are suffering from “climate anxiety” and choosing not to have children. According to the UN’s latest Human Development Report, the world is more pessimistic than at any point between now and before the First World War — even though in almost every measurable way, life on Earth is better than ever.

Not only is this rhetoric of impending doom hindering the possibility of fixing the problem, it is also engendering all manner of authoritarian fantasies. It has become an article of faith that the best response is to drastically cut back CO2 emissions — and that this should be done whatever the cost. For if the world is about to end, anything is justified. The increasingly violent forms of “eco-activism” are also part of this trend. Fear, depression, desperation and authoritarianism are mutually reinforcing.

Yet any realistic climate policy will take decades to pay off; even if we significantly reduce our emissions in the following years, the total amount of carbon dioxide in the air will still increase, though at a slightly diminished rate. This is especially true for Western countries, which will account for a smaller and smaller share of global emissions in the coming years and decades. Even if rich countries completely curtail all emissions (an impossible scenario), the temperature increase, after 80 years, will only be 0.4°C smaller than it would have been otherwise, according to estimates by Bjorn Lomborg based on a model used by the UN’s panel of climate scientists. So even if Western countries were able to meet their unrealistic climate objectives, we will continue to experience the negative consequences of climate change — floods, storms and heat waves — for a very long time.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything to try to stop temperatures from rising above a certain limit. But if our aim is to actually save lives — and surely we have a greater moral obligation to those who are alive today than to future generations — then our priority should be adaptation: that is, measures that will help people cope with the effects of climate change, and which would save lives here and now.

Adaptation has already greatly reduced climate-related deaths, even in the face of rising temperatures: it’s why deaths from storm surges have been declining even as sea levels have risen; and why the most likely future scenario is that fewer people will die from climate-related flooding — just as heat-related deaths have been declining in certain countries. Adaptation is also why deaths and devastation due to wildfires have dropped dramatically; and why, overall, climate-related fatalities have declined by about 96% over the past century, despite a massive increase in the global population. This is testament to the strong relationship between economic development and climate resilience.

In the context of the current heatwaves, this means that, instead of “climate action”, people should be demanding subsidies for air conditioners and lower energy prices from their governments — straightforward measures that would drastically lower the number of heat-related deaths, not empty promises that won’t make a difference in the short term (and will have a negligible impact in the long term). But this is what happens when nightmares and elitist fantasies replace the actual material conditions of people as the basis for politics — “saving the planet” becomes more important than saving actual human beings.

More from this author

Why the West should go nuclear

By Thomas Fazi

In this way, climate hysteria is completely distorting our perception of the world. Last week, a report by the World Meteorological Organization that the beginning of July was the world’s hottest week on record received widespread attention. At around the same time, another report was published — this time by the UN Development Programme — that was greeted with less interest. But it was arguably more important. It estimated that the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent surge in inflation and borrowing costs had pushed an extra 165 million people into poverty, bringing the total global figure to 1.65 billion, over 20% of the world’s population.

Climate activists often argue that those living in poor countries are the ones who will suffer the most from climate change. This is true. But, once again, it is illogical to claim that our priority, and theirs, should therefore be to reduce global emissions as fast as possible. Poor people’s priority is not be poor. A UN global poll of nearly 10 million people found climate to be the lowest policy priority among the poor, far behind education, health, and nutrition.

Of course, these objectives can’t always be treated in isolation. There are often trade-offs: reducing or eliminating world poverty requires more growth, which inevitably entails more energy and therefore more emissions. Indeed, coping with the effects of climate change is itself energy-intensive, as the climate paradox of air conditioning makes clear. Faced with this realisation, environmentalists continue to entertain the notion that the future energy needs of developing countries can be met entirely by renewables — yet this is also a fantasy.

As a report published last year by the Breakthrough Institute makes clear, even though renewables (ideally in combination with nuclear energy, which is fully carbon-free) have a role to play in the development of Africa and other poor regions, many of the world’s poorer countries have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels in the coming years: coal, oil and natural gas. “Continued and increasing fossil-fuel consumption is regrettable, but it will mean more people will be fed with less land, reducing deforestation, and enabling the transition to modern agriculture,” write the report’s two co-authors, Vijaya Ramachandran of the Breakthrough Institute and Arthur Baker of the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago. Remember, poverty is the leading cause of death in developing countries; more growth in these countries will mean more emissions but significantly fewer deaths. Moreover, helping the world’s poorest grow out of poverty will also make them more resilient in the face of climate change.

Suggested reading

Artificial grass is evil

By James Sean Dickson

One might think that, even for those with environmentalist sympathies, the choice here isn’t too difficult to make: fewer deaths is surely a goal worth pursuing. Instead, development banks and international funding groups such as the World Bank and the European Investment Bank are increasingly linking finance to climate adaptation and mitigation, curtailing or halting their funding of fossil-fuel or nuclear projects. Here we can observe the best example of the way in which climate hysteria is pushing us to make increasingly irrational — and ultimately very dangerous, if not deadly — choices for poor and marginalised people everywhere, in the developing world as well as in rich countries.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change; it means that we need to strike the right balance between improving human welfare — which implies more emissions in the short term — and mitigating temperature rises. As long as poverty continues to kill more people than climate change, environmentalists who profess to care about saving the world should think about who they are saving it for.

Because I only wear ties when I really must, I kept a few and would bring the rest as gifts when meeting prime ministers in other countries. Over the years, however, it increasingly transpired that these men had also met Berlusconi and received their own Marinella. They would respond with a Berlusconi anecdote, which invariably included a very good joke and some useful advice, delivered in his exuberant manner with the happy smile of a lifelong optimist.

That was the secret of Berlusconi. For, in spite of its beauty, Italy is a country of pessimists, while Berlusconi always believed that something good was waiting for him just round the corner — and, for decades, there was.

Berlusconi never had to climb Disraeli’s greasy pole to become Italy’s prime minister. When the moment came in 1994, Berlusconi simply went on his three television channels to call for mass support for his brand-new Forza Italia party, which he readily obtained from a frightened electorate. All the moderate parties had collapsed, and a takeover by the Communists, who had renamed themselves the Democratic Party of the Left, seemed imminent.

The cause of this chaos was the Mani Pulite investigative campaign started by Antonio di Pietro, a then-unknown prosecutor who used Italy’s unique and abusive system of “preventive detention” — which allows prosecutors to imprison people without any evidence, ostensibly to fight organised crime — to lock up politicians and make them talk. Di Pietro was soon imitated by other prosecutors across the country: by the end of 1993, more than 4,000 elected officials at every level of government had been investigated or remained under investigation, with others released only if they denounced a higher-level official or major business figure.

Because suspects could be re-arrested once the original time limit had expired, a number of prominent politicians and businessmen killed themselves in prison — including, in July 1993, Gabriele Cagliari, the head of the ENI oil company, Italy’s largest enterprise. This was a great shock to an already demoralised political and business establishment. Everyone at the top knew Cagliari personally, as I did myself (I went with him to Leningrad, as it then was, to negotiate with mayor Sobchak and his German-speaking foreign affairs director Vladimir Putin).

It was in this context that Berlusconi founded Forza Italia. A few months later, on 11 May 1994, he won enough seats in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate to form a government. At first there was promise: it tried to initiate liberalising reforms of Italy’s highly deformed state-directed economy. But before it had made much progress, Berlusconi fell from power. What was left of Italy’s political and business establishment could not accept that the upstart, incurably lower-middle-class Berlusconi was the country’s political leader — and by January 1995, he was intrigued out of office, with president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro engineering the defection of some of Berlusconi’s new allies.

There was no new general election because Scalfaro contrived a regrouping of parties that formed a new government under the technocrat Lamberto Dini. But Berlusconi’s party faithful remained in control of regional and local authorities across Italy, and its parliamentary votes were still needed. This yielded real power, which was often used to favour Berlusconi’s widespread business interests, but also to promote the liberalisation of Italy’s state-heavy economy. It eventually yielded tangible benefits, including the transformation of the decrepit money-losing Poste Italiane into an efficient modern service that is still present in every village.

It was not, however, until June 2001 that Berlusconi had enough votes to be made prime minister again and form Italy’s longest serving government since the Fifties. Over the next five years, the country’s economy was further liberalised, and its defence strategy, particularly after 9/11, strengthened. Even before then, under the influence of Francesco Cossiga — who was a real security expert while variously serving as interior minister, prime minister and president — Italy had taken firm measures in response to its own Red Brigades domestic terrorists. But Berlusconi’s decidedly pro-American and pro-Israel stance induced him to do even more, palpably strengthening the government’s resolve to prevent, and not just “fight”, terrorism like every other country. The result, 22 years later, is that while Italy’s Muslim population has continued to increase and its borders remain porous, not a single person has been wounded, let alone killed, by an Islamist terrorist on Italian soil since 9/11.

Suggested reading

MeToo was no match for bunga bunga

By Mary Harrington

This was the Berlusconi that I dealt with in those post-9/11 years. Not Berlusconi the energetic playboy, who at different times kept an entire harem of young girls to be made available to visiting political leaders who were so inclined, as most were; not Berlusconi the businessman, who continued to watch over his many different businesses while managing state affairs; but rather Berlusconi the industrial executive who had learned that sometimes the chief executive must engage with the most minute details to do his job — and there was nothing facile or irresponsible about that Berlusconi.

In many ways, his final government between 2008 and 2011 was a tale of personal decline, culminating in the peculiar circumstances of his downfall. He was neither deposed by a cabal of rival party leaders nor by the treachery of members of his coalition, but by his own minister of the treasury and Italy’s president. To avoid Greece’s fate, Italy had to raise taxes just enough to persuade investors that it would control its public spending. But Berlusconi refused. In fact, he refused to look even at the numbers his finance minister was proffering; he was then in his maximum harem phase, with a dozen young girls housed in a luxury dormitory from which they were ferried to attend his after-dinner entertainments.

After that, his leadership waned, never really recovering even after he gave up his harem to marry a new wife. By the time he died on Monday morning, Berlusconi had led several lives, mostly rather well, and always in great part successful.

Outside Italy, meanwhile, the Romeo who told one biographer “Think of how many women there are out there who would like to go to bed with me, but don’t know it”, and reportedly called Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lard-arse”, is immortalised in Bunga-Bunga, a Covent Garden restaurant serving metre-long pizzas.

It is an achievement, I suppose, to have been the epicentre of a sex scandal so epoch-defining and internationally notorious as to have provided the name for a restaurant that isn’t even in your own country. The term “bunga bunga” was reportedly introduced to the world by Ruby Ruacori, real name Karima El Mahroug. Berlusconi was accused of paying El Mahroug for sex in 2010, when she was just 17; El Mahroug claimed it was a lap-dancing game, in which the winner got to have sex with Berlusconi.

The events mesmerised the press, nationally and internationally. The details were juicy, the settings opulent, the men powerful, and the girls pretty. The tabloids feasted. But could this larger-than-life figure reach such prominence today? Though Peak Bunga was barely more than a decade ago, the stories feel sepia-toned, as though they belong to a different age.

We’ve been through the looking-glass at least twice since then: first, the Great Populist Earthquake of 2016, then Covid, and all their respective derangement syndromes. Along the way, we seemingly abandoned the sinking ship of tolerance and shared values altogether, in a flotilla of quarrelsome social-media lifeboats.

Somewhere in there was #MeToo. There was Epstein. We swapped headlines for clickbait. Politics now comes pre-marinaded in competitive victimhood. An out-of-context video clip can trigger international social media meltdown. And in this dyspeptic climate, there probably is less political bandwidth for uncritically lionising the priapic, piratical, rule-bending alpha-male mafioso type than there was in the Age of Bunga.

Officially at least, modern politics runs on rules, procedures, and meticulous attention to everyone’s feelings. So is his death, as one internet mourner put it, “the end of an era”?

Well. Public mores have, perhaps, shifted somewhat. But have the underlying patterns that shape how sex, money, and power interact shifted too? While we may have declared, officially at least, that we are no longer at home to Mr Toxic Masculinity, it’s far from obvious that men have stopped wanting to be around attractive young women. Nor is there much evidence that male power and status are any less magnetic to women than they have been at any other point in the long history of hypergamy. And nor has the inevitable resulting confluence between high-status men and young, nubile women grown any less asymmetrical in terms of raw power. So whatever we may wish to tell ourselves about how #MeToo changed everything on this front, the reality is: #MeToo changed very little.

More from this author

Why Gen Z prefers dogs to babies

By Mary Harrington

It’s true that there is a Berlusconi type: men (they are always men) of prodigious energy and appetite, boundless and infuriating charisma, and a cheerful indifference to the rules. The type, perhaps mercifully for the rest of us, is relatively rare – but Berlusconi is far from unique. Back in 1998, there was Bill Clinton: wildly charismatic, ferociously on the make, awash in rumours of perjury and nepotism — and, famously, lying about sexual doings with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Britain’s foremost contemporary exemplar of the type is the also charismatic and priapic Boris Johnson, who survived his own sex scandal only to leave No. 10 over that of Chris Pincher. In a 2003 Spectator interview with Berlusconi, Johnson betrays the wide-eyed admiration of a senpai for his sensei: marvelling at the energy, hospitality and sheer opulent extra-ness of this “balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire”, whom he describes as “the fizziest old dog you have ever seen”. Game, we might say, recognises game.

In turn, when such men become game themselves, their hunters usually lead with sexual wrong-doing. The accusations didn’t stick to Clinton, and only partially stuck to Johnson. But another of the same type, the epicentre of many post-Bunga political derangement syndromes, is now wrangling his own intensely politicised sex scandal: Donald Trump. In 2018, rumours emerged that Stephanie Clifford, real name Stormy Daniels, had been paid $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair. (There were also rumours of a “pee tape”, of which the less said the better.) The allegations have since cross-pollinated with a flurry of others, all of which add up to a miasmic impression of general dodginess and yet another indictment (or, to Trump supporters, banana-republic-style persecution of a feared political enemy).

Suggested reading

What kind of woman rides the New York subway?

By Kat Rosenfield

But as these big beasts age, we might be tempted to think their time is past. Berlusconi is on his way to his “fascistic” (according to Vanity Fair) mausoleum. The Orange Man is in the mire. Even Britain’s own pound-shop Alpha, Boris Johnson, has left Parliament. And the times really have changed: in 2018, Monica Lewinsky resurfaced, reframing her previous statements about a “consensual” affair in the #MeToo language of “authority, station, and privilege”.

But it doesn’t follow from this that young, pretty women are any safer today. It hardly seems likely that the corridors of power are any less stuffed with rich, entitled, horny men than they ever were, just because Harvey Weinstein got a punishment beating. Nor does it seem much more likely than before #MeToo that a woman will automatically get redress, should they find themselves in a sticky situation with such a man. Consider, for example, the recent fall from grace of Observer journalist Nick Cohen. Cohen is, to be clear, not a classic Berlusconi type; he was, however, the subject of numerous complaints, over a great many years, from female colleagues about sexually inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing was ever done – until campaigning barrister Jolyon Maugham identified Cohen as an enemy on Maugham’s pet issue of transgender rights, and set out to collate the rumours about Cohen. The paper apologised, following his departure, for ignoring the allegations so long.

The lesson is bleak. If a lower status woman accuses a higher status man of sexual impropriety, few will pay much attention – except that man’s political enemies. And the greater the power differential (as, for example, that of children trafficked to Epstein Island, seeking redress against billionaires and politicos), the more likely a horny plutocrat’s horniness will go unjudged and un-criticised.

Silvio Berlusconi left behind two ex-wives, five children, and a 33-year-old girlfriend. It seems implausible that such a rampantly oversexed man got all the way to his seventies before suddenly developing a taste for “bunga-bunga”. So why did his appetites take so long to cause a scandal? Well, Berlusconi was, by his own lights, someone whose modus operandi turned less on rules and procedures than on webs of friendship, loyalty, power-broking and obligation. He was upfront about this, saying of his convoluted business interests “If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest.”

We can perhaps catch a glimpse of this network of interests, via the relationship between Berlusconi and the half-English, one-time showgirl Nicole Minetti, another central figure in Bunga-gate. After appearing on Berlusconi’s TV show ‘Scorie’ in 2007, Minetti trained as a dental assistant, later helping to repair two of Berlusconi’s teeth after someone threw a marble statuette of Milan cathedral at him in 2009. The following year, Minetti was picked, age 25, as a Lombardy candidate for Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party, despite having no political experience, and was placed on Lombardy’s regional council a few months later. A couple of years after that, in 2013, Minetti was convicted of procuring minors for sex at Berlusconi’s notorious parties. During the trial, wire-tapped tapes appeared to show Berlusconi promising Minetti a seat in Parliament.

Suggested reading

Hag feminism is the future

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy

The most likely explanation of Berlusconi’s evading the Bunga Police for so long, then, is that despite decades of efforts to catch him breaking rules against (among others) drug trafficking, tax fraud, mafia links, bribery, and abuse of office, his carefully-crafted network of interests preferred to keep him in situ. We can only speculate as to what changed circa 2010, to inspire his enemies to turn bunga-bunga against him, but one thing should be clear: the exploitation of a prostituted child was the least of anyone’s concerns.

Some cases don’t even get as far as the one against Berlusconi. Clinton emerged largely untouched from the Lewinsky scandal. And when, in 2019, seven women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of sexually inappropriate behaviour, precisely nothing happened – #MeToo notwithstanding – except that supporters went in to bat for him. We can of course make no inferences about the truth or otherwise of the allegations. But it should be clear enough that “Believe Women” has a great many qualifiers, of which the foremost is “when it’s politically expedient to do so”.

What is the lesson, then, for those women young and beautiful enough to find themselves courted by (or attracted to) charismatic and powerful men? It’s a bleak one: nobody cares if you get hurt. Even those women who avoid being treated as wholly disposable, but build careers and their own power-bases in the shadow of such men, may find themselves pitilessly exposed once inconvenient. Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years. And while Berlusconi contested every allegation, receiving a final acquittal last February, Nicole Minetti was jailed for five years in 2013. No equivalent efforts were made to appeal her sentence.

And should you find yourself used and discarded by a man with more power than you, the only way you will find redress is in being used again, most likely by another man with more power than you. Only this time it’ll be as a weapon. And #MeToo counts for nothing, in this mix, unless you were groped by a Republican. I wish I had a more upbeat message, but the cold truth is this: if you attract the attention of men with big appetites and bigger bank balances, and you don’t want to be used either as a sex toy or political weapon, heed the medieval proverb. “She who sups with the devil should use a long spoon.”

Many of the elements of Berlusconismo were already present in that first campaign to become prime minister: Berlusconi’s larger-than-life persona, his unscrupulous use of his media empire to propel himself onto the political stage, his proto-populist marketing-style approach to politics. Yet, for several years, as far I was concerned, Berlusconi was little more than an annoying interruption between episodes of my favourite TV shows.

This changed in the final years of high school, when I became involved in Left-wing politics. One of the first things I learned was that being Left-wing in late-Nineties Italy meant being against Berlusconi. Even though I didn’t realise it at the time, what I was being exposed to was perhaps one Berlusconi’s most toxic legacies: the fact that, by then, the Italian Left had come to define itself almost exclusively in opposition to Berlusconi — as anti-Berlusconismo.

This changed, briefly, with the advent of the anti-globalisation movement. The horizon of Left-wing politics was extended beyond national borders (and beyond Berlusconi) to embrace — in our naïve vision at least — the entire planet. There were much bigger threats than Berlusconi looming out there: neoliberal globalisation, transnational corporations, free-trade agreements, and global financial institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

That movement culminated in the massive demonstrations that were held against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 — one of the largest protests in Western Europe’s recent history, and one of the bloodiest. It culminated in violent clashes with, and brutal repression by, the security forces, and in the fatal shooting of 23-year old anarchist Carlo Giuliani by the police. For everyone on the Left, and especially for those who had witnessed first-hand the violence in Genoa — including myself — the blame for those tragic events fell on one person: Silvio Berlusconi, who had won the elections for the second time just a few months earlier.

As the anti-globalisation movement waned during Berlusconi’s second term in office between 2001 and 2006 — the longest served by any Italian leader since the Second World War — Italian Left-wing politics once again came to be defined by anti-Berlusconismo, though for a few years the latter overlapped with opposition to the war in Iraq (for several years, Italy was the third-largest contingent of the US-led coalition). In 2008, after a two-year centre-left government led by Romano Prodi, Berlusconi was elected as prime minister again. By the time the euro crisis hit in 2010, he had been in power for almost a decade. Meanwhile, anti-Berlusconismo had metastasised into a political obsession: if only he could be removed from the equation, everything would be fine.

This came to a head in late 2011, when a financial crisis forced Berlusconi to resign. Within hours, a large crowd had gathered in front of the Quirinal Palace — the official residence of the President of Italy, where Berlusconi went to tender his resignation — to celebrate his departure. As someone who had grown estranged with Italian Left-wing politics in the previous years, the whole thing struck me as odd. I was no fan of the man. But even accepting the official narrative of events — that the crisis had been the result of financial markets punishing Berlusconi for his poor handling of the economic crisis — I couldn’t see how an elected government being forced to step down by financial speculators could be a cause for celebration — especially for those on the Left.

The short-sightedness of the celebrations became tragically obvious when Italian president Giorgio Napolitano appointed Mario Monti, a former European Union commissioner and international adviser to Goldman Sachs, to form a “technical government”, which proceeded to administer a devastating austerity “cure”. In a way, the whole affair exposed the myopia of anti-Berlusconismo. By obsessively focusing on Berlusconi and his threat to democracy, the Italian Left had ended up ignoring — or worse, embracing — the more significant structural trends that had been weakening Italian democracy for the past 20 years and more: the gradual erosion of sovereignty at the hands of the EU and later the euro; the growing power of the technocratic apparatuses of the state, such as the Bank of Italy and the President of the Republic; the undermining of Italy’s strategic interests by its supposed allies, exemplified by the Nato-led attack on Libya in 2011.

Suggested reading

The capitalists are revolting over China

By Thomas Fazi

While Berlusconi didn’t explicitly push back against any of these things — he was, after all, staunchly Atlanticist and pro-European — he did try, though never with enough conviction, to strike a balance between Italy’s international obligations and his vision of the national interest. This was particularly apparent in his foreign policy, through which Berlusconi tried to assert a relative degree of autonomy and independence. Aware of Italy’s dependency on foreign energy imports, Berlusconi won favourable gas and oil deals by cultivating strong friendships with the leaders of energy-producing countries: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and, most notably, Vladimir Putin.

In 2008, for example, Berlusconi signed a “friendship treaty” with Libya, promising $5 billion over 20 years to compensate for Italy’s colonial occupation in the early 20th century; in exchange, Libya agreed to sign off on lucrative energy contracts and to prevent unauthorised immigrants from travelling to Italy. Before that, he had tried to talk Bush, with whom he was on good terms, out of invading Iraq. Similarly, he backed joint energy projects between Gazprom in Russia and the Italian energy company Eni at a time when the EU was pushing for less dependence on Russian gas. Berlusconi also criticised the American missile defence project, the eastward expansion of Nato, and the West’s support for Kosovo’s independence for being “provocations of Russia”.

“Our relationship with Berlusconi is complex,” wrote Elizabeth Dibble, the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Rome, in a 2009 cable. “He is vocally pro-American and has helped address our interest on many levels in a manner and to a degree that the previous government was unwilling or unable to do.” Yet, the diplomat noted, there were other areas where Berlusconi “seems determined to be best friends with Russia, sometimes in direct opposition to American, and even European Union, policy”. Once the euro crisis hit, Berlusconi also tried to resist, to a degree, the aggressive austerity policies demanded by the EU and Germany, locking horns with Merkel, Sarkozy and Brussels on more than one occasion.

All of which meant that, by 2011, a consensus had formed on both sides of the Atlantic that Berlusconi had to go. In 2015, former Spanish prime minister José Luis Zapatero recounted to the Italian daily La Stampa the events that took place at the G20 in 2011, just a few days before Berlusconi’s resignation: “I will never forget what I saw at the G20 meeting in Cannes… Berlusconi and Tremonti [Berlusconi’s finance minister] were under immense pressure to accept an IMF bailout. But they staunchly refused. Shortly afterwards, I heard Monti’s name mentioned in the corridors. I found it very strange. Was it a coup d’état? I don’t know, all I can say is that the proponents of austerity wanted to decide Italy’s economic policies in place of the government.”

Suggested reading

The rise of Europe's military austerity

By Thomas Fazi

Indeed, over the years, it has become apparent that the financial crisis behind Berlusconi’s fall wasn’t simply caused by financial markets — but by the European Union itself. As even the Financial Times acknowledged, the ECB under Mario Draghi “forced Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favour of unelected Mario Monti”, by discontinuing the central bank’s Italian bond purchases — thus deliberately causing interest rates to rise above safety levels — and by making the ousting of Berlusconi the precondition for further ECB support.

Regardless of what one thinks of Berlusconi, it’s hard to imagine a more disturbing scenario than a supposedly “independent” and “apolitical” central bank resorting to monetary blackmail in order to expel an elected government from office and impose its own political agenda. Yet the evidence suggests that it was a monetary coup d’état that took place in Italy in 2011. The consequences would become tragically apparent in the following years: Italy has essentially been put into “controlled administration” by Brussels and Frankfurt — and, increasingly, Washington. The kind of relative autonomy that Berlusconi had succeeded in carving out for his country is today a distant memory. Today, blind obedience to the Euro-Atlantic status quo is firmly expected of Italy’s governments, lest they want to face the consequences of stepping out of line — a point that Meloni understands all too well.

None of this means that we should glorify Berlusconi, of course. All the charges laid against him over the years — his murky business deals with shady characters tied to the Mafia, his sex scandals, his patronage of the country’s political elites, his unscrupulous use of his media empire, his use of politics to advance his own economic interests — are, after all, true, and very serious. And whenever he had to choose between the country’s interests and his personal ones — over Libya, for example — he always ended up choosing the latter. Yet, there is little doubt that Berlusconi, for better or worse, was Italy’s last statesman. Despite being dismissed as a threat to democracy, it was his departure that really opened the door to Italy’s post-democratic, and therefore post-political, turn. Since he left office, our elected governments have morphed into mere implementers of foreign diktats — and anti-Berlusconismo did nothing to stop it.

The response, as one might imagine, was mixed. On the one hand, Patrik Schumacher, principal of the major architecture practice Zaha Hadid Architects, was irate. “The Venice ‘Architecture’ Biennale is mislabelled and should stop laying claim to the title of architecture,” he wrote. Yet other critics applauded the radical change of direction. “Artists and designers have occupied these spaces in a much more convincing way than usual,” wrote Tom Wilkinson.

Exhibiting architecture is tricky: you reduce these big, expensive outdoor structures into smaller indoor ones. And how exactly? Models? Photographs? Drawings? Films? All of the above? Why would you even bother? It is an impossible but necessary game. And yet it is something that we have been playing for as long as architecture itself; so long in fact, that it is architecture.

Of course, the palazzi of the Grand Canal remain untouched, and this may seem like an esoteric, avant-garde kerfuffle that is best ignored. However, even if you are a hopeless trad, the absence of architecture at the Venice Biennale is an unsettling development, which reveals much about the predicament of today’s creative classes.

Suggested reading

Christopher Wren: godfather of the technocrats

By Wessie du Toit

Consider the German pavilion. Not only does it lack any trace of real architecture, but its limited rhetorical force is further diluted by the fact that this has been done before. For the 1993 Art Biennale, Hans Haacke and Nam June Paik ripped up the marble floor of this kicked-about building and stuck up the words “Germania” on the back wall. Just after reunification, the artists were using the pavilion designed by Ernst Haiger, a Third Reich architect, to call into question German expansion in an admittedly unsubtle way. We got it. Today, by contrast, it isn’t immediately obvious what this round of petulant floorboard extraction is meant to symbolise. Boo Nazis again?

If so, then what explains the Israeli pavilion? And the Swiss one? Clever reasons are given for this strategy of non-representation: the Germans want to concentrate on activist community-building on the southern Venetian island of Giudecca, although whether the poor Giudeccans, who seem to have a thriving community, had any say in the matter is not disclosed. The Israelis wanted to show that their modernist pavilion is a product of a machine age. The Swiss wanted to discuss “neighbourliness”. (No one stopped to consider how you’d feel if your neighbour was displaying a plan of your house in theirs. Neighbourliness is not the word you’d use when phoning the police.)

But the emptiness endures: a questionable aesthetic strategy made all the more dubious given that the really empty pavilion is the Russian one, a symbol of their pariah status and a chilling reminder of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The commissioning cycle is long, of course, and curators can be hostage to fortune, but in comparison to this very real emptiness, the contrived desolation of other pavilions seems churlish and easy to misinterpret. Nothing can be more misunderstood than nothing.

This nothingness reflects a crisis of confidence in the creative classes, prompted by the populist moment of 2016. For once, Britain has led the way. In 2018, the British pavilion for the Biennale was empty. The curators Adam Caruso and Peter St. John made it clear that this was an articulation of what they saw as the cultural crisis prompted by Brexit: it was a kind of mute tantrum; a throwing up of the hands in the air. Far from being an isolated moment, this crisis has spread from nation to nation and for good reason.

Meanwhile, the study of architecture has become far more popular even as construction has become less likely. According to the Architects’ Council of Europe, the number of architects grew by 24% between 2008 and 2018. During that time, studying architecture became far more expensive, especially given that courses often last between five and seven years. Whatever it is we are witnessing in the pavilions of the Giardini, it has been conceived by architects who have spent more money on their education than those who exhibited in Venice over a decade ago.

The industry into which they are passing offers little reward. Although it may not seem like it, we are designing and building less. Construction output across the EU is currently running at about 80% of the levels seen before the banking collapse of 2007/8 which, in terms of housing, was just about keeping pace with demand. The net result is that the number of architects working in badly paid academic jobs has dramatically increased. Withdrawn from the act of building, architects have turned to critiquing the very idea of architecture itself. (The Czech pavilion offered a self-help guide on how to deal with the difficulties of the architecture profession, with “just leave” as one of the options.)

Suggested reading

The heroic failure of Cumbernauld

By Daniel Kalder

“Am I out of touch?” says Principal Skinner in The Simpsons. “No, it’s the children who are wrong!” he answers himself. Architects, and the architectural culture which Venice is the acme of, follow the same trajectory. The more extreme end of environmental activism — the Extinction Rebellion crowd — has found a home in the architecture profession. A sense of dislocation from the concerns of the public, and the sheer volume of materials that the architect must deploy, means that a need for increased care in allocating resources has turned into a complete abnegation of architecture. It is quite common to hear architects, whose livelihoods have historically been based on building new things, say that any new building is bad because of the climate crisis.

Yet emptiness is not the only strategy of non-representation going on throughout the Biennale pavilions. Elsewhere, there’s an odd fixation with the processes of eating and shitting. The Spanish have surveyed the food industry (not its architecture, the industry itself); the Dutch have explored plumbing and the Finnish toilets. The effect is to create an analogy between the body and the building. This mapping of construction onto consumption leaves a note of slightly scatological revulsion at our embeddedness in capitalist modes of production. (The extraordinary cartoons on the wall of the Dutch pavilion make the analogy between plumbing and banking explicit.)

Suggested reading

The socialist case for Trad Architecture

By Aaron Bastani

Perhaps because of this, Schumacher suggests that the Venice Biennale may be conceiving its own demise. I think this is overly dramatic, and correctives to the trend towards nothingness exist. One further feature of this year’s Biennale is that firms such as GMP Architekten, one of Germany’s finest, made their own off-site pavilion (a fascinating exploration of their renovation of civic halls). Other ventures and venues are already creating a fringe, outside the official event. Furthermore, by dint of the fact that pavilions are commissioned by different bodies and there is in fact a competition at its core, there is the chance they will once again engage with the pressing needs of society. The Biennale can become an organ for helping architectural culture out of its self-regarding impasse, freeing it from its obsession with closure and emptiness.

It is outside Venice, though, that one finds architecture’s ruthlessly applied redemption. On my way home from the city, I visited an astonishing public hospital in the dockland area of Cadix in Antwerp, built by a developer-led consortium but designed by the architects Robbrecht and Daem. The process by which the building was created was often self-confounding, the architects were often unable to speak directly to the end-user, the hospital trust, during the 10 years it took to build. However, the building they have created is exceptional, all the more humane for its moments of strange compromise; the architects bloodied but unbowed after a decade of delivery. It is, in other words, considerably better than nothing.

Once in a generation, a real-life fairy tale has the power to make you believe in providence again, in an eerie order to the universe. Last night, Napoli won the Serie A for the third time in its history, sparking Bacchanalian festivities and chromatic uniformity. Everything is blue: wigs, actual hair, bread. “There will be a spike in the birth-rate in nine months’ time,” shouts a Neapolitan friend to me over the din of plastic fog horns, “and they’ll be calling the babies Victor and Kvara.”

But this fairy tale isn’t just a story about the sporting triumph of an underdog. Perhaps its most extraordinary feature is the way it chimes so perfectly with what Naples, as a city, has become.

The sporting story, of course, is astonishing enough. Over the summer, Napoli had shipped out its star players: the Senegal defender Kalidou Koulibaly was sold to Chelsea, and the Spanish midfielder, Fabián Ruiz, to Paris Saint Germain. The two top scorers in the club’s history, Dries Mertens and Lorenzo Insigne, also both moved on. Coming into this season, Napoli was weak.

But then Neapolitans have always felt like Davids against Goliaths: compared to the rich cities and teams of Italy’s industrialised north, Naples can feel poor and down-at-heel. The team and its fans are often taunted by rivals for being “terroni” (“southern peasants”) plagued by cholera. As a famous Pino Daniele song goes, “Napule è ‘na carta sporca / E nisciuno se ne importa” (“Naples is a piece of dirty paper / and nobody cares”).

That, perhaps, is why Diego Maradona was so lionised in the city where he played from 1984 to 1991. He seemed to personify Naples in so many ways: he was a diminutive scamp (what they call, in Naples, a “scugnizzo”). He, too, was born on the wrong side of the tracks, but his naughtiness was never nastiness. In an era of often dour, defensive football, there was an exuberant spontaneity to the way he played the game. He was an imp, an artful dodger, canny and cool. And that’s how Neapolitans often see themselves. They are street-smart survivors. As one local proverb goes: “Ccà nisciuno è fesso” (“nobody here is a sucker”). They revel in their ability, despite it all, to get by. As Norman Lewis wrote in Naples ’44, “everyone improvises and adapts”.

This ability to serve as a fairground mirror in which a city can see and even laugh at itself is the exception in Italian football; almost all big cities have at least two teams (Lazio and Roma, Juventus and Torino, and so on). A team hated by half a city can never speak for the whole polis. But like Newcastle, Naples only has the one major team. Football here unites rather than divides.

In recent decades, however, the ways in which the football club most reflected the city was in its suffering. Napoli hadn’t won the Scudetto since 1990 with Maradona. It had gone bust and been relegated to Serie C, the Italian third division. And in that sense, the club chimed with a city that has often been portrayed as impoverished, even wretched. In his fictionalised account of Naples during the Allied occupation of the Second World War, Curzio Malaparte writes about the “squalid, dirty, starving Neapolitan crowd, dressed in rags” and their “ancient wisdom, nourished by pain”.

Centuries of writers have observed something similar — that Naples forces people to mislay their moral compass: Malaparte called it the city’s “melma”; Lewis wrote about “the Neapolitan quicksands”, a place where “the Middle Ages had returned to display all their deformities, their diseases, and their desperate trickeries”. Even today, one senses this city is deliberately dissolute or louche: the defiance of the law, even ordinary civility, is often brazen. Everywhere there is smashed glass between the cobbles. Dog shit is smeared across pavements. Graffiti, both beautiful and ugly, colours the stone. “The city would be very different,” Vincenzo De Simone, producer of the documentary Humans of Naples, tell me, “if the citizens loved Naples the city as much as they do Napoli the football team.”

But, understandably, there is great sensitivity about foreigners pointing out the dirt or the darkness. A few years ago, I was filming a history documentary about the city for Italian TV: the camera crew were 50 metres away, wanting a long shot as I strolled through a crowded market quoting the Marquis De Sade, who wrote about the “brutality”, “infamies” and “knives” of the Neapolitan “lazzaroni” (“lay-abouts”). The market-stall holders thought they were my own words and started first shouting over me, then jostling me angrily until the director ran in to rescue me.

Yet the point about Naples is that it’s a place of infinite contradictions. Everything you say about it, the precise opposite is also true. It can appear dystopian but is also renowned as a place of “cuccagna”, a wonderland of voluptuous goodness. Everyone who goes to Naples is warned about urchins and rogues, but this is the generous city where they invented the “suspended coffee”, where people who drink one coffee pay for two so that those who can’t afford won’t go without. This is a place teeming with life but constantly aware of death, not just because of the looming volcano that might obliterate everything in an instant. It’s all “Eros and Thanatos”, erotica and death. Even the city’s old name, Partenope, reminds you of seduction and dissolution: Partenope was one of the sirens who wooed Ulysses and, having taken her own life, washed up on the shores of the river Sebeto, where the city is now found.

These contradictions are very evident as you walk around the steep, narrow streets. Everything appears to be on show. The laundry is strung from balconies. In the famous “bassi”, the ground floor flats in the Neapolitan banlieues, you often see right into someone’s living room and glimpse an old woman ironing in her nightgown, or a man in his pants watching the box. But so much is hidden, too: there are hundreds of square kilometres of Napoli underground, all the catacombs and tunnels. It’s a place of raucous, performative shouting, but also of silences and secrets.

Suggested reading

The football hooligans fighting for Ukraine

By David Patrikarakos

That’s why, of course, it makes such a beguiling backdrop to books and films. Recently there has been a resurgence in global interest in the city thanks to the success of Elena Ferrante’s novels, Paolo Sorrentino’s films and the TV series Gomorrah and Mare Fuori. The setting works because there is an explosive energy to the claustrophobia. Naples is one of the most densely populated cities in the world; you’re permanently, as Pino Daniele sang, “int’e viche miezo all’ate” (in the alleys amongst the others).

The other thing for which the city is famous is its chansonniers. From Libero Bovio to Nicola Salerno, Renato Carosone to Pino Daniele, 99 Posse to Geolier, the city has always produced troubadours and folk singers, invariably writing laments about heartbreak, injustice and what Daniele called the city’s “sole amaro”, its “bitter sun”. But the city’s music is a rich infusion of jazz, ska, rap, hip-hop and more. One of my favourite musicians from the city, Enzo Avitabile, said in De Simone’s documentary that Naples “wants to be immersed in the knowledge of other cultures, to be contaminated by other populations, but at the same time to maintain its own identity”. In that sense, the city often seems an example of multiculturalism gone right: constantly welcoming outsiders but, in Avitabile’s words, with such a “strong root” that “Napolitanità” remains intact.

One might legitimately wonder, then, how this extraordinary and contradictory city could ever be reflected in a 21st-century football team. Perhaps the answer is because Naples has, for millennia, absorbed outsiders; the multi-cultural mix of modern football suits Napoli more than other teams. Lewis wrote of “how uneuropean, how oriental” Naples is, and the club’s talent scouts have tended to look East. This season, some of the stand-out players have been the Macedonian Elif Elmas, the South Korean Kim Min-jae, the Slovakian Stanislav Lobotka, the Polish Piotr Zieliński, the Kosovan Amir Rrahmani and the Georgian Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.

But Victor Osimhen is a major part of the story, too: the Nigerian striker suffered multiple facial fractures in a match against Inter Milan in November 2021, and has worn a black facial mask since returning to action. He no longer requires it for medical purposes, but whether because of its talismanic value or for its psychological reassurance, he never steps onto the pitch without it. The result is that he looks like a cross between Zorro and the famous Neapolitan character from the Commedia dell’Arte, Pulcinella (the black-masked “Punch”). In a city that sings obsessively about the sun, the guy even has a yellow circle dyed into his black hair: “like he’s captured the Naples’s sun,” as one song goes.

Then there’s Kvaratskhelia, the Georgian winger. He’s a bit of a scruffy scamp — unshaven with socks around his ankles — and reminds many of George Best, zig-zagging inside and outside defenders. “The style of play,” says Gianluca Monti, Napoli correspondent for La Gazzetta dello Sport, “is very similar to the city itself: Osimhen is very direct, straight to the heart, and Kvaratskhelia embodies the fantasy for which this city is famous.”

They blew away the top teams in Europe, hammering Liverpool 4-1 at home, and Ajax 6-1 away, in the Champions League. “This is Brazil, not Napoli,” said the Italian commentator on one occasion. The team beat Juventus, their arch-rivals, 5-1 (the exact same score as when they beat Juventus in the Supercoppa back in 1990). Every statistic and number was mined for its symbolism: the fact that it’s 33 years since the last title was linked to the earthly years of Jesus, allowing one banner to make a pun between “Crist” and “Chist” (“this”). Many in the city see this victory as divinely ordained.

Suggested reading

Does Ryan Reynolds understand football?

By Jonathan Wilson

It’s a truism that modern football fills a God-shaped hole in many peoples’ lives, but in Naples they take it further. During the Scudetto celebrations, I met a priest, Carmine, with his dog-collar unbuttoned; we started talking about the profound correlation between religion and football in Naples and he, slightly sheepishly, showed me a song he had written in which Osimhen rhymed with “ammen”.

But as well as reflecting the city back to itself, this team has also freed it, perhaps only briefly, of one of its most ancient traits. Naples is famous for its superstitions, for its attachment to magical, talismanic objects such as chili peppers or San Gennaro’s blood. There is a public belief that certain people — the iettatore or “jinxer” — have the power to bring bad luck. Even those who scorn superstition are wary of it: the Neapolitan actor and playwright, Eduardo De Filippo, once quipped: “Being superstitious is for idiots, but not to be superstitious brings bad luck.”

A large part of Neapolitan life is an attempt to nudge good fortune your way, or to interpret what the fates have in store. And the most absolute command in the city is that you never tempt fate by celebrating a victory before the final whistle. That would jinx it. But this spring, weeks prior to this Scudetto triumph, Naples was already celebrating. The team’s points advantage was so huge that banners proclaiming their third championship went up in March. It’s hard to emphasise how un-Neapolitan this was. “It’s as if we’ve smashed a millenarian taboo,” says Mimmo, a Neapolitan friend, “as if we’ve smashed this burden of superstition. We’ve defeated our corrosive, ancestral fears.”

The city has also, says Mimmo, been liberated “from the spectre of Maradona”. Since his death in 2020, the Argentine has become a religious figure in Naples, with his own shrines throughout the city. Since he wore the number 10 shirt, “D10” is placed under most portraits (it deliberately looks like “Dio”, or God). In the stadium, there’s a permanent banner calling him “the King”. But this team has finally moved beyond his brilliant, but cumbersome character. “This championship is the victory of democracy,” says Monti. In this team, there is no monarch surrounded by lesser mortals: “the whole team is one of equals.” It is noticeable that among all the players’ faces hanging on banners around the city, there are also the faces of the team’s most humble servants, such as the long-serving kit-man Tommy Starace.

I slowly walk away from the raucous carnival towards the seafront suburb of Posillipo. From here you can see the whole gulf of Naples, with Vesuvius and Capri in the distance. There are so many fireworks going off that night is turned into day. The original name of this suburb — Pausilypon — means literally “the cessation of woe”. And that, I guess, is what this season has offered: an interlude of sheer joy. Because despite all its notoriety for noir, the city has suddenly been illuminated by a script that seems to defy the cynicism and predictability of modern football.

Let me cite a case from my adopted country, Italy. For more than a century after its achievement in 1861, the unification of Italy was generally presented as a triumph of liberalism and constitutionalism, a great step forward in the emanci­pation and democratisation of a major European people. However, since the late Nineties, following the end of the Cold War and a general tendency in the West for nations to re-examine their founding presumptions, this notion has been constantly challenged and previously submerged counter narratives have come to the fore. In the south of Italy, proponents of the Neo-Bourbonist movement began to present the collapse of the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (43,000 square miles, ruled by a Bourbon dynasty), as an act of imperial aggression by the north of Italy on the south.

In the run-up to the 150^th anniversary of unification in 2011, the debate became heated and the Neo-Bourbonists made inroads. In 2008, a group of supporters of the Two Sicilies Committee unveiled a memorial stone at the huge Fenestrelle Fort in the mountains of Piedmont, northern Italy. It read:

Between 1860 and 1861 thousands of soldiers of the army of the Two Sicilies who refused to repudiate their king and country were imprisoned in Fenestrelle. Few returned home, most died from hardship and privation. The few who know bow their heads.

Speaking at the unveiling, Duccio Mallamaci, local leader of the Party of the South, compared the Piedmontese fort to Auschwitz and claimed that 8,000 men had died there of hunger and cold. In all, he claimed, 40,000 southern prisoners were exterminated in the north.

The fact that the authorities allowed the stone to be placed would suggest an acknowledgement of the truth of these claims. Scores of books have been published in recent years suggesting that the Bourbon kingdom was preferable to the modern Italian state, a model of intellectual openness and industrial achievement, in short not at all the backward, repressive regime described in the traditional narrative of the Risorgimento, the movement that led to unification. The end of the Bourbon monarchy, they claim, was followed by wholesale massacre of the kingdom’s citizens and decades of devastating asset-stripping, damaging the south in favour of the north.

In particular, in 2010, the journalist Pino Aprile’s book, Terroni, amounted to an impassioned denunciation of the whole Risorgimento process and the subse­quent treatment of the south. The book has been through more than thirty editions, reputedly selling hundreds of thousands of copies. When The Guardian published a list of the ten best books on Sicily, it ranked Terroni first, commenting: “Italy, [Aprile] argues, is not actually a unified country but a colonial project that the Savoy monarchy in Turin devised to pay off their war debts from fighting Austria… [T]his is a marvellous piece of research and a valuable catalogue of uncomfortable truths about the origins of southern Italy’s economic woes.”

While researching my own Risorgimento book, The Hero’s Way, I discovered that the word “genocide” creeps easily into this debate. At one dinner party I attended, a writer from the south spoke of a greater slaughter than the Holocaust, arousing the vigorous protest of a Jewish man present. On another occasion a professor of Italian literature assured me that Garibaldi, great champion of 19^th century liberalism, was little more than a cyni­cal if talented bandit, operating in line with the dictates of international freemasonry. Questioned, none of these people had read any serious historical accounts of the period, or biographies of those they criticised, but were nevertheless convinced that the traditional version of the Risorgimento was a lie. At another social occasion a Sicilian lawyer, in his seventies, confided that southern people were now long-resigned to being a colonised, subject people. The rhetoric is not unlike that used, say, by some members of the Scottish National Party: by speaking of resignation, one is justifying an eventual rebellion.

Suggested reading

The pantomime of pardoning witches

By Malcolm Gaskill

Married as I am to woman from the south whose family tend to share these revisionist views, I embarked on a project of reading. How else can one get to the truth? I soon came across three books dedicated to debunking the claims of the Neo-Bourbons; perhaps inevitably these are no more than elaborate exercises in fact checking. Nevertheless, they entirely demolish the narrative one finds in Terroni. Professor Alessandro Barbero specifically took on the claims about deaths at the Fenestrelle fort in I prigionieri dei Savoia. Over 378 pages, Barbero considers how the Italian government dealt with soldiers of the defeated Bourbon army who were not willing to serve in the Italian army.

Exactly 1186 prisoners were imprisoned at Fenestrelle in November 1860. Correspondence between prison and army officials describes the poor state of their health and laments the high level of hospitalisation required following their arrival: 178 soldiers were given hospital beds alongside regular Italian soldiers serving at the fort. As it turned out, the southern prisoners were held in Fenestrelle for less than three weeks. Five died. Again, correspondence is quoted indicating the efforts made to inform their families. The reader is struck by the meticulous bureaucracy surrounding the prisoners and the earnest, if sometimes heated exchanges between officials as to the exact nature of their responsibilities. There is no trace at all of any project of extermination or any systematic cruelty. There are no mass graves.

But the prisoners of Fenestrelle are only one detail in the broader claims of Neo-Bourbon revisionism. A far greater question is that of the thousands of briganti (brigands) who fought against the newly formed Italian government in the ex-territories of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies between 1861 and 1866. Neo-Bourbonists insist that far from being criminal, these men constituted a legitimate resistance movement that expressed the will of the people and could only eventually be crushed through a brutal strategy of concentration camps and mass executions. “Hundred of thousands [were imprisoned],” writes Aprile, “defined as brigands simply because they were southerners. If they were children they were precocious brigands; if they were women they were brigandesses, or wives or daughters of brigands, or relatives of brigands…all in respect of the law, of course, as with apartheid in South Africa”.

In 2019, the young southern historian Professor Carmine Pinto published a 500-page account of this long and complex conflict, followed in 2022 by a shorter work concentrating on the biographies of two of the war’s main protagonists. In brief, there had always been a tradition of banditry in the south, something successfully harnessed by the Bourbons after the Napoleonic invasion of Naples in 1799 when the brigands joined forces with royalists to resist the French. After his defeat in 1861, Bourbon king Francesco II tried to repeat this experience, encouraging the remnants of his army to ally with brigand bands and providing them with arms and money from his refuge in Rome. The brigand leaders seized on the situation to intensify their activities, which up to this point had been focused on kidnappings, theft and the collection of protection money. In 1863 alone there were 454 recorded kidnappings.

Suggested reading

The death of historical truth

By Jonathan Sumption

Towns were captured in Basilicata, Puglia and Calabria, and those siding with the Italian government were massacred. However, the alliance came apart, as traditional soldiers were appalled by the brigands’ cruelty and the brigands realised that the military support promised by the Bourbons was not going to materialise. From this point on the brigands’ activity was entirely criminal. Pinto methodically catalogues acts of atrocious violence, rape, castrations, decapitations and much more, pointing out that the brigands never had a political project, never attempted to redistribute land or wealth from the rich to the poor and never enjoyed widespread popular support, as Neo-Bourbonists claim. On the contrary, their most important allies were old aristocratic families who hoped for a return of the Bourbon monarchy in order to preserve their privileges, but did not wish to take the risk of openly opposing the new government.

However, the most illuminating aspect of these books is their account of the evolving reaction of the new Italian state. Elections in 1861 had returned a parliament in which southern candidates of the Right and Left took 163 of the 417 seats. Many of them had been supporting the cause of unification for decades. It was these southern deputies who called most urgently for the defeat of the brigands and who encouraged the govern­ment to assume draconian powers, something that many politicians from the north resisted until the introduction of the so-called Pica Law of August 1863, which remained in force until December 1865. This measure permitted the army to round up supporters of the brigands in temporary camps and to shoot anyone bearing arms against the Italian state. Those surrendering their arms would be spared. Some 12,000 people were arrested for the crime of “brigandry” in the first year of the law (not hundreds of thousands). Almost 11,000 trials led to 2,100 convictions, with more than half of the trials being resolved, as promised, in less than a month.

At the same time, combined groups of Italian soldiers and local National Guard militias worked together to fight the brigands, with the locals accounting for at least 50% of the force and proving the most determined to finish the job, often in a spirit of brutal vendetta. The government set up a fund to compensate citizens who had lost property or loved ones as a result of brigand activity and considerable rewards were offered to anyone betraying the brigands. There were wild public rejoicings as the various bands eventually surrendered, disintegrated, or were defeated in combat. That it was an ugly conflict no one disputes, with a death toll in the region of ten thousand on both sides of the conflict.

One comes away from these books with a sense that, however many mistakes it might have made, there was nothing evil or systematically predatory about the Italian government’s attempts to integrate the new nation and establish the kind of control over its territory that could guarantee the security of its citizens. Nor were these efforts made by one region of the country against another, but for the most part in a spirit of collaboration. Yet the desire for a simplistic polarizing version of the past seems irresistible. Our debates about history tend to boil down to a hunt for the guilty party; to nail yesterday’s villain is to empower one’s cause in the present. Despite all the fact-checking, the Neo-Bourbonist version of events flourishes.

Suggested reading

How to destroy a reputation

By Andrew Doyle

To return, then, to our initial question, does this shift in the narrative about Italy’s past, a shift occurring at the expense of the facts, indicate a shift of power, new winners and new losers? It is hard to think of the Neo-Bourbons as winners, since they do not seem to have a serious political project. The party Sud chiama nord which calls for greater autonomy for the south, received less than one per cent of the vote at the 2022 elections. On the other hand, the more the view that the south has been the victim of a tremendous injustice prevails, the more likely its people are to benefit from a flow of subsidies that often seem to take on a penitential flavour.

If this is at best a dubious victory, it’s not hard to spot the loser in this tale: the nation-state. The effect of Risorgi­mento revisionism has been to erode pride in the history of Italy as a state and to ques­tion its very legitimacy. Alternatively, you could say that an existing lack of pride made citizens receptive to propaganda that denigrated their national identity. Looked at this way, the beneficiaries are those large supranational organisations, particularly the EU, that seek to replace the nation-state, encouraging people to think of themselves as individual world-citizens in a global community, not as members of a nation, competing and collaborating with other nations. It seems unfortunate that this perhaps noble aspiration should make progress at the expense of historical truth.

The stone at Fenestrelle commemorating a massacre that never happened was testimony to a zeitgeist at odds with the facts. Italy, of course, is hardly the only victim. In so many contemporary conflicts, the feeling that one is on the “right side of history”, seems to justify a wilful blindness. History has no sides, right or wrong.

And yet, it’s impossible not to approach Qatar with a sense of unease. This is the first World Cup since 1934 to be hosted by a nation that has not previously played in it; why is Qatar so keen to be involved that it has spent an estimated $220 billion on staging the event?

The answer is timeless: hosting the World Cup has always been a political act. When Uruguay staged the first tournament in 1930, Juan Campisteguy’s government underwrote the costs of travelling teams because it believed the tournament would promote the country’s centenary of independence. The gamble paid off; Uruguay went on to beat Argentina 4-2 in the final.

This was nothing compared to what happened in Italy four years later. Mussolini was well-aware of the propagandistic potential of sport, often being photographed riding a horse or skiing. In 1933, when he met Engelbert Dollfuss at the beach resort of Riccione, he donned a pair of swimming trunks while the diminutive Austrian Chancellor wore a sober suit. “When you compete abroad,” Mussolini told Italian athletes, “the honour and sporting principle of the nation is entrusted to your muscles and above all your spirit.”

No doubt the Antwerp Olympics of 1920 were at the back of his mind, when the Italian athletes who turned up were a dishevelled bunch who sang the “Red Flag”. Twelve years later, they arrived in Los Angeles dressed in matching black shirts and singing “Giovinezza”, the hymn of the Italian Fascist Party. They went on to finish second in the medals table. Victories abroad, as Il Littorale noted as early as 1928, “were clear signs of racial superiority that are destined to reflect in many fields outside of sport”.

Whether Italy’s football coach throughout the Thirties, Vittorio Pozzo, was a Fascist remains contested, but he certainly benefited from the regime’s focus on muscular leadership. “The norms that govern the game,” he said, “impose the principles of authority, without which order cannot exist.” His side at the 1934 World Cup was brisk and physical and found referees benevolent. As the journalist Gianni Brera observed in his great history of Italian football, Louis Baert, the Belgian who oversaw the quarter-final against Spain, “behaved as if he were well-aware where the game was taking place”, while there were numerous rumours about meetings between Mussolini and the Swedish referee Ivan Eklind, who unusually refereed both Italy’s semi-final and the final.

More from this author

Viktor Orbán is football crazy

By Jonathan Wilson

Not that anybody in Italy much cared about the controversies, as Simon Martin’s Football and Fascism makes clear. In La Gazzetta della Sport, Bruno Roghi wrote of the national team as “little, gallant soldiers who fight for an idea that is greater than them”, while the Florentine Fascist weekly Il Bargello described the World Cup win as “the affirmation of an entire people, an indication of its virile and moral strength”.

It wasn’t, though, just about winning the World Cup. It was also about projecting the idea of Italy as a modern nation. There had been heavy investment in stadiums for a decade before the tournament. Fans from France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were subsidised to come to Italy. Tickets were printed on high-quality paper to encourage visitors to keep them, and the Fascist insignia they bore, as souvenirs. The Futurist artist Filippo Marinetti was commissioned to design a poster that focused on a powerful, thrusting figure in Italian kit and bore the fasces in one corner. Stamps produced for the tournament pursued a similar theme.

Foreign journalists were impressed, to the delight of the Italian media. “The spontaneous and heartfelt statements of our foreign colleagues,” Roghi wrote in La Gazzetta, “are more than sufficient to show Mussolini’s Italy — that was once little Italy of all improvisations and apologies — has organised the festival of football with the style, flexibility, precision, even the courtesy and meticulousness that indicated an absolute maturity and preparedness.” His response was extreme but not uncommon. It was a similar eagerness to show off the Estado Novo that led the Getúlio Vargas regime to bid for Brazil to host the 1942 World Cup — although by the time that tournament was finally played, in 1950, Vargas had been deposed.

Argentina was chosen as host for the 1978 tournament in 1966, the bid of one military junta ultimately inherited by another. This political chaos was reflected in the official logo, which was based on the arms-clasped-above-head gesture of Juan Perón, who had briefly returned to power in 1973 before dying and being succeeded by his wife, Isabel, who was ousted three years later in a coup. Before the tournament was held, slums were destroyed or hidden from view, dissidents rounded up, and around a tenth of the national budget spent on constructing or redeveloping stadiums. Most important: Argentina won.

Whether, as is widely believed, the success sustained the junta in power is difficult to assess, but two details seem telling. First, about ten minutes’ walk from El Monumental, the stadium where Argentina beat the Netherlands in the final, is the ESMA (the Navy School of Mechanics) which, under the junta, became a notorious torture centre. When the prisoners, hearing the roars of the crowd, celebrated in the cells, General Jorge Acosta, one of the most brutal torturers, took out three of them in his car and wound down the windows so they could see the celebrations on the streets — to show them that their protests against the regime meant nothing beside the eruption of patriotic joy. Second, four years later, after the invasion of the Falklands, Argentinian TV broadcasts were dominated by two things: news from the war, and reruns of the glory of ‘78.

More from this author

Maradona, the Argentinian Messiah

By Jonathan Wilson

Qatar, then, is not unique. Every country to have hosted the World Cup has done so with some sort of soft-power objective in mind. Even England, in 1966, saw their triumph blend with the idea of Swinging London: to project an image of a vibrant, modern nation emerging from the gloom and stuffiness of the Fifties and the loss of influence both politically and in football (the 6-3 defeat to Hungary in 1953 was essentially football’s Suez).

But this World Cup does feel different. This is partly down to the corruption that surrounded the award of hosting rights for 2018 and 2022. There is no evidence Qatar did anything wrong, but 16 of the 22 delegates who made the decision have either been convicted or credibly accused of wrongdoing, while many have wondered what was discussed at the lunch, nine days before the vote, between Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-French president, Tamim al-Thani, who has since succeeded his father as Emir of Qatar, and the French then-Uefa president, Michel Platini.

Then there are the well-reported human rights issues, and the fact that, ever since the Gulf states bought up major football clubs and the rights to stage major fights and Formula One races, both the British media and fans are more aware than ever about “sportswashing” — the way sport can be used to present a certain picture of a nation and garner influence. The phenomenon of certain fans backing the stance of the state that owns their club against its critics — see Newcastle fans criticising the fiancée of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi; or Manchester City fans insisting on the guilt of Matthew Hedges, who was accused of spying in Abu Dhabi — was familiar even before news broke that Qatar is actively paying fans from certain countries to sing on demand and help police social media.

Meanwhile, for those fans who do stay home, there is a prospect of a winter sitting huddled under blankets, struggling to afford rising energy prices (caused by a war started by the last World Cup hosts), hoping the power cut is over in time to watch the next game, beamed live from a country that is only staging the tournament because of the profits it has made from selling gas. Geopolitics has a sudden immediacy.

The Fifa president Gianni Infantino and secretary general Fatma Samoura wrote this month to each of the 32 competing football federations, urging them not to allow “football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists”. Which is not, on the face of it, unreasonable — were it not for the fact that Qatar hosting a World Cup is itself part of a political battle, and that certain issues cannot be casually dismissed as differences of ideology. The letter speaks of the opportunity “to welcome and embrace everyone, regardless of origin, background, religion, gender, sexual orientation or nationality” — and yet homosexuality is outlawed in Qatar. An existential threat to a group of people is not “an ideological or political battle”; indeed, it runs directly contrary to Article 3 of Fifa’s own statutes, the value of which is now exposed as nil.

Finally, there is the decision not to hold the World Cup in June-July. Perhaps there is a case to be made that the European off-season should not dictate the timing of the World Cup. Why should a raft of countries be disbarred from hosting just because their climate does not fit? But this does not alter the realisation that the bidding process for 2022 was for a tournament to be staged in June and July, and that the rules were changed after Qatar had won when it was decided that maybe trying to play — or watch — football in 40-plus degrees wasn’t a great idea, even with whatever speculative cooling technology was being proposed.

Suggested reading

English football's fatal demons

By Maurice Glasman

Covid-related changes to the schedule also have not helped, but the rejig to the Premier League calendar necessitated by the November start means there are just seven days between the final domestic league game and the opening match of the World Cup. There should have been eight, but three months ago the start date was suddenly moved forward by a day, apparently so Qatar could play Ecuador with the eyes of the world upon them, undistracted by three other matches on the same day. The change was made just as a global advertising campaign was launched marking 100 days till the start of the World Cup and immediately rendered inaccurate — the problem perhaps of a society in which royal whim can override years of diligent planning.

To put the lack of break in context, there has never previously been fewer than 16 days between the Champions League final and the first game of the World Cup, so most players have had three-to-four weeks beforehand. This means not only a greater likelihood of fatigue and injury for players, but also a lack of preparation time for national coaches; with the usual two-to-three weeks of build-up reduced to three or four days, how can they work on anything but the most basic planning?

There will be those who question how much this all matters. Football, after all, is only a game. It is just 22 players chasing around an inflated polyurethane sphere. Compared to persecuted minorities and workers toiling in abject conditions, who cares about the football? But the World Cup does matter. It matters to those who play it and those who watch it and those who believe, along with Jules Rimet, that, despite it all, the tournament can be an event that fosters understanding between peoples. And yet, once again, perhaps more than ever, the World Cup finds itself a tool of propaganda, with all that is good about it sublimated to the needs of an authoritarian state. At its heart, the World Cup is an idealistic phenomenon, and those ideals have rarely felt so threatened.