For the Review’s June 6 issue, nearly two years after Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s prime minister, Rachel Donadio traveled to Rome “to understand the new cultural priorities of the government” under “the first woman to govern Italy and the first far-right leader to govern in the heart of the European Union”:

A clearer picture begins to emerge. It is of a scrappy opposition party in power for the first time, eager to exact some comeuppance and hungry to put its loyalists in important positions yet lacking a deep bench of experienced officials and presentable right-wing intellectuals. It is a picture of the mainstreaming of a postfascist right seeking changes in Italian historical memory—what is emphasized, what is downplayed—and attempting, often ham-handedly and with a dearth of fresh ideas, to forge a modern right in a country that lacks a conservative tradition (comparable to, for example, the UK’s Tories) apart from fascism. Above all, it is an image of an aging country worried about its future and holding on to an idea of its past.

Below, alongside Donadio’s article, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about Italy’s fractious politics.

Rachel Donadio
Meloni’s Cultural Revolution

What changes has Italy’s far-right prime minister wrought?

Alexander Stille
The Corrupt Reign of Emperor Silvio

“A politician in most other democratic countries would have been destroyed by any one of these scandals, let alone several that have occurred in relentless sequence over a matter of months, and yet Berlusconi’s power has never been seriously in question. What are we to make of this bizarre situation?”

—April 8, 2010

Denis Mack Smith
Italy’s Dirty Linen

“Italy moved with impressive speed from being predominantly agricultural to becoming one of the major industrial nations in the world, with a great increase of individual prosperity. In fifty years its people have also made notable contributions in virtually every field of Western culture.

Yet…Italy’s political practices have been corrupt, self-destructive, and often more hindrance than help to social or economic development.”

—November 30, 1995

Douglas V. Johnson II
The ‘Brain’ of Italy

“Historians of modern Italy are often pessimistic. When, like all other historians, they have sought to find a dominating theme, a key that would open all the locks, they have seized upon that of failure. Italy has been described as the country of failed revolutions, the rivoluzione mancata.”

—June 13, 1985

Furio Colombo
Italy: The Politics of Culture

“Sharply summarized, his point was this: You intend that the principal Italian cultural festival, the 1977 Biennale in Venice, will be dedicated to dissent in Soviet and Eastern countries. Don’t. Our relations are good, but if you pursue this idea of giving undue importance to “dissent,” we will lodge a strong protest. Eastern countries will join us. We consider this emphasis on dissent a provocation. It will not be good for you. We have so many reasons, do we not, including trade, to remain on friendly terms? Why injure them?”

—July 14, 1977

Luigi Barzini
The Society of Friends

“At the moment of writing, the Mafia, though hampered and embittered by national and international initiatives, is flourishing more than it ever did in the past.”

—September 22, 1966

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