Category Italy

Essential skills for dictators

Thomas Mann wrote in his 1939 essay Brother Hitler: And then he — who had learned nothing, and in his dreamy, obstinate arrogance never would learn anything; who had neither technical nor physical discipline, could not sit a horse, or…

Troubetzkoy’s Children

The sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy was born in 1866 in Intra, by Lago Maggiore in the north of Italy, to Ada Winans, an American pianist and singer, and Petr (Pyotr) Petrovich Trubetskoy, a Russian diplomat of aristocratic lineage. Paolo grew up…

Shared misconceptions, the great unifier

Both the headline editors at The New York Times and Steve Bannon have made the dubious claim that Julius Evola influenced Italian fascism. I have tried to explain why the idea that Evola had a considerable impact on either Mussolini…

Italians have protested against the status quo…

…by voting down proposed changes to that status quo. Italy’s system of government needs to be reformed and everybody seems to know that, within and without the country. Instead of doing something to that end, the referendum turned out a…

Don’t forget Grillo

Professor Jan-Werner Müller from Princeton claims in the London Review of Books: But the peculiarity of Trump is that he seems the equivalent of Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi merged into one person. I don’t think he is, but Müller’s view…

Bannon on Dugin and Evola

Steve Bannon, Trump’s strategist, comes across as sensible and well-informed, judging by this 2014 speech. Unfortunately, he is short on new solutions, to say nothing of a new worldview, but that would take a genius. At the moment, I’m more interested in the…

The Italian of the Iliad

LanguageHat is wondering, “why would the Iliad be taken as a measuring-rod for Italian”? Namely, in Elena Ferrante’s first Neapolitan novel, My Brilliant Friend, A teacher is said to speak “Italian that slightly resembled that of the Iliad,” and since…

The wrath of the righteous losers

The indirect verbal brush between Donald Trump and judge Gonzalo Curiel has given me a slight pretext to quote from Perry Anderson’s 2002 article once again. Very slight indeed, because the US justice system is not nearly as politicized as Italy’s, even…

Not so clean hands

In the previous post, I was talking about the “clean hands” operation launched by Milan prosecutors in 1992, which destroyed the old political order and unexpectedly brought a rightwing coalition headed by Berlusconi to power in 1994. Two things stood…

Lynch is no Di Pietro

The theory that Donald Trump is neither quite a Hitler nor truly a Mussolini but an American Silvio Berlusconi is increasingly popular and invariably superficial. (Politically; psychologically, who knows?) It seems to ignore the constants of Trump’s campaign, which occasionally get lost…