As a longtime fan of JRR Tolkien, I’ve long felt put out by Giorgia Meloni’s bizarre obsession with The Lord of the Rings. Over the years, Italy’s ultra-conservative prime minister has quoted passages in interviews, shared photos of herself reading the novel and even posed with a statue of the wizard Gandalf as part of a campaign. In her autobiography-slash-manifesto, she dedicates several pages to her “favourite book”, which she refers to at one point as being a “sacred” text. When I read the news this week that Italy’s culture ministry is spending €250,000 to organise a Tolkien show at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and that Meloni will attend the opening, I couldn’t help wondering: why? What is this government trying to achieve by stamping its mark so aggressively on one of the world’s most loved fantasy sagas?
My Italian friends don’t get the fuss. This is everyday politics, they say, a simple branding exercise to soften Meloni’s image. Perhaps. But there’s a deeper, and frankly stranger, side to this story. When The Lord of the Rings first hit Italian shelves in the 1970s, the academic Elémire Zolla wrote a short introduction in which he interpreted the book as an allegory about “pure” ethnic groups defending themselves against contamination from foreign invaders. Fascist sympathisers in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) quickly jumped on the provocation. Inspired by Zolla’s words, they saw in Tolkien’s world a space where they could explore their ideology in socially acceptable terms, free from the taboos of the past. Meloni, an MSI youth wing member, developed her political consciousness in that environment. As a teenager she even attended a “Hobbit Camp”, a summer retreat organised by the MSI in which participants dressed up in cosplay outfits, sang along to folk ballads and discussed how Tolkienian mythologies could help the post-fascist right find credibility in a new era.
Obviously, we’re talking about a fringe movement here. But it’s worth recognising that, with a little imagination, the sagas of Middle-earth do fit pretty neatly into the logic of contemporary rightwing populism. The Lord of the Rings follows the logic of a zero-sum game, rooted in Catholic metaphysics. There are “good” hobbits and elves who fight off “evil” orcs. There’s little space for nuance. While most of us probably read the “good” characters in apolitical terms, it doesn’t take much effort to bend that definition to nationalist purposes. In her book, Meloni does just that. One moment she tells us her favourite character is the peace-loving everyman Samwise Gamgee, “just a hobbit”. A few pages later she’s implicitly likening Italy to the lost kingdom of Númenor and citing the character Faramir’s call to arms in The Two Towers. Ultimately, she seems to view Tolkien’s work as a didactic anti-globalisation fable, a hyper-conservative epic that advocates a full-blown war against the modern world in the name of traditional values.
Meloni’s interest in fantasy, symbols and grand narratives sets her apart from previous leaders. All governments in Italy, left and right, use culture to aid their political messaging. Even so, the current administration seems atypically obsessed with asserting control over the public imagination. One of the first things Meloni did when coming to power was to appoint Giampaolo Rossi, a journalist known for defending Vladimir Putin, director general of the public service broadcaster Rai. The organisation’s remit is now being rewritten to include an obligation to promote “the richness of giving birth and parenthood”. Next, she appointed Alessandro Giuli, a conservative critic and outspoken Eurosceptic, president of Rome’s most important contemporary art museum, Maxxi. Last week, the government nominated Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a public intellectual and former central committee member of the post-fascist youth organisation Fronte della Gioventù, as the next president of the Venice Biennale. In the run-up to the decision, Buttafuoco declared “This season the fences will come down. A home will be given to those who have not had one until now.”
It’s tempting to disregard culture wars as superficial, campaign tactics: polarising arguments that politicians use to galvanise passions in the run-up to elections, and nothing more. Meloni’s actions remind us there’s a serious side too. Over the summer, in a move right out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook, the Italian government took the dramatic step of awarding itself direct power to appoint the management of Rome’s Experimental Cinematography Centre, one of Italy’s most important film schools. MP Igor Iezzi justified the decision on the basis of a need to “modernise” the institution, adding that the left must make an effort to “remove its claws from culture”. Interestingly, the government seems to have no such qualms with the apparently growing number of far-right publishers that are reprinting books by fascist authors such as Giovanni Gentile and Julius Evola for a new generation of readers (many of these publishers, by the way, are using The Lord of the Rings to draw in new audiences).
The question of where this is all heading remains unclear. Meloni’s cultural project is still in its embryonic stages and there is no sign yet of a cohesive state policy. Still, the early signs are worrying. Over the past year, many have bought into the idea that Meloni is a “moderate”. They’ve fallen for her smiles, her sheepish body language, her newly moderated language. Beneath the surface, however, is a deeply troubling cultural agenda.
Jamie Mackay is the author of The Invention of Sicily. He lives in Florence, Italy
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