A Confession About Italy

I want to make a confession.

I have no intention of revisiting every chapter of Italy's post-war history, although I believe that from the Second World War onward, Italy has never truly come to terms with its past.

From the Armistice of Cassibile to the Cold War, from the "historic compromise" to the Moro kidnapping, the Italian Republic has often preferred comforting national narratives over an honest reckoning with its own contradictions.

For an international audience, I believe Italy deserves to be studied not simply as another Western democracy, but as a case study of what can happen when a country never fully resolves the political and cultural conflicts from which it was born.

In my view, Italy's greatest problem has never been the post-fascist right alone. That political tradition emerged after the collapse of Fascism as the heir to a defeated regime and was forced to rebuild itself within a democratic constitutional order.

What has been far more influential, I would argue, is a political and cultural establishment that defines itself through anti-fascism while often treating anti-fascism less as a historical responsibility than as a permanent source of moral legitimacy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini described this phenomenon as "anti-fascism without Fascism"—an anti-fascism that survives even after the historical object it opposed has disappeared, becoming a cultural framework through which political legitimacy is claimed and dissent is frequently judged.

Italy's Constitution was drafted under extraordinary circumstances. The country had emerged from military defeat and civil conflict, and the Constituent Assembly sought to prevent the return of authoritarian rule by creating a system of institutional checks and balances.

That constitutional framework has undoubtedly protected democratic freedoms. At the same time, it has often produced fragmented coalition governments, chronic political instability, and a culture of compromise that has sometimes made decisive long-term reform exceedingly difficult.

The political culture often described as Catho-Communism has, in my opinion, become one of the defining features of modern Italy. Over the decades, its influence has extended well beyond electoral politics into sections of the bureaucracy, academia, the media, and parts of the judiciary.

This is not to suggest the existence of a single hidden authority or a coordinated conspiracy. Rather, I believe Italy has developed a remarkably resilient network of institutional and cultural continuity that frequently outlasts elections and governments, shaping public debate regardless of which coalition formally holds power.

The controversy surrounding the Palamara affair, for example, intensified public debate over factional dynamics within the judiciary and reinforced the perception that informal power structures can endure independently of democratic alternation.

For these reasons, I believe Italy offers an important lesson to the wider world. It illustrates how a democratic state can become politically immobilized not because elections cease to exist, but because enduring cultural and institutional networks continue to exercise influence regardless of electoral outcomes.

Whether one agrees with this interpretation or not, Italy remains an exceptional laboratory for understanding the strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions of modern representative democracy.

I Have Erased My Past | Ho cancellato il mio passato

I have erased my past. I have even erased the idea of being an underdog. Labels are for those who need to justify their story; I prefer to write my future.

People sometimes ask me why I never entered politics. My answer is simple: because I do not believe that the most important decisions are made there anymore. Too often, national politics seems to manage the details while the major choices are shaped elsewhere, by economic, financial, and geopolitical forces that lie beyond the control of individual governments.

Journalist Matteo Gracis summed up this feeling with a provocative metaphor: in Rome, they only decide "the shape of the dog's kennel." Whether one agrees or disagrees, the image captures the growing sense that political power has become increasingly limited.

That is why I have no desire to pursue a political career. I would rather devote my time to something I consider freer and more enduring: ideas.

A member of Parliament serves for a term. An idea can survive for generations.

I write in Italian, but I no longer write only for Italians. Artificial intelligence and machine translation have torn down one of humanity's last great barriers: language. Today, an article written at the foot of Mount Vesuvius can be read, discussed, and challenged in New York, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, or Johannesburg within minutes.

For decades, we were told that to be heard we had to belong to major newspapers, prestigious universities, or political parties. That is no longer true.

Today, what truly matters is having something worth reading.

Ideas do not ask for permission. They cross borders, ignore flags, and outlive governments.

That is why I chose to write instead of building a political career.

Governments have an expiration date. Ideas do not.

The Vesuvian Paradox

I have also chosen to stop writing about the thirteen municipalities that are part of the Vesuvius National Park. In many ways, I consider this debate even less meaningful than the discussion surrounding Italian politics.

Across many parts of the world—including other regions of Italy—a national park is regarded as an opportunity: a catalyst for sustainable development, environmental protection, cultural identity, and tourism. The Vesuvius area, however, often seems trapped in a different mindset. Public debate is still largely focused on the restrictions imposed by living in a volcanic protected area, with complaints about limits on new construction and the regulations required to renovate and modernize the existing building heritage.

Too often, the vision for the future appears to be linked to a return to an economy mainly driven by construction, as happened in previous decades, rather than to the search for new models of growth. In my view, this reflects an inability to fully recognize the extraordinary potential of a territory that has global historical, natural, and cultural value.

For this reason, the articles I published about the individual municipalities of the Vesuvian area have either been removed or will remain online only temporarily. They belong to a previous phase of this blog and no longer represent its future direction.

The only content I have decided to keep is a link discussing a possible alternative vision for the management and development of the Vesuvius National Park. I have kept it primarily as a matter of personal conscience, as a testimony to the fact that different approaches are possible. However, I do not believe that the current local political environment has the capacity to seriously embrace such a proposal, given the limitations that have characterized much of its public leadership.