Why right-wing Italians love hobbits, pirates and talking seagulls

The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome houses choice examples of 19th- and 20th-century Italian art. But the books currently on sale in its vestibule have nothing to do with futurism or Arte Povera. They are by – or about – J.R.R. Tolkien, a British writer of fantasy. “One of the greatest authors of the last century,” murmured Carlo Pesce, a Venetian business executive, as he fingered an edition of “The Silmarillion”, a dense narrative even die-hard fans tend to skip.

The books were put on sale as part of a show called “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author”. Italy’s right-wing government had sponsored the exhibition as a component of its cultural strategy, which aims to dismantle the long-standing ascendancy of Italy’s mainly left-leaning intellectuals and artists. At a packed news conference held to announce the exhibition, the culture minister extolled Tolkien as “a staunch Catholic who exalted the value of tradition and of the community to which one belongs…a true conservative.” Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, took time out from her official duties to open the show, and the inauguration was attended by a bevy of ministers from her party, the Brothers of Italy (Fdi). It was given extensive, admiring coverage on the prime-time news bulletin of the largest state-owned tv channel.

Attendance was sparse when I visited on a chilly weekday afternoon in January, yet the woman at the ticket office said the turnout had been “pretty good”. Still, the exhibition hardly lived up to the razzmatazz with which it was unveiled. It consisted of film clips and photos of Tolkien, illustrations for his books in which heroes slay dragons and grapple with orcs and editions of his works in a bewildering assortment of languages. There were also costumes and posters from Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of “The Lord of the Rings”, and a clip in which the wizard Gandalf battles the ghastly Balrog. There was even a gaudily decorated Tolkien-themed pinball machine. Meloni pronounced it all “very beautiful”.

This wasn’t the first time the prime minister had professed her admiration for Tolkien on the public stage. Last year Meloni received an award from a right-wing think-tank in London and quoted one of the orc-slayers of “The Lord of the Rings”: “​​I do not love the bright sword for its sharp edge, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for [his] glory, I only love that which I defend.” A year earlier, the actor who dubbed Aragorn in the Italian version of “The Lord of the Rings” appeared at the rally that closed Meloni’s election campaign. He walked on stage and, adapting the original, declared: “Sons of Rohan, my brothers, people of Rome...the day of defeat may come. But it is not this day.”

Tolkien, however, is only one of a strange collection of cultural touchstones held in esteem by Meloni and her party, which dominates Italy’s governing coalition. The Fdi champions an array of writers, artists and film-makers who would be unfamiliar to most mainstream European and American conservatives. Surprisingly, few of them are Italian but they provide the country’s nationalists with a store of reference points. And not all of them are conservatives. What they have in common is a shared genre: fantasy.

The Fdi was formed in 2012. Most of its early members, including Meloni, had belonged to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the neo-fascist party established by supporters of Benito Mussolini in the aftermath of the second world war. Until 1994, when the late Silvio Berlusconi brought them into the coalition that won power that year, Italy’s neo-fascists were a pariah movement, admitted to parliament but rigorously excluded from a role in government by the dominant Christian Democrats and their allies. In 1994 the MSI rebranded itself as the National Alliance and fully embraced democracy. The new party subsequently merged with Berlusconi’s in an eventually unsuccessful attempt to form a broad movement of the Italian right. But even before the demise of this hybrid grouping, Meloni and her associates had abandoned it, partly in disagreement with Berlusconi’s authoritarian ways, partly because they wanted to offer voters a more conservative option.

Over the years, the MSI had attracted to their ranks a number of traditionalist Catholics, who found common ground with neo-fascists on a range of moral issues. The Fdi, like the church, opposes same-sex marriage, euthanasia and abortion (though Meloni has promised not to rescind the law permitting women to terminate their pregnancies). The party’s manifesto for the 2022 election led with a promise to support families and somehow increase the birth rate.

On economic matters, traditionalist Catholics and those who see themselves as the heirs to the fascist tradition share an approach that attempts to steer a middle course between communism and unfettered capitalism. Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, began his political life as a socialist. According to its own propaganda, fascism sought the elimination of class warfare by, among other things, giving employees a say in firms’ management and a share in their profits. In practice, however, Mussolini compromised with capitalists.

A similar rejection of both free markets and Marxism is at the core of Catholic social teaching. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which addressed the effects of Europe’s industrialisation, rejected socialism and supported property ownership. But it also argued that workers had a right to form trade unions and negotiate collectively, and that employers had a duty to pay wages that allowed employees to live with dignity. In the years since, Catholic prelates have been as willing as fascist officials to compromise with bosses and socialists alike. Yet even that most conservative of popes, Benedict XVI, damned both liberal capitalism and Marxism as “systems that marginalise God”.

For all that conservative Catholicism and Italian post-fascism have in common, however, the latter movement remains tinged with secularism and even paganism. The young Mussolini was virulently critical of Christianity, as were most of the early fascists. The future dictator saw priests as “black microbes” and religion as a “disease of the mind”. After seizing power and reaching an accommodation with the Vatican, he and his regime glorified the achievements of ancient, pre-Christian Rome. Mussolini, like Hitler, admired Friedrich Nietzsche, the atheistic German philosopher, whose works even today occupy a prominent place in right-wing bookshops.

Beside them, in many cases, are the writings of Julius Evola, one of the most outlandish intellectuals of the 20th century. Many Fdi youth groups read Evola today, and regard him as a “hero of the party tradition”, says David Broder, the author of a history of Italian neo- and post-fascism. A Nazi sympathiser who abhorred Christianity and was accused of being a Satanist, Evola wrote on a dizzying range of subjects that included alchemy, Tantric yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism and the legend of the Holy Grail. He dabbled in magic, experimented with hallucinatory drugs, wrote without disapproval of the “ritual violation of virgins” and believed that “nothing stirs a man more than feeling the woman utterly exhausted beneath his own hostile rapture.” He believed that humankind was living in the Hindu age of Kali Yuga, one of vice and conflict.

It was these two currents – the paganism of a thinker like Evola and the Catholicism practised by others on the Italian right – that found a common literary hero in J.R.R. Tolkein.

The Lord of the Rings” was first translated into Italian by a teenage princess. Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca e Valguarnera, the sole heir of a Sicilian noble family that traces its origins to fifth-century Byzantium, was only 17 when the first volume appeared in 1967. (She subsequently took a degree in Islamic law and became a fixture in New York’s avant-garde literary scene. Last year, she surfaced in Moscow at a pro-Russian gathering along with other admirers of Vladimir Putin’s regime, including the actor Steven Seagal.)

Initially there was little interest in Alliata’s translation. But shortly after its publication, the rights to “The Lord of the Rings” were acquired by Rusconi, a conservative publishing house, which commissioned Elémire Zolla, a medievalist and esotericist, to write a new introduction. It was this edition, published in 1970, that began to attract attention.

The Italian intelligentsia dismissed “The Lord of the Rings”. “The author and his tales were described as reactionary, conservative, obscurantist and – it goes without saying – fascist,” says Gianfranco de Turris, a Tolkien authority and the president of Italy’s Evola Foundation. This disdain, more than anything else, de Turris told me, prompted young neo-fascists to champion the book. Not a single national daily reviewed it, yet it went through three editions in a year.

In 1977 a group of young MSI activists inaugurated an open-air gathering called Camp Hobbit. The four camps, staged at intervals until 1981, are often described as the Woodstock of Italy’s far right. Political discussions were held but culture was equally important. “There was theatre, there was music. There were even some lads from Milan who came to brew craft beer,” recalls Marco Tarchi, a professor of political science and former member of the MSI’s youth wing. “It was a time of individual and collective liberation.” Much of the music was supplied by a band called La Compagnia dell’Anello (The Fellowship of the Ring) and there was a makeshift tavern, the Prancing Pony, named after a hostelry the hobbits visit soon after leaving the Shire.

Two of those who came to the first Camp Hobbit had the idea of adapting and translating into Italian the song from the film “Cabaret” that a boy from the Hitler Youth sings in a country beer garden. The lad’s stirring rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” brings all but a handful of those present to their feet, arms outstretched in the Nazi salute. By the time of the third Camp Hobbit in 1980, “Il domani appartiene a noi” (“Tomorrow belongs to us”) had become the unofficial anthem of Italy’s young neo-fascists. It was sung at the close of the event. One of the creators of the Italian song, Mario Bortoluzzi, recalled the scene on a hot July night in Abruzzo, in the centre of Italy: “Under an immense planetarium of stars rose the notes of ‘Il domani appartiene a noi’…sung by thousands of young people at the tops of their voices.”

The youngsters’ enthusiasm for alternative worlds appalled the leaders of the MSI. “They took us for idiots or lunatics,” Tarchi says. “They said we were living in a world of fantasy and that that was absurd.” But considering the political atmosphere of the time, the retreat into unreality was understandable.

The period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s are known to Italians as “The Years of Lead” – a reference to the hundreds, if not thousands, of bullets fired in a period of intense political violence that began after the student revolts of 1968. Left-wing terrorists used assassinations and kidnappings to attack the established order in Italy, dominated by the Vatican-linked and American-backed Christian Democrat party. Right-wing terrorists, fearing a Marxist takeover, resorted to bombings and shootings to spread havoc as part of a so-called “strategy of tension”, aimed at prompting military intervention. Both groups of extremists attacked each other. Although the far right was behind much of the violence, members of the MSI were also victims. The movement’s youngsters, according to Tarchi, felt besieged: their opponents talked as though they were responsible for Nazi-era crimes, even though they had not yet been born. Escapism through fantasy literature came naturally to neo-fascists of his generation.

Italo Bocchino, the editor of Secolo d’Italia, an online daily close to the Fdi, argues that the right’s connection to Tolkien was more meaningful than offering simple escape. His tales provided an inspirational ethos, he argues, and offered “myth, community, honour, sacrifice”. Young members of the MSI could refound their movement on these values, says Bocchino, and borrow from them in a way that freed them from the historical baggage of fascism.

Tolkien’s stories also venerate tradition and hierarchy, values that are precious to conservative Catholics and neo-fascists alike. They are even arguably racist. His work reflects the prejudices of his time – by his own account, the gold-obsessed Dwarves were reminiscent of the Jews, and the evil Orcs a debased version of “Mongol-types”. (Tolkien himself, though, had no truck with fascism or discrimination: he described the Nazis’ racial laws as “lunatic” and deplored the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid.)

Decades after the Years of Lead, Tolkien’s ethics and traditionalism might account for some of his enduring popularity among Meloni and the Fdi. But a more compelling answer may lie with the way “The Lord of the Rings” harmonises the tensions between the secular and Catholic wings of the party. “In Tolkien, there has been seen – perhaps wrongly – this fusion of, rather than conflict between elements of a pagan and Catholic nature,” says Tarchi.

Tolkien claimed that “The Lord of the Rings” was a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision”. Scholars have identified the featherlight yet nourishing lembas (elven bread) that sustains the Fellows of the Ring with the host of the Eucharist and seen the water that Galadriel, an elven princess, draws from a spring to safeguard Frodo as reminiscent of Holy Water. Frodo’s journey up Mount Doom recalls Jesus’s agonising climb to Golgotha, and the hobbit drops the Ring into the scalding, seething heart of the volcano on March 25th, the date the Anglo-Saxons assigned to Jesus’s crucifixion (Tolkien’s academic speciality was Anglo-Saxon literature).

For all that, however, the irreligious can still read “The Lord of the Rings” simply as a rousing saga. Tolkien’s masterpiece taps into an aesthetic that has been dear to the far right ever since Hitler fell in love with Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. The same style is reflected in the art surrounding heavy metal and the iconography of the Celtic cross. In the whole of the trilogy, there is no mention of a priest, priestess or place of worship. Nor does Tolkien describe any of his characters praying to a higher being. Fans who turn to “The Silmarillion” read about a creator of Middle Earth – Eru. But they also discover an entire array of deities, the Valar. Tolkien’s works are able to provide comforting reading for traditionalists of all spiritual inclinations.

But Tolkien is far from the only idol in the Italian right’s pantheon of fantasists. In 2003 an encyclopedic volume on the cultural and philosophical world of the Italian hard right was published. It runs to just over 600 pages and includes entries on singer-songwriters, cartoon characters, books, thinkers, music, fashion and films.

They include several fantasy writers of a reactionary bent. For example, Hugo Pratt, a cartoonist, once dedicated a book to a French friend with the words “De votre fasciste”. His most famous character, a pirate named Corto Maltese, won fans on the left as well. But, says Meloni’s biographer, Francesco Giubilei, Maltese’s free-booting lifestyle is reminiscent of that of an idol of the fascist era, the poet and military adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio. Maltese, argues Giubiliei, reflects a “conservative and right-wing vision of society”.

Maltese, roaming the seas in the early 20th century, has much in common with Matsumoto Leiji’s anime buccaneer, Captain Harlock, a spaceship captain who cruises the universe at the close of the third millennium with a crew of misfits and weirdos. Among Harlock’s admirers is Meloni, who in 2019 posted a tribute to her Twitter (now X) account on the 40th anniversary of the space pirate’s first appearance on Italian television screens. Matsumoto was not politically active, but his sympathies emerged clearly in an episode that was omitted from the programmes televised in Italy. His black-caped hero is revealed to have been the descendant of a Nazi war ace in a scene set to Wagner, whose Ring cycle also supplied the plot for a six-part series, the “Harlock Saga”.

Not all fantasy writers who have captivated the Italian right share their ideological sympathies. Michael Ende, the author of “The Neverending Story”, worked for a secret anti-Nazi resistance group as a teenager in Germany near the end of the war. Yet he remains so beloved by the Italian right that the Fdi holds an annual festival called “Atreju”, named after the child protagonist of “The Neverending Story”, who searches for a way to vanquish The Nothing, a mysterious force devouring the world of Fantastica. (Ende’s executors have objected to the Fdi’s use of the name.) Some other far-right favourites, like Ray Bradbury, author of “Fahrenheit 451”, raged against authoritarianism in their writing.

What they share, along with Tolkien, are narratives featuring individualistic rebels. Annalisa Terranova, Secolo d’Italia’s deputy editor, argues that their heroic enterprises offered a point of difference to both the Marxist and free-market understanding of psychology, which explained human motivation in purely economic terms. But equally important was these characters’ willingness to challenge the complacency of their contemporaries. In her tribute to Captain Harlock, Giorgia Meloni described him as “the symbol of a generation that defied people’s apathy and indifference”. Guy Montag in “Fahrenheit 451” rebels against a society exemplified by his wife, addicted to sleeping pills and mesmerised by the output of their vast, flat-screen tvs. In “The Neverending Story”, The Nothing that threatens to destroy Fantastica turns out to be the product of humankind’s lack of imagination. In Tolkien’s work, most of the hobbits are smugly content with their lives. Only Bilbo, and later Frodo, understand the threat they face from beyond the peaceful confines of the Shire. In all these stories, the majority are brain dead; only an enlightened few can see reality clearly.

In Meloni’s autobiography “Io sono Giorgia” (I am Giorgia), she recalls being summoned to meet her fellow MSI activists by the Horn of Boromir, which in the novels is carried by the heir to the ruler of the kingdom of Gondor. She also recounts their dressing up as characters from “The Lord of the Rings” to stage tableaux vivants for students in Rome. As one of the shortest in her group, Meloni always ended up as a hobbit. “I recently saw again a dreadful photo of myself dressed as Sam Gamgee,” she wrote.

But despite her devotion to Tolkien, Meloni ultimately gravitated towards a different fantastical story, from which her particular group of MSI youth acquired their name. They were known as I gabbiani (the Seagulls). “Our main text – our bible – was ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ by Richard Bach,” says Nicola Procaccini, a member of the European Parliament who has known the prime minister since he too was a “seagull”. “Jonathan Livingston is a seagull in a community. But he wants to go beyond the limits. He wants to experience a new way to fly,” says Procaccini. “He wants to do something that no one did before.”

The Fdi has achieved something similar: as recently as 2018, the party was unable to garner even 5% of the national vote. Today, it is the senior partner in the coalition that runs Italy. Its leader, once a diminutive girl with a broad Roman accent from a rundown suburb, will this year chair the meetings of the G7 group of rich nations.

Given Meloni’s remarkable success, her enduring passion for fantasy baffles Marco Tarchi. “At a time when you have gone via the ballot box to a dominant position in society, it is pretty odd to remain bound to this sort of mythology.”

Or is it? Italy’s prime minister has an image problem. She needs to be accepted, not just by Italy’s voters, but by her international peers. Yet – whether out of conviction or fear of upsetting the hardliners in her party – she refuses to renounce publicly a fascist political heritage that is anathema to both liberals and most conservatives. Her predecessors may have danced and swigged craft beer at the Hobbit Camps, but some were street fighters, perhaps even terrorists. And they closed their chummy get-together with a song that had unabashed links to Nazism. Embracing cuddly hobbits and boy heroes softens the edges of post-fascism as effectively as the airbrushed portraits of Giorgia Meloni that adorn her autobiography and the Fdi’s electoral posters. What was once an idiosyncrasy is today an invaluable propaganda tool. ■

John Hooper is The Economist’s Italy and Vatican correspondent. Additional research by Marie Keyworth