Dante Father of the Right: A Political Heritage Appropriation from Fascism to Social Media

Alessandro Micocci, Trinity College (Rome Campus)

Introduction

The Fascist regime depicted the great Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, as a prophet of its anthropological and ideological tenets. To this end, the regime made use of both the contribution of prominent intellectuals, such as the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, and amateur writers, such as Domenico Venturini, to display an historical lineage from Dante to Mussolini.^[1] This article takes as a starting point Dante’s fascistization and investigates how given principles, developed both by prominent Fascist intellectuals and in propaganda literature, left a legacy of the poet’s conception as a visionary precursor of Fascism.

This article will also show how the contemporary Italian populist right is undertaking an attempt to demonstrate Dante’s belonging to a right-wing political thought through the use of apologetic literature from the Ventennio, as well as introducing stereotypical narrations into political discourse. This effort is accompanied by a deluge of critical reactions on social media, which address ironic and satirical responses rooted in a similarly stereotypical conception of Dante’s political and historical legacy. This article thus aims to advance a more comprehensive approach to understanding the use of historical heritage and memory in the digital sphere by analyzing Dante’s appropriation during the Fascist era and the revival of some of these uses by the contemporary Italian populist right.

Dante and the Pre-Fascist Debates

Benjamin Martin argues that Dante was adopted since the unification of Italy as a “cultural counterweight to the lack of any continuous political or social unity in the peninsula,” with his prophecies presented as a lesson to be taught to the Italians.^[2] Nationalist intellectuals portrayed the Florentine poet as grief-stricken for the bereavement of the universal Roman Empire. Italian nationalists heightened this peculiar depiction of Dante as prophet of the Italian decadence through the centuries to enhance a sense of pride in the cause of Unification against the centuries-old foreign oppression. From the outset of the Italian unification process, the Risorgimento, various political factions and intellectual currents disputed the Florentine poet’s legacy. Both radical republicans, such as Mazzini, and exponents of Catholic movements, such as Vincenzo Gioberti or Cesare Balbo, described Dante as either a fervent anticlerical or a champion of Catholicism.^[3]

The celebration of Dante’s prophetical role reemerged during the First World War. Following the disastrous defeats on the front against Austria-Hungary, notably the 1917 Battle of Caporetto, and reports of internal discord within the Italians, the psychosis of the nation’s softness took hold among Italian nationalists. Furthermore, the end of the conflict, marked by the failure to obtain important territorial claims, led many nationalist intellectuals to formulate the concept of a “mutilated victory,” and to associate it with the laments of Dante for Italy.^[4] Therefore, the liberals were depicted as the communal elites who were bringing the country to disgrace, just as the infighting between the Black and White Guelphs had forced Dante to flee Florence.

The impact of the Great War on the conservative appropriation of the Italian communal myth was a pivotal feature for the contemporary cult of the political Dante. The division between traditional Catholic and liberal republican visions in the post-war period was also expressed in the different use of Dante’s thought. The liberal propaganda interpretation of the Divine Comedy intended to emphasize the role of the Roman Church as the ultimate obstacle to the Italian nation’s unification.^[5] Catholic intellectuals, such as Father Agostino Gemelli, depicted Dante as an advocate of the Papacy, claiming that he regarded the Roman Church as the source of internal cohesion within the nation and as the sole heir to the glory of ancient Rome. Liberals were portrayed, by contrast, as those responsible for the nation’s internal divisions.^[6]

In 1921, the liberal government committed to an intense program of celebrations, that were intended to foment the “religione della madrepatria.”^[7] Among these, from 11–20 September, the government commemorated the 600^th anniversary of Dante’s demise.^[8] The importance of the celebration was underscored by the holding of public ceremonies in three cities: Ravenna, where the poet was buried, Rome, and Florence. The Catholic presence at the Ravenna ceremonies was no less significant. Delegations from Catholic associations, along with prominent figures from the national Catholic milieu—such Antonino Anile, deputy of the Italian popular Party (PPI)—paid homage to the poet’s tomb. In his speech to the young representatives at the congress of the Italian Catholic Federation of University Students (FUCI), held in Ravenna, Anile claimed Dante’s catholicity and upheld his example as a bulwark against the tensions within Italy.^[9] However, it was not the peaceful claims by Catholic intellectuals but the extreme political turmoil in the nation that hampered the liberal stance. In Ravenna, Italo Balbo and Dino Grandi swarmed all over the city with their Fascist militia, deliberately intending to violently appropriate the symbolic national commemoration, in a foreshadowing of the Fascist regime’s future endeavor.^[10]

As highlighted by Fulvio Conti, the political use of Dante witnessed a decisive acceleration and formal institutionalization in the years immediately preceding Mussolini’s seizure of power. Both Catholics and liberals sought to find in the poet’s propositions a legitimization for their respective modern political visions. In support of this thesis, Conti reports the univocal reactions of intellectual and political circles to the discourse delivered by the Minister of Education, Benedetto Croce, on September 14, 1920. The philosopher warned scholars against the tendency of depicting Dante as an “apostle” of a contemporary political ideology. However, Croce failed to understand that a clear separation between Dante studies and politics had by then become impossible.^[11] Croce’s appeal went unheeded, and the political use of Dante received decisive support during the Fascist regime, established two years after the minister’s declaration. Fascism ultimately intensified the political appropriation of the poet by rewarding and legitimizing amateur Dante studies.

Stefano Albertini underscores the presence of pre-Fascist rhetoric in many speeches given by renowned academics and politicians during the celebrations. The president of the Società Dantesca Italiana, Isidoro Del Lungo, commended the Divine Comedy as the first formulation of the Italian nation, stating that the Nation existed in Dante before its material and historical formation.^[12] In his discourse held on 20 September 1921—the anniversary of the conquest of Rome by the Italian army in 1871—the prominent archaeologist Corrado Ricci distorted Canto 6 of Paradise. Ricci purposely stated that Jesus Christ died for “la gloria dell’Impero Romano,” enhancing the role of the “aquila Romana” as a symbol of divine justice through the sacrifice of Jesus.^[13] It is possible to infer that the national debate was ushering the stereotypical rhetoric and ideological devices that would be further developed during Fascism, particularly through the tight aligning of Dante and his productions to the nationalist standpoint.

At the outset of the Fascist regime, the use of a prophetical reading of Dante was a long-standing strategy within various political ideologies and movements in Italy, each attempting to legitimize their own positions through an unscrupulous interpretation of Dante’s thought. Dante’s political views were represented alternately as a holistic symbol of catholicity and a forerunner of the Italian will to become a united nation.^[14] This burgeoning legitimizing usage was thus inserted into the Fascist creed to bolster Mussolini’s depiction as the restorer of the Italian historical glory.

The Fascist Regime and Dante: Debate and Propaganda in Upper Fascist Culture

The philosopher Giovanni Gentile was one of the regime’s most prominent ideologists and a zealous reader of Dante’s political philosophy. This featured decisively in his elaboration of the 1923 school reform, which made reading the Divine Comedy compulsory, while Dante’s political and moral tenets were also included in the final school exams. Gentile’s political thought placed great emphasis on maintaining the profound connection between politics and religion, with the latter being understood primarily in its power to generate myths. Two years before the March on Rome, Gentile had remarked in his Speeches on Religion that “the religious character of politics derived from the identity between politics and religion, an identity made concrete within the State.”^[15] Religion was to be intended, according to the Sicilian philosopher, as the religion of the Italian tradition and would contribute to the construction of a national conscience.^[16] Gentile had hence developed a nationalist doctrine aimed at achieving a stable union between state and religion. The state was to draw actively on tradition, including spiritual tradition, to create myths that would foster the cultural unification of the peninsula. The risk, therefore, was to repeat the very condition Dante himself depicted, that is, a state of decadence resulting from the inability of temporal and spiritual powers to collaborate. Gentile regarded the Florentine poet as both the founder of modern Italian and the first Italian prophet to predict the advent of a new, universal Rome: namely, the Fascist regime. The latter was portrayed as the final political stage in the unification of Italy. In his school reform, the Sicilian philosopher juxtaposed the post-unitarian approach to the literary study of Dante with his political and ideological stances, conveyed by Croce’s idealist philosophy.^[17]

However, the measures Gentile implemented in the Fascist education system underwent several changes during the late 1920s and in the 1930s, particularly when Cesare De Vecchi, who served as Ministry of Education from 1935-1936, reduced the number of canti to be studied at school. A supporter of a stricter regimentation of the masses under the regime, De Vecchi sustained the need for schools to be the primary means of forming the new Fascist citizen through enforcement of political and ideological readings of the Florentine poet. By presenting an emotionally charged interpretation of the poet as a medieval symbol of Italy’s centuries-old struggle for national unification, he approached the subject from political, cultural, and anthropological perspectives. De Vecchi’s successor, Giuseppe Bottai, stated that by studying Dante the new generations would receive Fascist knowledge and ideology, thereby endorsing the Florentine poet as an ideal conduit of Fascist ideals. In 1939, Bottai presented the Grand Council of Fascism with his Carta della Scuola a document outlining his program to combine politics and culture. Since in the Fascist order “età scolastica e età politica coincidono,”^[18] every historical figure and event taught at school was to be traced back to its political use.^[19] According to many leading members of the Fascist Party, Gentile’s reforms, by displaying broad programs, was producing a ruling class excessively tied to abstract knowledge and insufficiently “fascistized.” Consequently, it would be plausible to assume that the modifications to the Gentile reform went hand in hand with a more stereotyped and rigid ideologically instrumentalization of Dante. Nonetheless, many schoolteachers did not faithfully follow the ministerial directives, therefore creating a passive disagreement with the regime’s educational program.^[20]

Under the regime, academic historians were involved in the “fascistization” of prominent Italian figures by inserting them within a genealogy favorable to legitimizing the Fascist regime. Mussolini personally nominated many members of the Royal Italian Academy, an institution established by the regime in 1926 with the explicit intent of orienting national culture, from sciences to literature and arts.^[21] Conceived as a technical institution of experts aiming to influence the cultural politics of the nation, its real objective was to control the nation’s intellectuals.^[22] The Academy was inaugurated only in 1929 at Villa Farnesina in Rome. Numerous prominent intellectuals, such as Benedetto Croce, refused to join the institution, as it was mandatory to take a loyalty oath to the King and to the Fascist Party.

In this vein, the regime fostered the project of the Enciclopedia Italiana, with the Institute responsible for it, the Treccani, presided by Giovanni Gentile.^[23] Mussolini considered the Enciclopedia Fascism’s most prominent intellectual and cultural operation. Its ultimate intent was to array a timeline of Italian history legitimizing Fascism as the final stage of “true” Italian historical and cultural heritage. Major Fascist intellectuals also promoted this perspective. Gioacchino Volpe, one of the most influential Fascist historians, posited that the Risorgimento was a feeling and a conscience present among Italians since the rise of the communal middle classes.^[24] Particularly, the thirteenth century was pivotal for the formation of Italian culture; as Volpe argued, “il continuo battagliare di Italiani contro Italiani non arrestava il cammino d’Italia.”^[25] According to the Fascist historian, while the political unity was hampered by disunity, Italians were reinforcing their intellectual cohesion. In a polemic with the National Society of the Risorgimento, Volpe argued that, throughout the medieval and modern ages, Italy witnessed the evolution of the sense of nationhood through the awareness of municipal, regional, and then national problems.^[26] Obsessed with pursuing the continuity between imperial Rome and national history, many Fascist historians engaged in researches that confirmed their ideological stances. While the Catholic Church was represented as the institution that impeded the dissolution of the Roman universal heritage, medieval comuni and Renaissance podestà were portrayed as the first vessels of the unitarian State. Within such discourses, Dante was depicted as the intellectual who predicted the evolution of municipal pride into a new “imperial” Italy through the interplay between Cesar, representing imperial authority, and Christ, embodying the universal Christian heritage.^[27] In his History of the Italians and of Italy (1933), Volpe dedicated an entire paragraph to Dante “Father of the Italians.”^[28]

After the signing of the Lateran Treaty in 1929, pivotal members of the Fascist regime, such as Giovanni Giuriati, stressed Dante’s “prophetical abilities,” hailing Mussolini as the man who succeeded in bringing them to concrete realization.^[29] On 10 March, 1923, Giuriati had already compared Mussolini to the greyhound, the Veltro, prophesied by Dante to slain the She-wolf and deliver “humble Italy” from evil.^[30] However, as underlined by Albertini, the myth of Dante as harbinger of the Fascist regime was effectively undertaken by pamphlets written by unknown schoolteachers or bureaucrats, who invoked Dante as the prophet of Fascism.^[31] Although these works were undoubtedly amateur and deferential toward the regime, their heritage is still markedly present in the contemporary political debate, also heightened by social media.

Fascist Propaganda and the Opposition to Intellectual Perspectives on Dante

The 1930s witnessed an exponential rise of publications pursuing “Fascist features” in the “political” canti of the Divine Comedy. The majority of the authors of these propagandistic pamphlets or books were obscure schoolteachers who, in many cases, possessed scarce knowledge of Dante’s works. Nevertheless, they leveraged themselves as true interpreters of the symbolic and mythical messages embedded within the Divine Comedy, contemptuously depicting as “idiots” those intellectuals who regarded the poem as strictly autobiographical.^[32]

In the apologetic essay Dante Alighieri e l’Italia imperiale, Eliseo Strada, sought to demonstrate that Dante conceived the Divine Comedy as a wholeheartedly “Italian will” depicting a future Italian civic and political tenet. This essay aimed to discredit academic interpretations of the poem as a “semplicemente morale” or religious work.^[33] Strada violently attacked the philological approach to Dante, which denied any nationalistic dimension to the Divine Poet. He adopted vitriolic propositions—such as: “Povero Dante! Perché non ti balenò il sospetto di tante scemenze sul tuo nome e non serbasti loro nell’inferno una fogna speciale?”—to oppose those who criticized his theories, even demanding their collocation in Hell.^[34] Such vilifying discourse was part of a radical rhetoric that the Fascist regime’s revolutionary faction directed against scholars and academics. Strada’s work was hence embedded in a broad cultural milieu fostered by the regime, which considered such populistic stances as a significant means for its legitimization.

The propagandistic literature of the regime especially focused on selected canti of the Comedy, namely Canto 6 of each canticle. In 1924, Ciro Danesi analyzed Purgatorio 6 in a pamphlet titled Il simbolo di Sordello nella Divina Commedia. By interweaving Sordello’s celebrated lament over the loss of liberty with a critique of liberal governance, Danesi juxtaposed the crisis of Italy’s communal age with the political climate of the pre-Fascist period.

Accordingly, the parallel between the two historical crises was thereby arrayed to portray the necessity for Italy to curb disunity and infighting. Danesi strengthened his positions by depicting the liberals and Parliament as a gathering of beasts and animals rather than an assembly of politicians. However, Italy withstood during its age of yielding to the “disordine della guerra civile” in a “martirio paziente,” finally achieving its true national essence. According to Danesi, Dante was the outcast intellectual who bolstered the national aspirations through his invective and advocated for the intervention of a “uomo geniale che ha ben compreso il senso della storia,” i.e., Mussolini, thus connecting the prophetic Dantean myth to the celebration of Fascism and Mussolini.^[35]

Nonetheless, the most notable case of “fascistization” of Dante is Domenico Venturini’s book Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini. Published in 1927, the book immediately earned the definition of “Fascist literature.” Distributed in every Dopolavoro section through the national territory, the text was considered a perspicuous means of legitimization by Mussolini and the Fascist Party.^[36] The title explicitly conveys the work’s argument, namely the overlapping of the myth of Mussolini with Dante’s yearning for a hero to relieve Italy from its centuries-old decadence.^[37] Venturini re-asserted arguments expressed by nationalist and Fascist thinkers and substantively enhanced Dante’s alleged prophecy of a forthcoming “Dux,” connecting it to the cult of the Duce Mussolini.

Albertini argues that the intrinsic peculiarity of Venturini’s essay is the endeavor to conceive the Divine Comedy as a “handbook of Fascist culture.” Encapsulating numerous sections of the poem as notions for future fascists, these notions range from the pivotal principles of the regime and the cult of the chief to the nation’s borders and geography.^[38] In the preface to the volume, Amilcare Rossi highlighted the existence—since the beginning of the Fascist regime—of “orazioni e articoli,” thus suggesting a “parallelo storico tra il Dux vaticinato dall’Alighieri e Benito Mussolini.” According to Rossi, however, these attempts were mere “improvvisazioni,” devoid of any “passione critica” and faith to further “il rapporto ideale ed etico tra le due grandi figure.”^[39] By contrast, Venturini’s essay listed a series of objectives of the Fascist regime that were closely connected to Dante’s thought, such as the greatness of the homeland, the aspiration for romanitas, and the pursuit for civil and moral rebirth.^[40]

The book is characterized by a cursory and simplified approach. Venturini extrapolates a few passages from the Divine Comedy and either associates them with Mussolini’s statements and concepts or analyzes them directly, in order to demonstrate the fulfillment of Dante’s prophecies in the Dux of Fascism. A noteworthy example of Venturini’s approach is the reading of Virgil’s prophecy of the veltro. Venturini’s effort to personify the veltro—that is, the one man capable of unifying and pacifying Italy—was by no means a novelty. According to Venturini, in the aftermath of the Risorgimento, King Victor Emmanuel II was already celebrated as the veltro.^[41] In his apologetic work, however, the amateur Dante scholar associated Mussolini’s propositions with Virgil’s prophetic verses, once again decontextualized from the Comedy. Therefore, Mussolini’s declarations that “le società umane non si sviluppano, e non grandeggiano se non c’è il disinteresse in chi comanda” were emphatically associated at the Dantean verse “Questi non ciberà né [sic] terra né peltro.”^[42]

The effectiveness of Venturini’s arguments lies in the ability to isolate Dante’s verses and combine them with formulations from Mussolini. In some cases, Venturini cited passages from his own essays to support the alleged veracity of his claims. Dante’s thought was therefore “volgarizzato,” as Amilcare Rossi noted in his preface, in order to plainly illustrate the foreshadowing of Mussolini in Dante’s veltro. At the conclusion of his lengthy discussion over the role of the Duce as a legitimate veltro—the figure capable of pacifying Italy and reconciling the Church’s spiritual authority with the State’s temporal power—Venturini incorporated verses from one of his apologetic odes praising Fascism’s recovery of Rome.^[43] In doing so, the future Accademico d’Italia strengthened his arguments by vulgarizing Dante’s verses on the veltro, without any philological analysis or contextualization, and associating them with the corpus of Fascist literature.

Venturini’s ode cited in Dante Alighieri and Benito Mussolini is particularly effective as a propaganda means, in that it connected Mussolini’s myth of the third Rome, i.e. the Fascist one, to both the imperial and the Christian Rome. In the concluding pages of his analysis of Dante’s veltro, Venturini focused on Dante’s aspiration to restore the Christian Rome to its ancient glory through the balance of powers between empire and papacy. This vision corresponds to the Fascist program to transform Rome into the capital of the new Fascist empire, with the Catholic faith as the trait d’union between the regime and the Vatican.^[44] Passages from Dante’s Monarchia were likewise instrumentally extrapolated, without faithfully reporting the text or contextualizing it, and thus put to the service of Venturini’s apologetic theses. Dante’s political work was reduced to an alleged desire of the exiled poet to “vedere rivivere l’impero.” It was therefore easy for this unscrupulous propaganda writer to associate Dante’s will with the program of the Duce Magnifico.^[45]

Though published two years before the Lateran Pacts with the Vatican, the book appeared at a moment when the Duce was already publicly distancing himself from his earlier atheism and anticlericalism. Venturini actualized Mussolini’s new role as bulwark of the Church, depicting him as the man responsible for the renewed shining of the “Croce che si innalza dal Campidoglio,” the hill that “vide i trionfi della Roma pagana.”^[46] This ideally connected the cult of the Roman Empire to the image of Mussolini as “Defender of Faith.” This theme, i.e., the defense of the Christian faith by Fascism, constantly recurred throughout Venturini’s work. In this light, Beatrice’s prophecy in Purgatorio 33—allegedly, a Dux’s imminent coming to avenge the outrages made against the “church and the empire”—was tellingly associated to the figure of the Dux Mussolini defeating Bolshevism in Italy. Venturini argued that the “nuovo ordine di cose che si è svolto in Italia” and the advent of Fascism “sembrano sciogliere l’enigma di Dante.” According to Venturini, the fact that the Fascist movement had chosen to designate its leader as Dux, independently of any reference to Dante’s prophecy, constituted incontrovertible proof of the fulfillment of Beatrice’s prediction.^[47] Venturini consequently stated that the moral, religious, and political heritage of Dante’s thought was integrally embodied by Mussolini, who was lauded as the modern man capable of interweaving the glory of pagan Rome with Catholic tradition. It is thus possible to infer that Venturini audaciously sought to juxtapose Dante’s political formulations, positing Rome’s glorious history as a sign of divine will, to the Fascist sacralization of the cult of romanitas. Hence, through an amateur analysis of selected sections from the Comedy, Venturini arrayed a parallel cult of Rome by the Florentine poet, stressing the historical and cultural legitimization of Fascist ideology.

Therefore, Venturini’s apologetic work represented a decisive moment for the framing of Dante as the vessel of the political ideology of the right. The publication of Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini entailed a shift in Fascist propaganda, as the regime began acclaiming mediocre publications as true “Fascist literature.” Works such as Venturini’s had the advantage of contributing to the legitimation of the regime by co-opting great historical figures into the Fascist pantheon. The universal value of Dante’s thought was thus encapsulated within the imperial projection of the Fascist myth of Rome and within Mussolini’s role as protector of the Catholic faith. By legitimizing a more populist and non-academic approach to the Divine Comedy, Fascism could hence seclude the scholarly analyses and interpretations that could not serve its agenda.

Venturini’s approach illustrates how the regime actively supported the “vulgarization” of Dante, seeking to incorporate Dante’s prophecies into its Fascist doctrine. It is possible to hypothesize that Venturini’s text is a clear example of how single Dantean quotations could be fascistized by depriving them of their original meaning. The intellectuals interpreting the manifold facets of Dante’s thought and ideology were consequently cast out from the public debate, as were Catholic scholars, or even former Fascist sympathizers such as Giovanni Papini.

Papini, a renowned writer from Florence, contributed to the burgeoning of nationalistic journals at the beginning of the twentieth century. A staunch supporter of Futurism and then Fascism, he abruptly converted to Catholicism in the 1920s. In 1933, he published Dante Vivo, in which he stated the actuality of Dante for his modern interpretation of Catholicism and Empire. Unlike the author of Dante Alighieri and Benito Mussolini, he avoided embracing the stereotypical Fascist rhetoric that posited the bequeathment of Dantean historical and cultural heritage to contemporary Italy. This rhetoric ultimately culminated in the necessity to reestablish Italian cultural superiority. Papini tried to adopt the Dantean appeal for an imperial intervention to pacify the Italian turmoil and rivalries, turning it as a model for a contemporary “unità politica dei popoli del mondo civile.”^[48] Papini did not support the dominant myth regarding the “Italianness” of Dante. Instead, he described the poet’s cultural heritage as equally embedded in Etruscan, Roman, and Jewish traditions.^[49] Moreover, he described the romanitas of Dante as a combination of admiration both for Caesar as founder of the Roman Empire and for its opposers, such as Cato the Censor, praised in Purgatorio for his unswerving struggle to preserve the dying-out Republic. Although Papini’s formulations were part of a long-established scholarly analysis of the Divine Comedy, they stood in opposition both to the apologetic cult of Mussolini as the new Caesar and to the celebration of Imperial Rome. Papini’s celebration of Cato’s “loss of life,” preferred to a “loss of freedom,” thus entailed a subtle critic of the imperial Roman heritage.^[50] Furthermore, as Forlenza and Thomassen argue, Mussolini’s main political stance was to “break the nexus between Risorgimento and Liberalism or ‘liberty’ as understood by liberal, post-unification Italy. ‘Liberty’ in effect was the continued object of attack by Fascism and by Mussolini himself.”^[51] In addition to Papini’s exaltation of the fight for freedom by the defenders of the Roman Republic against Caesarism and the Augustan empire, the Fascist party considered his adoption of an academic and sophisticated approach toward the reassessment of selected parts of the Comedy as a substantive challenge to the regime’s propaganda. As mentioned above, in the 1930s the regime enhanced works and essays portraying Dante as the poet who foretold the resurgence of the Roman Empire, thereby heightening a direct connection to the Fascist myth of the Empire.

Nonetheless, despite being portrayed as a work underpinning a non-Fascist cultural stance, Dante Vivo was not subjected to the regime’s censorship.^[52] Dante come Profeta, an essay by the priest Enrico Buonaiuti, depicted Dante as a prophet of a reign of justice and peace, which Buonaiuti identified in a spiritual dimension rather than in terms of the advent of a material empire or leader.^[53] Buonaiuti’s work aligned with the theory expounded by various Catholic thinkers, who interpreted Dante’s Monarchia as a treatise in which Dante repudiated Caesarism and subordinated imperial authority to faith in the Pope, as also maintained by Father Mariano Cordovani in an essay published in 1919.^[54] These two essays neither belonged to the institutional academic debate on Dante, nor were conceived as part of the Fascist mass propaganda.

To conclude, it can be inferred that the regime boosted the more “practical” and political interpretation of the utopic ideology displayed by Dante in the Comedy—emphasizing the prophetic celebration of the Roman heritage and the advent of a future leader to save Italy—through the stirring and evocative narratives of propagandistic essays. The regime sought to present Dante and his “prophecies” as hallmarks of the Fascist era, celebrating the works of apologetic authors to legitimize Fascism for Italians as the historical heir of the Roman Empire. Hence, Dante was included in the Fascist pantheon, in a process Roberto Bizzocchi described as one of “incredible genealogies.”^[55] By selectively isolating favorable sections of Italian history, Fascist discourse embedded them within what another Fascist author described as an imagined “eternal Italianity.”^[56] As the regime intended to forge a new Italian and a new State, it devised a series of isolated “heralds” of the Fascist advent, conveying their alleged prophecies by manipulating selected parts of their works with a simple and immediate rhetoric. Notwithstanding criticism by eminent Fascist historians, such as Gioacchino Volpe, the display of a pantheon of national prophets was an abiding presence in the regime’s cultural politics.^[57]

Benjamin Martin argues that Fascism adopted the commemorations of Italian intellectuals and military leaders­­—Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Leopardi, Julius Cesar, Garibaldi—to remove them “from the field of competing interpretations that had existed in liberal Italy by linking them to Fascism in such a way to fix their meaning.”^[58] This project was pursued through a set of “textual techniques,” namely the use of a “characteristically Fascist language” to discuss the leaders and intellectuals commemorated by Fascism.^[59] Thus, many commemorative speeches deployed rhetorical tropes drawn from a vocabulary of concepts and phrases immediately associated with Fascism. Through a careful interplay of vitalistic language with the depiction of Fascist Italy as the future nation forestalled by Dante, the regime portrayed itself as the fulfillment of history.^[60] By presenting only selected formulations and concepts of the Divine Poet, the regime effectively “fascistized” Dante. These strategies are evident in Venturini’s apologetic book, explaining his immediate success. By contrast, non-aligned works did not circulate beyond restricted circles, and their distribution was prevented or significantly hindered within the Dopolavoro branches.

As Fulvio Conti argued, the Fascist cult of Dante “prescindeva ormai da una conoscenza approfondita della sua opera di scrittore, si era appunto trasformato in una forma di devozione popolare” deftly adopted by the regime.^[61]

The Contemporary Dantean Stereotypes

The present paragraph shows that the populist depictions of Dante were not just superficial aspects of a Fascist propagandistic effort destined to vanish with the advent of democracy. By contrast, these simplistic theses proved to be a successful means of legitimization, inserting Fascism as the heir of the nation’s “true” glorious traditions and heritage, from the vestiges of romanitas to Dante, to the Renaissance warlords and leaders.^[62] Mussolini sought to “free” the national history from the “grasp of biased and professorial realm, to bring it into contact with the Italian people and consider it through the prism of Fascism.”^[63] Accordingly, it was necessary to bolster the creation on a national scale of simplified historical narratives capable of legitimizing Fascist claims.

Fascist propaganda made substantial efforts to demonstrate that the Divine Comedy belonged to the culture of the right—a concept still nurtured by the new populist right parties in contemporary Italy, namely Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) and the Lega. The contemporary Italian right, particularly Fratelli d’Italia, presented itself as the heir to a series of countermeasures against what it portrays as hegemony of left-wing thought, especially in the educational and pedagogical contexts, which it perceives as deviated from authentic Italian tradition. In the 1990s, as Gabriele Turi underlines, the culture of the right was marked by a lack of specific and distinct right-wing features.^[64] As the right-wing intellectual Marcello Veneziani explained, a communitarian and traditional culture emerged in an “antagonistic” form in response to the purported “hegemonic” culture of the left.^[65] In this context, Alleanza Nazionale (AN)—a political formation born on the initiative of Gianfranco Fini, then secretary of the Italian Social Movement/Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), with the aim of moving beyond the heritage of Fascist ideology—could declare at the time of its foundation, in the 1995 Fiuggi Theses, that it was no longer rooted on the Fascism/anti-fascism dichotomy. It was, rather, Catholic culture and a generic “national culture” that made Italians “heirs” of figures such as Dante, Machiavelli, and even Gentile. Fascist influence was perspicuous in the contiguity between the Fiuggi Theses and the thought of Alfredo Rocco, the architect of the regime’s penal code.^[66]

According to Gabriele Turi, with the collapse of the traditional left-wing parties and the advent of Silvio Berlusconi’s populism, the Italian right came to present itself as a mentality rather than an ideology, one that required progressively less adherence to a set of ideas and principles.^[67] Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia (FI), simultaneously claimed a series of symbolic “fathers,” all of whom were characterized as “heretics” with respect to their ideologies. These were Luigi Einaudi for Liberalism, Carlo Rosselli for Socialism, and Don Luigi Sturzo for Catholicism.^[68] A profile such as Dante, forced into exile and whose prophecies about a unified Italy went unheeded in his own time, embodied the heretical characteristics that could be instrumentalized by the new right that arose in the 1990s.^[69] This ideological elasticity of the contemporary right depends less on fixed ideological structures and more on presenting itself to the public through principles expressed as the “common thinking” of all Italians. The populists, such as the new Lega led by Matteo Salvini, have also recognized the potential of social media as powerful conduits to spread concepts, thereby forcing even their political adversaries to admit a priori the validity of selected stances.

In January 2024, the former Italian Minister of Culture and member of FdI, Gennaro Sangiuliano, stated that Dante was the “founder of the thought of the right in Italy,” underscoring his political ideology as “profoundly” connected to the right. The Minister’s declarations triggered fierce criticism from left-wing Italian parties, forcing Sangiuliano to write an open letter to the newspaper Corriere della Sera at the end of the same month, in which he defended his discourse as mere “provocation.” Nonetheless, by analyzing the deluge of memes labelling the Minister’s declarations as ludicrous, it is possible to trace what Paolo Gerbaudo defines as the real power of networking platforms, namely, the power to disseminate a set of information to millions of individuals, thereby enabling the populist movements to present social media as the “people’s voice.”^[70] As stated by Cas Mudde, populism invokes “the principle of popular sovereignty” to criticize independent establishments, which can alternatively be the media, the judiciary, or the elitist academic world.^[71] Accordingly, if a large part of the citizens feels “orphaned” for being neglected by the established cultural and political actors, they tend to associate a political event to a “populist mental map.”^[72] The decline of traditional mass media is connected to public criticism of their commercialization, dating back to the nineteenth century, which undermined their role as purveyors of citizens’ opinions and demands.^[73] By the time Sangiuliano apologized, the social media had witnessed a flood of ironic associations of Dante with Benito Mussolini or the Fascist movement, as figure 1 shows. Sangiuliano’s neofascist past favored a logical connection of the memes with the regime.^[74]

“Fascist” is one of the most recurrent words in the social media interactions on the topic. Users who criticized Sangiuliano almost unanimously adopted images and references associated with the regime. This deluge of memes was coupled with widespread discussions on selected and stereotypical passages from Dante’s works. Moreover, many social media users engaged in the debate by providing their opinions on whether Dante was a left or right wing intellectual.^[75] This debate was criticized by intellectuals such as Luciano Canfora, who, in an interview with the newspaper La Stampa, asserted the intrinsic impossibility of associating a medieval intellectual with contemporary political categories.^[76] Canfora’s discourse articulates concepts comparable to Croce’s invitation to separate Dante’s study from any political instrumentalization. It should be emphasized, however, that Croce intended to warn the culture of his time against associating Dante with a radical nationalist discourse, whereas Canfora reproaches politicians for attributing modern characters to Dante. On the one hand, Canfora cites the various Fascist apologetic authors who interpreted the prophecy of the veltro as referred to Mussolini. On the other hand, to “save” Dante from political use, he claims that the categories of right and left are nineteenth-century constructs. Although Canfora’s criticism was not directed specifically at Dante scholars, as was the case with Croce in 1920, parallels between the two interventions can still be found. Both underestimated the potential of a decontextualized and stereotyped political instrumentalization of Dante. Yet, Sangiuliano’s unsuccessful appropriation attempt conceals a broader intent of the Italian radical right, that is, producing a conservative genealogy to defend the Italian identity from purported “subversive forces within the nation and hostile forces without.”^[77]

A separation between the literary Dante and the political Dante does not seem to be in line with current times. Just like on the eve of Fascism, Dante’s political use cannot be relegated to mere “infantile propaganda” as Canfora states. The strategy of decontextualizing Dante and creating a few caricatured political myths, exemplified by characters like Venturini, can now be observed in the social media reaction to memes about Dante and Mussolini. Therefore, it can be inferred that some of the strategies to instrumentalize Dante, adopted by Venturini and other Fascist propagandistic essays continue to influence the discourse of the Italian right. According to Tristan Kay, “successful books aimed at the wider public” can reinforce a caricatured image of Dante.^[78] Additionally, when the left challenges FdI’s appropriation of Dante, it almost ironically upholds the same methods of the right, that is, the decontextualization and simplification of the debate surrounding the poet. In many cases, memes are extrapolated from their original context, disseminated on the web, made available to anyone who wants to interpret them according to certain concepts and meanings, without engaging with their original context, the debate within which they were inserted, or the creative source.

As Umberto Eco foresaw in 1995, the return of “Fascist cultural habits” resides in “ways of thinking and feeling.” In his renowned essay on Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism, Eco identified a list of features he considered central to the category of Ur-fascism. One such feature, rejection of modernism,^[79] is noteworthy for this analysis. Eco stated that despite their self-representation as defenders of tradition, both Nazism and Fascism actively embraced technology. It can therefore be inferred that technologies, such as social media, are vehicles for enhancing another Ur-Fascist trait, that is, the use of impoverished vocabulary and elementary syntax. In Sangiuliano’s case, the use of short and concise sentences provoked responses that mirrored the former Minister of Education’s statements, thereby forcing the public debate to adapt to repetitive and extremely lapidary concepts. The discussion was therefore reduced to debates over whether Dante was right-wing or left-wing.

It is my contention that the debate on social media favored the diffusion of a political tenet expressed by the leader of FdI, Giorgia Meloni, i.e. the “fixed nationhood.” As Kay observes, this fixed identity—“la nostra identità” is a common phrase in Meloni’s discourses—must be protected against any change that might modify it.^[80] As Eco stated in his definition of Ur-Fascism, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism exacerbates the natural fear of difference and deems any disagreement an act of treason.^[81] In the case of the debate on Dante’s political collocation, any form of disagreement is impoverished through social media to the narrow debate on whether one agrees with Sangiuliano or not.

Concepts related to Fascist propaganda productions are therefore introduced into the Italian debate without full awareness of their origins. Stereotyped Fascist interpretations of the political Dante are thus normalized and transformed through the mass diffusion of stereotypes and simplistic concepts on social media.

Mudde argues that social media enhanced the formation of homogeneous “bubbles” that act as “echo chambers,” amplifying the reach and intensity of a message.^[82] Additionally, in the last thirty years the parties belonging to the populist right spectrum were involved in an effort to normalize the Italian Fascist regime by removing from its historical heritage any elements considered to be “criminal,” such as the racial laws.^[83] Therefore, neofascists have tried to present a “purified” historical memory to the Italians,^[84] aiming to re-fashion integralist ideas as “conventional” and “respectable” stances.^[85]

The reassessment and “normalization” of the Fascist critical heritage is combined with contemporary criticism of the “politically correct,”^[86] leveraged by right-wing populism as a form of top-down censorship, as well as with the notion of the “obliteration” of national identity.^[87] In the latter instance, radical populists invoke the need to preserve history and tradition, while excluding those who are perceived as favoring the loss of identity.^[88] Cas Mudde argues that present day populism is a “thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the ‘pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’.”^[89] We could hence maintain that a stereotypical opinion is not subject to a critical approach in social media, and it is instead discussed without any real interest in tracing the origin of an ideological stance. It seems plausible to infer that the rekindling of mass-produced political interpretations of Dante has stripped the Divine Poet of his authority, entailing the simplified dissemination of interpretations and counter-interpretations of the prophetic role of the Divine Comedy. On the one hand, the debate that broke out on social media after Sangiuliano’s formulations reiterated how Dante’s elevation to father of the right was immediately traced back and proposed in a visual key, like in Figure 1, as actively neo-fascist. On the other hand, the ironic response in social media is countered by supporters of the current government through lapidary sentences evoking the danger of obliteration at the hands of Islam and other external enemies, such as the communists.

I contend that the paranoia surrounding the perceived external enemies of a traditional Catholic Italy—whom Venturini’s propaganda compared to the turmoil brought to Florence by foreigners, the villani—represents an effective instrumentalization of Dante as a prophet.^[90] Several interactions and ironic comments on social media posts positioned Dante as a tutelary figure of the right, enhancing his role as a cultural bulwark of Italian traditionalism against globalization.

Such re-surfacing of nationalist appropriations and exploitations of Dante inevitably shaped the 700^th commemoration of his death in 2021. The celebrations were marked by initiatives across many Italian cities, reinforcing the myth of Dante as the forefather of the Italian language. On 2 October, 2020, during the commemorations’ inauguration, the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, delivered a speech in which he presented Dante as the “very father” of the Italian Unification, a “visionary patriot” and “the great prophet of Italy.” Furthermore, Mattarella juxtaposed the nationalist hailing of Dante as the great Italian poet who foresaw the advent of a united Italy with the celebration of Dante’s global stature.^[91] Numerous contemporary scholars have emphasized this renewed standpoint on Dante, observing that in postwar Italy the poet was reassessed as a “universal” cultural symbol.^[92] As Fulvio Conti has pointed out, in the immediate postwar period Dante was repositioned within a universalistic framework. During the 1965 centenary celebrations, the inaugural speech by the President of the Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, put an end to the older interpretation of the Florentine poet as a prophet of the Italian nation.^[93] Nonetheless, in the same speech, Saragat did not refrain from evoking Dante’s image as father of the nation. The dichotomy between a universal Dante and a Dante envisioned as a foreseer of unified Italy thus became a significant element within Italian political discourse.^[94] Ivan Simonini claims that the postwar left parties described the notion that Dante was a prophet as “reactionary.” It was not until 1965 that the left portrayed Dante as the father of the Constitution and the poet of universal peace.^[95]

Kay argues that since the 2021 centenary the new extreme right parties, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, have “invoked a traditional and homogenous idea of national identity, of which they cast themselves as the trusted defenders.” The revival of the “national” Dante in public debate should thus, according to Kay, come as little surprise.^[96] Kay interprets Mattarella’s speech as a legitimization of the conception of the Florentine poet as exclusively Italian, albeit Mattarella’s misalignment from postwar “globalization” was intertwined with parts of his speech where he simultaneously heightened the universality of Dante’s heritage.^[97]

The 2021 anniversary was based on the public participation of academic and cultural institutions, such as museums, schools, associations, and universities, in the newly instituted Dantedì, Dante’s day, which commemorates the traditional date when Dante is believed to have started his voyage through the overworld.^[98] However, as Kay has pointed out, the Dantedì was an initiative grounded in a markedly nationalistic celebration of Italian identity. Clearly in opposition to the established global celebration of the poet,^[99] it ultimately enforced the conception of Dante as tightly bound to Italian culture and essence. As in the discourses of Ricci and Del Lungo, Dante was hailed by the Democratic Party (PD) Minister of Culture in 2021, Dario Franceschini, and by Luigi Di Maio, Minister of Foreign Affairs and former head of the populist 5 Star Movement, as the foreseer of the nation and first embodiment of Italy.^[100]

It is noteworthy to mention that a peculiar initiative was displayed in Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace, by the local administration in collaboration with the association Tessere del 900.^[101] An exhibition of the “uses and abuses” of Dante during the Fascist regime was placed in Mussolini’s former home, presently a museum and one of the new sanctuaries for neofascist entities (figure 2). The exhibit exposed numerous essays, books, and artistic productions that sought to present Dante as the prophet of Fascism. Notably, all the apologetic texts cited in this article—from Strada to Danesi, Venturini, and Papini—were included in the exhibition, providing additional evidence of the use of Dante devoid of explicit left or right-wing outlook.^[102] The exhibition recognized the hallmark of Fascism’s intense use of Dante-the-prophet in post-war society. Its panels highlighted the enduring debate on Dante’s political belonging to nationalism or Fascism or to the “heretical” culture of the left, as well as underscoring the universal value of his thought.^[103] Yet the problem of Dante’s political instrumentalization and stereotypical reduction seems far from resolved. Sangiuliano’s assertion represents an unfortunate manifestation of a broader strategy still being developed by the new Italian radical right. Nevertheless, it is important to underline the exhibition’s attempt to demystify the complex Fascist legacy associated with Dante’s political appropriation. As Francesco Mosti noted in his address at the inauguration, the municipality of Ravenna declined to host the event, preoccupied with a potential overlapping with official centenary celebrations.^[104] Thus, the issue of Dante’s instrumentalization continues to linger in the background, unaddressed by major public initiatives.

The 2021 commemorations were not limited to institutional declarations. Alongside official government discourse, right-wing populist parties advanced their own political interpretations of Dante. Giorgia Meloni repeated the rhetoric expressed by members of the government further enhancing the instrumentalization of Dante for “more exclusivist ends.”^[105] She deliberately posted a video on social media in which, using simple and repetitive language, described Dante as the “father of our identity” and authentically “ours,” namely Italian and Christian.^[106] The adoption of a simple and repetitive message demonstrates the ability of the populist far right to convey a fixed idea of cultural and historical heritage, thereby presenting their political tenets as the language of the “people.” This is proposed in opposition to what is depicted as a contrived and contemptuous intellectual or institutional discourse of other sectors of the political sphere. Accordingly, the adoption by contemporary right populist parties, such as Fratelli d’Italia, of the same stereotypical rhetoric ushered by Venturini or Danesi was ultimately propitious to the establishment of Dante as progenitor of the right-wing Italian political ideology. It is also worth underlining the similar adoption by far-right populists of a pejorative language similar to the contemptuous words addressed to academic scholars by obscure Fascist authors.

As social media peer-to-peer opinion-making possesses a far broader diffusion than conventional political initiatives,^[107] it could be argued that the Dante-related apologetic literature of the Fascist era has witnessed, through Minister Sangiuliano’s one-time declaration, a significantly more popular and nation-wide diffusion than the institutional events of the 2021 commemorations, which had been conceived as long-lasting initiatives.^[108]

Conclusions

To conclude, this article has highlighted a series of legitimizing strategies employed by authors such as Domenico Venturini to elevate Dante to the status of a prophet of Fascism. In particular, the decontextualized, simplified, and stereotypical interpretation of selected Dantean concepts has left a lasting mark on contemporary right-wing populism. Venturini’s Dante Alighieri and Benito Mussolini represented a watershed moment in the political instrumentalization of Dante under Fascism. Following a long-standing tradition of exploiting Dante for political purpose, Venturini associated the cult of Mussolini-as-veltro with Dante’s aspiration for a long-sought equilibrium between the Catholic Church and the temporal authority. The Duce Mussolini was thus praised as the material and historical realization of the destiny foretold by Dante.

This article has also underscored the distinction between works such as Venturini’s and the intellectual analyses produced within the “high culture” during the regime, some of whose exponents did not wholeheartedly align with Fascist stances. While authors such as Papini or Buonaiuti expressed controversial political interpretations of Dante, Venturini’s direct and lapidary rhetoric ensured that his work not only earned the official status of “Fascist literature” but also perpetuated a set of enduring stereotypes about Dante that persists to this day. Unlike Giovanni Gentile, whose political views provoked internal opposition within the regime, Venturini’s claims went unchallenged. Dante Alighieri and Benito Mussolini presented a simple and immediate narrative, accessible even for an uneducated audience. Its straightforward language was pivotal for the success of his work.

This apologetic literature diverged from the interpretations proposed by major intellectuals of the regime, such as Giovanni Gentile, and was proposed, through effective rhetorical strategies, as the “voice of the people.” The few quotations extrapolated from the Divine Comedy were presented as self-evident truths, seemingly confirmed by Mussolini’s exploits and political program. This article has also demonstrated how Venturini’s legacy was reflected in the political exploitation of Dante by contemporary radical-right movements, such as Fratelli d’Italia. The political appropriation of the Divine Poet is part of a broader process of polarization in political debate. The right seeks to absorb key figures of Italy’s cultural history, such as Dante, into its ideological pantheon through an exaltation of their traditional and identity-based characteristics. This process is framed in opposition to the perceived threats of modern globalization and “external” forces hostile to “Italianness” and the nation.

Formulations such as those by former Education Minister Sangiuliano have been criticized through new means of propaganda dissemination, particularly social media. The renewed “fascistization” of Dante thus adapts to the simplified language and information fostered by social media debates and populist rhetoric, thereby encouraging the polarization of opinions. One perspective defends the role of Dante as father of the nation and, therefore, as exclusively Italian, while the other reasserts his universal significance. The 2021 centenary revealed how the rhetoric of Dante as “father of the nation” is combined with the exaltation of his global role. This may be considered as a nuanced response to the nationalist appropriation of the Florentine poet by the radical right and its leaders, including Meloni.

Fascist apologetic narratives regarding Dante are still conveyed by populist politicians, while social media debates amplify the possibility for such populist standpoints to be nurtured and boosted. Thus, although the debate on Dante’s prophecies has been instrumentalized by both right and left, as well as by catholic or laic intellectuals and politicians from the Risorgimento onwards, the stereotypical and simplified heritage of authors such as Venturini or Strada remains a defining feature of contemporary right populist ideology. At the same time, reactions from the left on social media often reinforce a similarly reductive counter-narrative. While the works of Venturini or Danesi reached the masses mainly through the regime’s nationwide institutions, such as the Dopolavoro, the contemporary Dantean populist propaganda can spread rapidly through social media memes, debates, and videos, providing a deluge of information and stereotypes extrapolated without any critical approach.

Finally, this article has compared how two major intellectuals, Croce and Canfora, responded to the political instrumentalization of Dante. Both were unable to assess the extent of Dante’s political use and their attempts to delegitimize such exploitations proved largely ineffective. Venturini’s simplifications still seem to affect the contemporary political debate on Dante’s prophecies: they resurface at a time when the appropriation of figures rooted in the national tradition is pursued as a means of protecting culture against globalization and cosmopolitan values. Croce’s appeal to remain detached from such political debates does not ensure, however, that Dante studies can remain immune to the influences of political appropriation. On the contrary, new platforms for public debate, such as social media, accelerate this process and require careful attention to the ongoing evolution of Dante’s ideological instrumentalization.

1. See Stefano Albertini, “Dante in camicia nera: Uso e abuso del divino poeta nell’Italia fascista,” The Italianist 16, no. 1 (1996): 117-42. ↑

2. Benjamin Martin, “Celebrating the Nation’s Poets: Petrarch, Leopardi and the Appropriations of Cultural Symbols in Fascist Italy,” in Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual culture of Fascist Italy, ed. Roger J. Crum and Claudia Lazzaro (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 192. See also: Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever (Basingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2014); Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: Il mito della nazione nel XX secolo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2021); Tommaso Di Carpegna Falconieri, “Roma antica e il Medioevo: due mitomotori per costruire la storia delle nazioni e delle «piccole patrie» tra Risorgimento e Fascismo,” in Storia e piccole patrie: Riflessioni sulla storia locale, ed. Riccardo Paolo Uguccioni, Seminars proceedings, Società pesarese di studi storici, Pesaro, 1 aprile 2016 (Ancona: il lavoro editoriale, 2017), 78-101. ↑

3. See Giulio Bollati, L’italiano: Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin: Einaudi, 2021), 47. ↑

4. Carl Levy, “Fascism, National Socialism and Conservatives in Europe, 1914-1945: Issue for Comparativists,” Contemporary European History 8, no. 1 (1999): 97-126, 111. ↑

5. See: Bruno Tobia, “La statuaria dantesca nell’Italia liberale: tradizione, identità e culto nazionale,” in Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome 109, no. 1 (1997): 75-87; and Anne O’Connor, “Dante Alighieri: From Absence to Stony Presence: Building Memories in Nineteenth Century Florence,” Italian Studies 67, no. 3 (2012): 307–35. ↑

6. See: Alfredo Canavero, “De Gasperi, Gemelli e i clerico-fascisti,” Nuova Antologia 144, no. 2249, January-March (2009): 349-61; Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1996); Danilo Menozzi and Renato Moro, eds., Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo: Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2004); Gian Mario Anselmi, “Dante e l’interpretazione della storia,” in Dante e la fabbrica della Commedia, ed. Alfredo Cottignoli, Donatino Domini, and Giorgio Gruppioni (Ravenna: Longo, 2008).

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7. For more information, see Maurizio Ridolfi, Le feste nazionali (Bologna: Il Mulino 2020). ↑

8. In 1865 many Italian cities celebrated the centenary of the birth of the Divine Poet. However, Fulvio Conti underlines that these initiatives were mainly spurred by individual municipalities, associations or committees: see Fulvio Conti, Il Sommo italiano: Dante e l’identità della nazione (Rome: Carocci, 2021), 119.

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9. See Conti, Il Sommo italiano, 127. See also “L’omaggio a Dante della Federazione Universitaria Cattolica italiana,” Il VI Centenario dantesco 8 (1921): 120-21. ↑

10. The march on Ravenna was organized by the two ras, i.e. local Fascist chiefs, as a violent sign of protest for the pact between Mussolini and the socialists in August 1921 to stop Fascist violence against left parties and structures.

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11. See Conti, Il Sommo italiano, 122. ↑

12. See Albertini, “Dante in camicia nera,” 124. ↑

13. See Corrado Ricci, Roma nel pensiero di Dante (Rome: Centenari, 1921), 17. Ricci will later emerge as a staunch supporter of Mussolini’s regime, being rewarded with the presidency of Italy’s Institute of Archeology and Art History (Istituto Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte). See also Guy P. Raffa, Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 210-11. ↑

14. Piero Gobetti publicly criticized in 1921 this dualistic representation of the political Dantean heritage: see Conti, Il Sommo italiano, 144.

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15. Alessandra Tarquini, “Fascist Educational Policy from 1922 to 1943: A Contribution to the Current Debate on Political Religions,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 2 (2015): 168-87, 175. To further Gentile’s concept of identity between politics and religion see: Giovanni Gentile, Discorsi sulla religione (Florence: Vallecchi 1920), 20-29. ↑

16. Ibid. ↑

17. In 1921 Croce published an essay, Poesia di Dante, that fostered the idealistic approach toward the study of Dante. ↑

18. Giuseppe Bottai, Carta della Scuola, Riunione del Gran Consiglio del Fascismo, 15 February, 1939, 217. ↑

19. The historian Michel Ostenc argues that the ministers of instruction nominated after Gentile implemented a “counter-reform” of the Gentile school reform: see Michel Ostenc, La scuola italiana durante il fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza 1981), 127-81. ↑

20. See: Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975); Luisa Mangoni, L’interventismo della cultura: Intellettuali e riviste del fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1974); Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Paul Corner provides an effective study on the actual reach of the Fascist directives in the various Italian provinces: see Paul Corner, La dittatura fascista: Consenso e controllo durante il Ventennio (Rome: Carocci, 2018), and The Fascist party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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21. See Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, 25. ↑

22. For additional information, see Gabriele Turi, Lo Stato educatore: Politica e intellettuali nell’Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002). For an overview of the relationship between Mussolini’s regime and intellectuals, see also: Guido Bonsaver, “Culture and Intellectuals,” in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. Richard J. B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 109-26; and Gabriele Turi, Il fascismo e il consenso degli intellettuali (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980).

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23. The Treccani Institute was founded in Rome on 18 February, 1925, by Giovanni Treccani and Giovanni Gentile.

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24. For further information on Gioacchino Volpe, see: Eugenio Di Rienzo, La storia e l’azione: Vita politica di Gioacchino Volpe (Florence: Le Lettere, 2008); and Alberto De Bernardi, “Il fascismo e le sue storie,” in Estados autoritários e totalitários e suas representações, ed. Luís Reis Torgal and Heloisa Paulo (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 2008). ↑

25. Gioacchino Volpe, La storia degli Italiani e dell’Italia (Milan: Treves, 1933), 35. See also Riccardo Rao, “Dal comune alla signoria: eclissi e successo di due temi storiografici in età fascista,” in Il fascismo e la storia, ed. Paola S. Salvatori (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2022), 73-110, 90-1.

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26. See Gabriele Turi, “Ideologia e cultura del fascismo nello specchio dell’Enciclopedia Italiana,” Studi Storici 20, no.1 (1979): 157-211, 184. See also Patrick J. Geary, The myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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27. See Albertini, “Dante in camicia nera,” 121. ↑

28. Volpe, La storia degli Italiani, 38-51.

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29. Conti, Il Sommo italiano, 148-49. ↑

30. Raffa, Dante’s Bones, 206. ↑

31. See Albertini, “Dante in camicia nera,” 123. ↑

32. The term idioti was used by Eliseo Strada, Dante Alighieri e l’Italia imperiale (Milan: Navarini, 1927). See Albertini, “Dante in camicia nera,” 125. ↑

33. Albertini, “Dante in camicia nera,” 126. ↑

34. Strada, Dante Alighieri, 30. ↑

35. Ciro Danesi, Il simbolo di Sordello nella Divina Commedia: Per l’anniversario di Dante (Pavia: Bizzoni, 1924), 27. ↑

36. Fulvio Conti considers this book a semi-official Fascist text: see Conti, Il Sommo italiano, 148.

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37. See Paul Hollander, “Mussolini, Fascism and Intellectuals,” in From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 47-82.

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38. Albertini, “Dante in camicia nera,” 127. ↑

39. See Domenico Venturini, Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini (Rome: Casa editrice Nuova Italia, 1927), 5. Amilcare Rossi (1895-1977) was a nationalist and then member of the Fascist Party. Mussolini nominated him president of the Associazione Nazionale Combattenti. ↑

40. See Albertini, “Dante in camicia nera,” 7-8. ↑

41. See Venturini, Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini, 39. ↑

42. Ibid. ↑

43. Ibid., 67-68. ↑

44. Ibid., 69. ↑

45. Ibid., 66. ↑

46. Ibid. ↑

47. Ibid., 110. ↑

48. Giovanni Papini, Dante vivo (Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1933), 60. ↑

49. For the political use of the Etruscans in Fascist Italy, see Andrea Avalli, Il mito della prima Italia: L’uso politico degli Etruschi tra fascismo e dopoguerra (Rome: Viella, 2024). ↑

50. See Papini, Dante vivo, 44. ↑

51. Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen, Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 122. ↑

52. The essay was appreciated by Mussolini while also being criticized by eminent Dante scholars. The dictator deliberately let Papini’s work win the Florence Prize, which was originally assigned to the book Vita di Arnaldo, written by the Duce to commemorate his brother Arnaldo’s demise in 1931.

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53. Buonaiuti was excommunicated by Pope Pius X for his defense of Modernism, i.e. the attempt to reconcile Catholicism to modern culture. ↑

54. See Mariano Cordovani, “La Monarchia di Dante e la Società delle Nazioni,” Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali e Discipline Ausiliarie 80, no. 317 (1919): 3-27, 6-7. Father Cordovani was a convinced anti-Fascist and opponent of Gentile idealism. He supported Luigi Sturzo’s Popular Party. An expert in Dante’s philosophy and on Thomas Aquinas, he was one of the promoters of the FUCI. ↑

55. Roberto Bizzocchi, Genealogie incredibili: Scritti di storia dell’Europa moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995). ↑

56. The expression was invented by a history schoolteacher, Guglielmo Strata, in his book L’Italia imperiale of 1942. The work possessed an innovative conception of the use of images to convey knowledge mainly through a visual approach. ↑

57. See Adolfo Scotto di Luzio, “Risorgimento, guerra e fascismo nella scuola italiana: Dalla riforma Gentile a Bottai,” in Il fascismo e la storia, ed. Paola S. Salvatori (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2022), 183-216, 216. ↑

58. Martin, “Celebrating the Nation’s Poets,” 192. ↑

59. Ibid., 195. ↑

60. See Forlenza and Thomassen, Italian Modernities, 139. ↑

61. Conti, Il Sommo italiano, 152. ↑

62. For more information on the debate between Fascist historians on the role of the Renaissance warlords, see Rao, “Dal comune alla signoria,” 101-9. Mussolini was often depicted as a Renaissance condottiero. Many apologetic essays associated Mussolini as a Renaissance warlord, as Giuseppe Portigliotti’s Condottieri of 1935. See: Davide Iacono, “Condottieri in camicia nera: l’uso dei capitani di ventura nell’immaginario medievale fascista,” in Medievalismi italiani (secoli XIX-XXI), ed. Tommaso Di Carpegna Falconieri and Riccardo Facchini (Rome: Gangemi, 2018), 53-66; Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario: Storia di una biografia 1919-1939 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991), 202.

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63. Forlenza and Thomassen, Italian Modernities, 127. ↑

64. See Gabriele Turi, La cultura delle destre: Alla ricerca dell’egemonia culturale in Italia (Bollati Boringhieri: Turin 2013), 52. ↑

65. Marcello Veneziani, La cultura della destra (Rome-Bari: Laterza 2002), 18. ↑

66. See Turi, La cultura delle destre, 54-55. It is possible to consult the text of the Fiuggi Theses on the Heritage site of the Historical Archives of the Senate. https://patrimonio.archivio.senato.it/inventario/scheda/movimento-sociale-italiano-msi/IT-AFS-049-000073/xvii-congresso-nazionale-fiuggi-1995, accessed 23 October, 2025. For more information on the Fiuggi Theses, see: Marco Revelli, Le due destre: Le derive politiche del postfordismo (Bollati Boringhieri: Turin 1996). ↑

67. Turi, La cultura delle destre, 55. ↑

68. Ibid., 141. ↑

69. See Tristan Kay, “Dante e l’Italia sono la stessa cosa: Poet and Nation in the Centenary years in 1865 and 2021,” Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies 6, (2023): 208-29, 214. Kay is referring to the depictions of Dante’s political biographies around the centenary of 1865, but the prophetic and unheeded Dante was also positioned in the 1990s right pantheon. ↑

70. Paolo Gerbaudo, “Social Media and Populism: An Elective Affinity?,” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 5 (2018): 745-53. ↑

71. Cas Mudde, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 81. ↑

72. Ibid., 101. ↑

73. See Jürgen Habermas, Storia e critica dell’opinione pubblica (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1999), 221. Cas Mudde (Populism, 109-10) argues that media had a pivotal role in the normalization and mainstreaming of the populist far right, determining “which issues voters deem important.” ↑

74. Sangiuliano was affiliated with the Italian Social Movement (MSI).

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75. Matteo Renzi, former secretary of the left-wing Italian Democratic Party (PD), published in 2012 the book Stil Novo, where he hailed Dante as the perfect political model for the contemporary Italian left. The title of the book is a homage to the homonymous literary genre, adopted by Dante in his Vita Nuova. ↑

76. See Pierangelo Sapegno, “Luciano Canfora: ‘Dante era libero, un cristiano eretico. Tirarlo per la giacca è infantile propaganda’,” La Stampa, January 16, 2023, https://www.lastampa.it/cronaca/2023/01/16/news/luciano_canfora_dante_era_libero_un_cristiano_eretico_tirarlo_per_la_giacca_e_infantile_propaganda-12538655/, accessed 13 June, 2024.

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77. Kay, “Dante e l’Italia,” 221. ↑

78. Ibid., 223-24. ↑

79. Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, 6. ↑

80. See Kay, “Dante e l’Italia,” 220. ↑

81. Ibid., 7. ↑

82. Mudde, Populism, 112. ↑

83. See Filippo Focardi, Nel cantiere della memoria: Fascismo, Resistenza, Shoah, Foibe (Roma: Viella, 2020), 73; See also: Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); David Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan: Mondadori, 1994); Ernest Ialongo “Nation-Building through Antisemitism: Fascism and the Jew as the Internal Enemy,” Annali d’Italianistica 36 (2018): 327-50; and Ilaria Pavan “Fascism, Anti-Semitism, and Racism: An Ongoing Debate,” Telos 164 (2013): 45-62. ↑

84. Stefano Pivato, Vuoti di memoria: Usi ed abusi della storia nella vita pubblica italiana (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007), 91. ↑

85. Luiza Bialasewicz and Sabrina Stallone, “Focalizing New-Fascism: Right Politics and Integralisms in Contemporary Italy,” Environment and Planning: Political Spaces 38, no. 3 (2019): 423-42, 413. ↑

86. At the end of May 2024, two Muslim students at a secondary school in Treviso were exempted from studying the Divine Comedy, as their parents considered Dante’s decision to put the Prophet Mahomet in Hell “offensive” to their religion. The social media witnessed a deluge of anti-Islamic and anti “cancel culture” protests, with FdI politicians denouncing a “submission to the Muslims.” See: https://www.rainews.it/articoli/2024/05/studenti-musulmani-esentati-dalle-lezioni-su-dante-e-divina-commedia-i-genitori-offende-lislam-3b11e7d3-95e5-480b-a9ad-7e662a84d919.html, accessed 14 June, 2024.

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87. See: Sven Engesser, Nicole Ernst, Frank Esser, et al., “Populism and Social Media: How Politicians Spread a Fragmented Ideology,” Information, Communication & Society 20 (2017): 109–26; Aristotle Kallis, “Populism, Sovereigntism, and the Unlikely Re-Emergence of the Territorial Nation-State,” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11, no. 3 (2018): 285–302; Michael Morden, “Anatomy of the National Myth: Archetypes and Narrative in the Study of Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 22, no. 3 (2016): 447–64; and Chiara Bonacchi, Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (London: UCL Press, 2022), 87-90. ↑

88. See Bonacchi, Heritage and Nationalism, 87. ↑

89. Cas Mudde, “The Populist Radical Right: A Pathological Normalcy,” Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations 3, no. 7, (2008): 1-18, 6-7. ↑

90. Venturini, Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini, 35. See also Gian Mario Anselmi, “Dante e l’interpretazione,” 38. ↑

91. See Kay, “Dante e l’Italia,” 218. For Mattarella’s full speech, along with photographs and videos, see: Presidenza della Repubblica (2020), “Intervento del Presidente della Repubblica Sergio Mattarella in occasione delle celebrazioni per il settecentesimo anniversario della morte di Dante Alighieri,” 3 October, 2020, https://www.quirinale.it/elementi/50535, accessed 13 June, 2024.

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92. For more information, see: Fulvio Conti, The Ultimate Italian: Dante and a Nation’s Identity (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2023); and Raffa, Dante’s Bones. ↑

93. See Conti, Il Sommo italiano, 163-64. The President of the Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, verbalized this new universal conception of Dante in his opening speech for the centenary, on March 31, 1965: see Discorso del Presidente della Repubblica, in Cerimonia di apertura delle celebrazioni: Il messaggio agli Italiani del Presidente della Repubblica, Campidoglio, 31 marzo 1965, ed. Comitato nazionale per le celebrazioni del VII Centenario della nascita di Dante (Rome: Istituto grafico tiberino, 1965). ↑

94. See Conti, Il Sommo italiano, 45. ↑

95. See Ivan Simonini, Mussolini lettore di Dante (Ravenna: Edizioni del Girasole, 2022), 227. ↑

96. See Kay, “Dante e l’Italia,” 217. ↑

97. Ibid., 218.

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98. The initiative was launched by Corriere della Sera and endorsed by many politicians. See Eneo Branelli, Filippo Forlani, Chiara Murru, et al., “Dante 2021: Una rassegna delle celebrazioni per i 700 anni dalla morte,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italianischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 103, no. 1 (2023): 503-43.

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99. See Kay, “Dante e l’Italia,” 219. ↑

100. For Franceschini’s full interview, see: https://www.beniculturali.it/comunicato/il-dantedi-nellanno-delle-celebrazioni-dei-700-anni-dalla-morte-di-dante-alighieri-intervista-al-ministro-franceschini-a-cura-di-rai-cultura, accessed 14 June, 2024. For Di Maio’s declarations, see https://iicshanghai.esteri.it/it/gli_eventi/calendario/dante-700-nel-mondo/, accessed 14 June, 2024.

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101. The exhibition was ushered on 17 July, 2021, and lasted until 9 January, 2022.

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102. I am grateful to Dr Selena Daly, who brought to my attention the Predappio exhibition and kindly provided photographs of it. ↑

103. In particular, the panel mentioned was curated by Francesco Mosti, organizer of the exhibition, and Piero Casavecchia. ↑

104. The video can be found on the Facebook page of the association Tessere del 900: https://www.facebook.com/tesseredel900/videos/la-mostra-su-dante-e-il-ventennio-a-predappio-inaugurata-il-16-luglio-prosegue-c/3023714124508070/, accessed 2 October, 2025. ↑

105. Kay, “Dante e l’Italia,” 220. ↑

106. Notably, Meloni utilized the same words of her self-presentation in numerous rallies (Io sono Giorgia, sono una donna, sono una madre, sono italiana, sono cristiana) over the last years. For the complete video, see https://www.fratelli-italia.it/dantedi-giorgia-meloni-fratelli-ditalia-ha-presentato-una-proposta-di-legge-costituzionale-per-riconoscere-litaliano-come-lingua-ufficiale-della-repubblica-video/, accessed 14 June, 2024.

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107. See Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 261. Gerbaudo (“Social Media and Populism,” 5) argues that social media had provided a channel for previously marginalized voices, allowing individuals to express themselves without the intermediation of news media. ↑

108. Meloni adopted an idea of “fixed nationhood” and connected it to the myth of Dante as the father of the Italian language. Accordingly, she adopted a defensive and paranoic rhetoric, stating that such heritage is currently under the attack of foreign influences. It is noteworthy to cite a Fascist essay published in 1940, Autarchia della lingua by Adelmo Cicogna, which portrayed an image of Dante as’ symbol of the defense of “Italianity” and Italian language against foreign terms. See Kay, “Dante e l’Italia,” 222.

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