On May 26, 2023, nearly a year after winning the 2022 national election to become Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni addressed a political rally in Catania, Sicily. The first woman to govern Italy, and the most far-right politician to do so since fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Meloni told her cheering supporters that despite her electoral success, victory was not yet complete. There was one last left-wing holdout in Italian society, she said: the cultural sector.
“I want to liberate Italian culture from a system that you can only work in if you are from a certain political camp,” she said. It was a clear signal of intent, a threatening shot in the country’s culture wars, and the promise of a right-wing counteroffensive to the supposed left-wing hegemony over Italy’s film, television and arts scenes.
Meloni has appeared to be true to her word. One of her first acts as prime minister was to appoint Giampaolo Rossi, a journalist known for defending Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Hungarian far-right leader Viktor Orbán, as head of Italian public broadcaster Rai. Rossi said he wanted to “rebalance media narratives” and reclaim media spaces “usurped by the left.” Other appointments followed. Gennaro Sangiuliano, another right-wing journalist, was named culture minister and spoke of countering “Anglo-Saxon cancel culture and a dictatorship of wokeness.”
Conservative critic Alessandro Giuli took over at Maxxi, Rome’s most important contemporary art museum. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, arguably Italy’s most acclaimed right-wing intellectual, was named president of the Venice Biennale, the institution that oversees a vast series of cultural events, including the Venice Film Festival. “This season the fences will come down,” Buttafuoco declared before his appointment. “A home will be given to those who have not had one until now.”
As the film world descends on the Lido for the 91st Venice Film Festival and the unofficial start of awards season, what’s the state of Italy’s culture wars? What impact could Italy’s far right have on the industry?
Italian filmmakers are worried.
Last summer, virtually all of the country’s top directors, including Luca Guadagnino (Challengers), Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah) and Alice Rohrwacher (La Chimera), signed a petition protesting a move by Meloni’s government to take over the management of Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the world’s oldest — and still one of the best — film schools, interpreting the move as a “violent and crude” attempt to impose a new political orthodoxy.
In May of this year, several journalists at state-run broadcaster Rai staged a 24-hour strike to protest what they said were threats to freedom of speech and cases of suspected censorship since the Meloni government took power. The strike came just days after media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders downgraded Italy in its annual index of press freedom, moving the country into the “problematic” category alongside Hungary, which has seen sharp restrictions on political speech under Prime Minister Orbán.
“There is an obvious loss of the plurality of voices and offering [on Rai],” says Giuseppe Candela, a journalist working for online publications Dagospia and Il Fatto Quotidiano who specialises in the television industry. “Those who don’t align [with the government] are antagonised.”
“But Italy isn’t Hungary, at least not yet,” says Tommaso Pedicini, an Italian cultural journalist based in Germany. “There are definitely fewer government-critical voices on Rai, but they have not disappeared entirely. And the left-wing protests have gotten louder.”
Andrea Minuz, a professor of cinema history at Rome’s Università La Sapienza and a member of the Centro Sperimentale board, notes that political appointments in Italy are the rule, not the exception. When in power, left-wing governments have put their people in the top jobs. Under Meloni and new culture minister Sangiuliano, “there’s been talk of the right wanting to take revenge, to settle scores [with the left],” says Minuz, but so far he thinks the impact has been minimal because the majority of Italy’s cultural “bureaucracy” remains solidly left-wing. “If what lies underneath the surface doesn’t change, nothing will change,” he says.
Beyond this, the Italian right, which is a combination of traditional nationalists, free-market capitalists and anti-government states’ rights proponents, lacks a unified cultural vision. Meloni’s primary cultural indulgence appears to be fantasy novels. She’s a self-professed Lord of the Rings superfan who once posed next to a statue of Gandalf for a magazine photo shoot. Last December, Meloni hosted a four-day fantasy-themed Christmas celebration with a guest list including Elon Musk and Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spanish right-wing party Vox. J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories were, somewhat bizarrely, appropriated by a section of the Italian right in the 1970s, who interpreted him as a voice for tradition against progress, representing the struggle to defend Western, Christian identity against modernization, globalization and foreign invasion.
“The right wing has a point when they say cultural institutions are dominated by the left,” notes Pedicini, “but even if the right wanted to take over [the cultural industries], they don’t have the personnel. Italian cultural institutions have been dominated by the left for decades and there just aren’t enough right-wing intellectuals, qualified people, to replace them.”
Students participate in an anti-fascist protest against Giorgia Meloni on June 20 in Rome.
Imona Granati – Corbis Via/Getty Images
Biennale president Buttafuoco is one of the few “qualified” cultural right-wingers, according to Pedicini: “He’s a bona fide intellectual and an excellent writer and thinker.”
A Meloni ideologue, however, he is not. Buttafuoco has defended the idea of a deep “right-wing tradition” in Italy but is also a recent convert to Islam and now a practicing Muslim.
“If you look at his politics, he’s less of a Meloni-style Italian nationalist and more of a right-wing anarchist,” notes Pedicini. “Many of his opinions are counter to that of the Meloni government.”
“He’s doing very well,” adds Minuz. “Look at the decision of naming Willem Dafoe as the new artistic director of the theatre section of La Biennale: That’s a great choice.”
Fears that Buttafuoco’s appointment as Biennale president signaled the start of a new far-right agenda at the Venice Film Festival have so far not been realized.
In May, Alberto Barbera, the long-running artistic director of the film festival, and a left-wing appointee, renewed his contract for another two years, through 2026. Barbera is widely credited for reviving Venice and making the festival a must-attend awards-season springboard.
“I felt an immediate understanding with Alberto Barbera and I have great respect for the expertise, professionalism and passion he has demonstrated in the years that he has directed the Venice Film Festival,” said Buttafuoco in a statement at the time. “I am extremely pleased that La Biennale will continue down this path with him.”
Ahead of this year’s festival, Barbera nailed his political colors to the mast, announcing on X that he was quitting the social media platform after a series of posts by Musk in which he railed against Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and claimed the U.K. was on the verge of civil war following anti-immigrant riots sparked by far-right agitators.
“After the latest statements by the owner of Twitter (or rather, sorry, of X), I have definitely lost the desire (already weakened) to remain on a platform, the objectives and purposes of which I no longer share,” Barbera wrote.
In his festival selections, Barbera has continued to show his political independence from the Meloni government. Last year, he picked several titles, including Garrone’s Io Capitano and Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, which look at the suffering of migrants trying to enter Europe and can be read as a direct rebuke to Rome’s anti-immigrant policies. The 2024 selection includes Joe Wright’s M. Son of the Century, a scathing TV series about the life of Mussolini, based on the novel by prominent Meloni critic Antonio Scurati.
“There’s been no censorship, no crackdown, no obvious right-wing agenda,” notes one prominent Italian film critic and Biennale regular. “But Meloni’s government is just two years old. I fear they might just be getting started.”
This story first appeared in the Aug. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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