What was your first experience on a film set like?

Perhaps this was partly down to the red hair he inherited from his paternal grandfather, a Neapolitan with Norman roots: his ancestors were from Alcamo in Sicily. When I was seven, I was cast in Siro Marcellini’s “Lola Colt – Face to Face with El Diablo”. I, Pablito, died in the arms of Lola Falana. I also appeared in “The Four of the Ave Maria” alongside my mum, my sister and my brother, playing the part of a Scottish family.

When did he start out in television?

I had a small part in the 1968 film "Odissea", in which I played the blind poet Demodocus, and a major role in "Giovanni ed Elviruccia", a TV drama starring Paolo Panelli and Bice Valori, which is well worth watching again, not least for Morricone’s wonderful score.

Why did Leone choose it?

Perhaps he’d seen me in “Lola Colt”. And Timmy’s older sister, who was the first to be killed by the bandits, is actually my sister. Simona was eighteen, but she was initially turned down because she turned up for the audition dressed in the style of the time: a miniskirt, a headband, and heavy make-up. The agent suggested she come back without make-up and with her hair in plaits. So they took her on.

What do you remember about the filming?

We were filming in Almería, in the desert area of Tabernas where they’d set up the McBain ranch. It took over an hour to get there from the hotel where the crew were staying. I was the youngest and therefore the most pampered. In the massacre scene, I come out of the house when Frank and his men have already killed the others. Leone would say to me: “Now go, but you don’t know what will happen to you – they might kill you too.”

The child is standing in front of Frank and the close-ups alternate.

Fonda had to spit, but didn’t know how. What’s more, the desert climate had dried out his throat, so they got him some liquorice sticks and he spent a while practising until he managed to spit. Leone was keen to get it right.

After the massacre, Jill – played by Claudia Cardinale – arrives and stares in horror at your corpses.

Her wonderful scent has stayed with me; even at the hotel I could tell where she’d been. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a mishap: as I’d been standing motionless in the sun filming that scene all morning, I suffered heatstroke and was hospitalised for two days. My mother kept me company, but Fonda also came to visit me with his wife, and a prop master built me a rocking horse on the spot. I would have loved to take it home with me, but I don’t know what became of it. I still regret it.

How did he perform at school?

For a year and a half, they provided me with a private tutor.

Did her mother encourage her?

Without ever pushing things too far. There wasn’t the media hype there is today, where you feel like a star just for having been on “Big Brother”. I also acted alongside Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Zeffirelli’s “La bisbetica domata”, but I didn’t boast about it. I remember instead the July heat, dressed as a pageboy, at the De Laurentiis Studios on the Pontina.

Was he happy with Bud Spencer?

What’s more, I had been a fan of his ever since I had seen “Lo chiamavano Trinità…” at the Supercinema. Working with him felt like a dream come true. A refined filmmaker and a gentle, kind giant. He used to call me “the redhead”.

At the age of seventeen, he starred alongside Johnny Dorelli in Luigi Zampa’s “Il mostro”, a rather bitter film.

Based on a screenplay by Sergio Donati. A fine, underrated film. Dorelli was brilliant; he could do everything – he even provided the voice-over for me. The music was by Morricone there too.

Why did he stop?

I could have chosen to carry on, but I simply didn’t, even though I enjoyed it. There was just one time I felt embarrassed: it was in “San Pasquale Baylonne, Protector of Women”, one of those comedies that were popular at the time. I emerged, dusted with flour and completely naked, from a cupboard where I had been secretly flirting with Giuliana De Sio, who was making her debut. I felt uncomfortable, with the film crew and the onlookers from the village, Posta Fibreno, all standing round watching.

What career have you chosen?

I am a dental technician; I work with my wife, who is a doctor, and I formerly served as a diving instructor as a hobby. I’ve never boasted about my past: it was only when social media became widespread that people started getting in touch. A month ago, I was invited to Torella dei Lombardi, the birthplace of Sergio Leone’s father, where they’ve set up a museum. I gave him an original still from “Once Upon a Time in the West”. A piece of my heart that my mother had kept safe. When I look back at the photos of me acting alongside Henry Fonda, I can still hear Morricone’s music playing on set. Many years later, I became friends with Maria, Ennio’s sister, who passed away a few months ago. My wife used to play burraco with her. Come to think of it, what a small world it is.

This novel is thus characterised by a dual structure, but such pairs frequently feature in Jaeggy’s works, as in "Proleterka", featuring a young woman and the man she believes to be her father during a cruise; in "Le statue d’acqua", where Katrin and Beeklam proceed in a shared detachment from reality; or in the harrowing tale "I fratelli", where the two characters are engulfed in the coils of violence. Given the autobiographical inspiration behind her works—more or less veiled in a constant game of concealment—the persistent choice of this narrative structure invites us to interpret the possible personal implications and to trace in these couples a projection of Fleur Jaeggy and the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, a friend (“we’d met in a bar. She was sitting on a stool. She seemed protected by a shield that made her untouchable. We spoke. By chance. Until we became friends. True friends. Perhaps it is the only friendship I regret’), but also a key figure in her writing (“She left her mark on my life. She proofread the drafts of my first book with generosity and love. She was the one who encouraged me to keep writing”).

Adelphi, which has all of Fleur Jaeggy’s works in its catalogue, has recently published "Gli ultimi giorni di Ingeborg" (a volume that launched the new aesthetic of the ‘I microgrammi’ series), three prose pieces by the writer centred on this relationship which, spanning different periods of their time together, vividly capture the nature of a bond that helped shape Jaeggy’s writing. In these short texts, she seems to unite—with the magic characteristic of great literature—life and work, biographical events and the way in which these are immortalised on the page. Indeed, one finds the origin of that detachment which shapes Jaeggy’s perspective (“I try to make everything more distant; even the way I write the words must be frozen; I try to strip the sentences bare. ‘It’s a way of keeping things at a distance,’ she once said”), the ironic perspective through which she attempts to come to terms with reality (“Once, when I was eight, my grandmother asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up? And I replied, ‘I want to die’”, as recounted in the story “I Am the Brother of XX”), but also his relationships with contemporary Italian and foreign writers (from Italo Calvino to Uwe Johnson, for example, whom he met whilst on holiday in Forte dei Marmi).

In the cover photograph, taken in Vienna in 1970 by Roberto Calasso – director of Adelphi until his death and husband of Fleur Jaeggy – Bachmann’s gaze stands out as she looks, with a faint smile and lively eyes, at Jaeggy; a snapshot which, in its stillness, fully captures their bond. In her first work of prose, "La casa dell’acqua salata", Jaeggy recounts the 1971 holiday: setting off from Rome in an Alfa Romeo 2600, staying in a house in Forte dei Marmi with two Jehovah’s Witness housekeepers who seem to have stepped out of one of Jaeggy’s stories, and with days marked by a strict yet pleasant routine (“The same thing every day. A little time at the seaside. A bit in the sun. Ingeborg was a brilliant swimmer. Anyone who fancied it had breakfast: a stick of celery and something else. In the afternoon, everyone went to their own room and met up for tea. In the evening, we had dinner at home. And then late-night chats”) – interrupted by encounters that were not always thrilling, such as Calvino’s awkward visit (“He didn’t speak. He just stood there. We’d agreed: if he doesn’t speak, neither will we. It didn’t take much for Ingeborg to fall silent. After perhaps a quarter of an hour, Calvino said: ‘Er… ahem’”). Whilst the second story focuses on a visit to Vienna and the place, Klagenfurt, where Bachmann is buried, the final, poignant piece of prose that gives the volume its title reconstructs the last days of the Austrian writer’s life, spent in a sterile ward at Sant’Eugenio Hospital in Rome (“She makes a gesture as if to blow me a kiss. I shall never forget the look in her eyes. A gaze full of tenderness, heart-rending”) following extremely severe burns which, it seems, were caused by a cigarette left burning in her home. In her search for information and in her questions to the doctors, Jaeggy seems, for a moment, to let her guard down and reveal her true self in the most transparent way, as if the account of her friend’s death required words as clear as those of the Desert Fathers, whose austere wisdom illuminates the final two pages of this story, the absolute pinnacle of Jaeggy’s work and, probably, the origin of everything that followed: a style of writing that sought, through its forms and silences, to recount the unfathomable, to draw closer to the tranquillity with which death is honoured.

“I loved her, and perhaps it’s true, ‘Wir haben es schön gehabt’,” writes Jaeggy as he brings the story to a close. “We had a lot of fun” is what these words mean in German and, perhaps, that is the whole of Jaeggy’s mystery.

In short, individualism has never been in vogue politically. The structure of power is, in fact, inherently anti-individualist. The individual is an irreducible point of resistance against which power tends to crash, and which it must therefore somehow crush (in a more or less gentle, subtle or violent manner, depending on the historical era). Today, however, in the West, individualism is undergoing a dramatic phase for another reason, one far more alarming than the political one. The matter could be summarised as follows: for the individual to be an individual, they must be free; otherwise, they are not. And since freedom is a risk – a multifaceted risk that presents itself in different guises each time – and since Western citizens, particularly Europeans, are no longer willing to take any risks at all, the individual loses its centrality entirely. Indeed, since anything that constitutes a risk must be removed from a society that seeks ever greater security, the very idea of the individual is, in itself, a dangerous one.

Covid, which has returned to the fore in recent days with Fauci’s hearings, has been a vivid illustration of this situation. Between accepting a certain degree of risk in exchange for a guarantee of freedom, and absolute security accompanied by the deprivation of the most basic freedoms, the latter path was chosen with overwhelming support and without hesitation. But that is merely the overarching evidence of a general state of the individual’s devaluation, of their ‘fading into the background’, which appears to be an inevitable condition of our societies. Ageing societies, in fact, by their very nature, become gregarious societies; they seek fewer conflicts, greater stability and tranquillity. Those who are ageing value nothing more highly than security, and it is only natural that this should be the case. But these values trickle down the age spectrum, which becomes numbed by such a situation, and which then reveals its most practical and tangible side in the colossal public debt weighing down on these very societies, condemning them to a de facto state of paralysis. People work and govern without any real drive, merely to repay the debt through exorbitant taxation that strips citizens of a large part of the fruits of their own labour. It is impossible to be an individualist ‘simply’ in economic terms!

At the same time, the capitalist system – which has long been the means by which individuals have managed to channelling a significant part of their unique aspirations and to exercise self-determination in freedom through economic activity, and which in turn has grown through the plurality of decisions and desires of increasingly liberated individuals – has a growing need for predictability and substitutability. In other words, no longer a total freedom in which only the individual can be the protagonist, but rather experiential phantoms – those horrendous ‘experiences’ – to be managed and administered within a framework of managed freedom (though always with the possibility of some form of guarantee and assurance at one’s fingertips).

It is also necessary to clarify one point. We are not referring here to that ‘methodological individualism’ which lies at the conceptual heart of every guarantee of political, social and economic freedom. That premise is an ‘epistemological law’ that will always remain valid, as a bulwark against any oppressive, statist or socialist-leaning delusion. What concerns us here is the individual as an ‘existential possibility’ of a single subject. Such individualism calls for ‘heroism’, which obviously does not necessarily have anything to do with the act of war, but with the exceptional act – that is, one that breaks with the norm, that takes one by surprise, that takes a risk not so much for the sake of it, but in an attempt to draw closer to the truth of oneself as an individual, precisely.

The myth of being ‘free to live our lives as we please’ has never been so widespread. And yet never before has all this taken place along such common, such identical paths. Never has the process of imitation amongst people – partly due to the technical structures within which we spend so much of our lives, namely social media in general – been so pervasive and all-encompassing. Never in history have so many people who claim to live their lives as entirely free individuals resembled one another so closely. What room, then, remains for us to be individuals?

The terrible thing about force is that it appears to us as something we cannot resist, the law of an inescapable necessity

This ambiguity of power – the fact that it is something which necessarily determines us, even if we do not want it to, and at the same time something we go along with because it sets us free – is never an either/or situation or a Manichaean alternative, as both determinists and moralists would have us believe, but rather a tension that is a permanent feature of our lives, one that profoundly shapes our existence in the world.

The problem arises when we discover – and we discover it all too soon, the hard way – that there are forces from which we cannot escape, and this impossibility of escape accompanies the very sense of our existence like a muffled basso continuo, determining the ‘quality’ and ‘tone’ of our self-awareness. This is an existential realisation, one that affects us personally, but which can lead to the metaphysical suspicion that the whole of human life depends on factors which people illusorily believe they can control, yet by which they are in fact completely dominated.

Simone Weil demonstrates this with poignant clarity in her essay on “L’Iliade poema della forza”, written between 1939 and 1941. The great Homeric poem is said to express, with an intensity of vision that remains unrivalled, a definitive truth: that ‘force turns anyone who is subject to it into a thing […], in the most literal sense of the word, because it transforms them into a corpse’. This effect of petrification that force produces on a man who is subject to it – that is, on all men, not only those defeated in battle, but also the victors – does not necessarily coincide with physical death, for it also affects those who continue to live, but no longer as ‘living flesh’, rather as a dead thing.

For Simone Weil, the Iliad expresses a definitive truth: “force reduces anyone who is subject to it to a thing”

This dominion of force ‘extends as far as that of nature’: as in the case of the maternal love nurtured by Niobe, who, exhausted after the death of her twelve sons—left unburied at the behest of the gods— ‘thought of eating when she was weary of tears’, having been rendered ‘incapable even of feeling her own misery’, subject to a command ‘just as cold [...] and harsh as if it were exerted by inert matter’. That same force “crushes just as mercilessly” those who fall under its yoke as it “mercilessly intoxicates those who possess it or believe they possess it”. Not only Hector, but Achilles too; not only Achilles, but Priam as well; not only the Trojans, but the Achaeans too: “by virtue of being blind, fate establishes a sort of justice, blind itself”, and those who kill will in turn be killed with equal measure. It is called Nemesis. That in which ‘executioners and victims are equally innocent’, like brothers in the same misery.

For the protagonists of the Iliad, being aware of death as the sole destiny – as the very ‘future’ of life – means something quite different from the mere acceptance of the natural finitude of existence: rather, it means living ‘subjugated to the yoke of war’, driven by a genuine ‘need for death’, like the need for a terrible fulfilment, in which only destruction can bring liberation from the constant fear that petrifies the passage of life. Thus, although they are still alive, these men belong to ‘a race distinct from that of the living’, having fallen, as they have, to the level of inert matter, pure passivity driven by the impetus of blind forces.

And yet – and here Weil’s perspective becomes poignantly delicate – in the Iliad there resounds, almost imperceptibly, a ‘note’ of pure and touching regret for what force will lead to destruction. The note of love ‘of the son for his parents and of the father and mother for their son’, or that of conjugal love; the note of friendship between comrades-in-arms and – ‘an even greater miracle’ – that of the friendship which can bind even mortal enemies together. This ‘bitterness that springs from tenderness’, this profound regret for what is lost but might have been lived, is what makes one feel the rare ‘moments of grace’ in the poem, and even more so in the fate of force. Everything that ‘escapes the dominion of force’ in the soul and in human relationships is ‘loved, but loved painfully, because of that ever-present danger of destruction’.

This supreme ‘Greek genius’, first encountered in the Iliad, will, for Weil, be inherited solely by Attic tragedy (particularly Aeschylus and Sophocles) and will find its ultimate expression in none other than the Gospel. In particular, in his Passion, Christ “trembles before suffering and death”; he feels separated from mankind and even abandoned by God, thereby revealing the most acute understanding and expression of the dominion of force—that is, of the common destiny of human misery. To look this fate in the face, without illusions or justifications, means ‘to suffer force’ by allowing oneself to be struck by it ‘to the very soul’. And whilst grace – purely human in Homer’s poem, even divine in the Gospels – may prevent one from being corrupted and destroyed by the ‘blow’ of force, ‘it cannot, however, prevent the wound’.

It is this wound that enables a man ‘objectified’ by force to become a living man once more, a being of flesh and blood. Free once more, or perhaps free for the first time. Here, the true stakes become clear in the unstoppable dominion of force – more radical than the necessary laws of physical and biological nature, and yet, within them, even more profound than the ideological disputes surrounding force as the domain of political power. What is at stake is the possibility that that touch of tenderness and love, that extreme, dramatic sharing of human misery, might ultimately arise and act as a true ‘force’ in their own right.

This is clearly not a matter of ‘masking’ the invincibility of this force – as we have outlined it so far – with edifying narratives, nor of taming and making more bearable the tragic consequences it brings about in human existence, which is, as such, forever bent under its yoke. Rather, it is a matter of navigating its dominion, sensing – even more than the inescapable tragedy arising from the fate of death – the drama it provokes when it intersects and intertwines with that other force: the irreducible desire of the human soul, the desire to exist and to fulfil oneself, that is, to be happy.

This desire has often been interpreted as a mere biological force, a physiological impulse falling within the realm of the ‘psychic’, yet always on the verge of turning into a pathological experience. As if it were the individual manifestation, within the conscious self, of an unconscious power: what Freud, drawing on Georg Groddeck, had termed the impersonal, necessary ‘Id’. We still find ourselves in the full grip of the dark, blind force of nature, which now, however, evolves almost seamlessly into ‘culture’ and ‘history’. Yet it remains the relentless force we know, merely managed and processed, perhaps, in bourgeois drawing rooms. Or, in what is only an apparent contrast, it unfolds as a revolutionary and/or reactionary force in the history of classes and states, of capital and labour, of markets and finance.

All these forms, despite their radical differences, are manifestations of the great force – both natural and political – which we delude ourselves into believing we can control and manage on our own, whether as individuals or as a collective, but which ultimately and inevitably plays us all. The force-necessity whose canon was established with geometric rigour once and for all by Spinozian rationalism, which pursues the ‘scientific’ claim to finally resolve the most burning problem of the human condition – that of the freedom of the self – simply by dissolving it into the inevitable acceptance of the necessity of force. The truly fulfilled—that is, happy—man is he who, through intellectual exercise, has learnt to free himself from compulsion, even from that extreme form represented by death, and to no longer fear it, because he intuits that even destruction forms part, ‘divinely’, of the homeostasis of man’s natural forces.

Here is the verdict of the insurmountable force: the desire of the self that becomes the simple ‘conatus’ (Spinoza again) through which human beings tend to preserve their vital force, as a survival instinct. But perhaps not everything is ‘held’ by this force, and homeostasis is ultimately always at risk. It is that happy instability in which the system of tendencies and counter-tendencies leaves room for an asymmetry within the cycle of actions and reactions.

This asymmetry has revealed itself with particular force in the Judeo-Christian experience of the self and the world. The decisive principle – and in this case a truly revolutionary one – is that all the forces of the universe encounter a point of incredible resistance at the heart of the human being, and in their decision – seemingly of no consequence in relation to the cosmic and political order – to ‘will’ the good or to reject it; that is, to open themselves up to grace or, conversely, to close themselves off from it. And the latter is a strange force, for although it is radically ‘other’ than human decisions or merits, it calls upon – and I would almost say awaits – the assent of mortals. It is distinct from our freedom, yet it can be given and manifested only to a free being. Its order is no longer that of mere imposition from above, but of a call from the heart itself. This is what Paul of Tarsus (Letter to the Romans) identified in the conflict between the Law—closely bound to the slavery of sin—and the Spirit of God, which leads us to realise that we are no longer slaves but ‘children’. This means we are capable of welcoming another force that acts in a personal—and responsible—way within our own hearts.

In Paul of Tarsus’s Christian paradox, one senses a new emphasis which would be too much for the Greek genius

This is clearly evident in Augustine’s discovery of the decisive and, until then, previously unrecognised role of the human will in relation to evil. Significantly, in contrast to the Manichaean view – for whom evil is a metaphysical ‘force’ opposed to good on a cosmic level, and against which the individual is powerless and for which they bear no blame – Augustine insists on attributing responsibility for evil to the ‘perverse’ use of the human will, in which also lies the possibility of changing course and ‘converting’ the orientation of the will itself towards being and the good.

With Augustine, the true centre of strength shifts its location and takes root in the heart of man

From that moment on, the true centre of power shifts its location, taking root in the heart of man. And not because it is capable of halting or nullifying the forces that inexorably determine the course of nature and the events of history, but because it is capable of questioning their meaning. Indeed, because it discovers that it is in need of meaning. This need is its true power. It is no cheap solution; indeed, ever since then we have been constantly tempted – and sometimes compelled – to say that there is nothing we can do in the face of the fate that looms over us, even when we misnomerously refer to this mortal fate as the ‘will of God’. Yet every time we think this, we reaffirm, through that very thought, a strength within us that does not yield. This strength of resistance always coincides with the intuition – often a simple suggestion, in some cases merely a fleeting suspicion born of the very fabric of experience – that we are children rather than slaves. The hallmark of sonship is a generation that does not predetermine existence, but rather gives it the vital space to unfold in its own way.

In Paul’s Christian paradox – ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’ (2 Corinthians) – one hears not only, as Weil maintained, the Greek principle of the Iliad, but also a new emphasis which would be too much for the Greek genius, and which is rightly too much, indeed far too much, given its absolute gratuitousness, the most fitting image of which remains that of a wholly unpredictable encounter, such as that with a loved one or a friend who suddenly makes us see the balance of strength in a different light.

This is not a difference between doctrines or between different interpretations, but a difference in experience. It is not a matter of explaining things better, but of paying closer attention to what can make our very weakness a source of strength. Indeed, one might say that weakness, which inevitably marks us all, is precisely the way in which each person lives out and experiences their own specific strength. And what if we were to reflect once more on what the great Leibniz said about "vis" – the force or dynamic energy that acts from within every individual (monad), reflecting – in each person in their own specific way – the forces that sustain and move the entire universe? A point, however tiny, of thought and therefore of freedom – the most astonishing force in the world.

Costantino Esposito is a full professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Bari Aldo Moro. His article continues Il Foglio’s summer series dedicated to the concept of force. Each week, a different author will examine this concept from the perspective of a specific discipline. The other instalments were published on 7 July (Michele Silenzi, “The force that sustains the world”), 14 July (Luca Amendola, “Between force and matter”), 21 July (Luigi Marco Bassani, “The yardstick of us Europeans”), 28 July (Alberto Frigerio, “The plight of modern man”), and 4 August (Lorenzo Castellani, “Damn reason of state”).

At the Mykola Kulish Theatre, on the evening before the invasion, “Forever and a Day More” was staged – a play in which it was up to the audience to choose the ending

Everyone in the room knew what might happen – if not that very night, then soon; if not a matter of hours, then days. The decision to opt for a happy ending is perhaps more a human choice than a military one. “It was an incredible evening; some journalists even wrote that it seemed like witchcraft. The director, Serhii Pavljuk, did a brilliant job.” And in the midst of her excitement as she described it, Alena added: “Then we woke up to the sound of explosions – the war had begun.” The fiction on the theatre stage the night before had given way to a staggering, surreal reality: hard to put into words, especially in a place like Kherson, where fiction ended and reality began – harsh, pervasive, ready to disrupt everyone’s lives, even those who had taken part in the staging of "Per sempre e un giorno in più"; never has a title been more fitting for that last night of peace.

Alena is a poet; during the occupation, she led the city’s literary resistance: “My son saved me.” She always carried him with her

In war, you cease to be who you were the day before. This applies to people, and it applies to buildings. The Mykola Kulish Theatre became a place of refuge and a centre of resistance, where ordinary citizens, actors, directors, sound and lighting technicians, scriptwriters and set designers gathered, lived and organised themselves. In the theatre’s basement, many of the posters that Ukrainians displayed on the streets of Kherson were created to tell the Russians that they were not welcome and had to leave. The theatre’s director, Oleksandr Knyha, was abducted in the early days of the invasion whilst in his hometown, Oleshki, on the left bank of the River Dnipro, which remains under occupation to this day. “He was taken to a basement, where the Russians asked him to collaborate,” says Alena, who has dedicated a book, “Kherson under Occupation”, to the story of the theatre and its director. Oleksandr Knyha was released, but his hometown of Oleshki remains under occupation, at the mercy of Moscow’s decisions, paralysed and destroyed; it is home to around a thousand people – a thousand survivors held hostage amidst the ruins, without hospitals and with no alternatives. In the midst of the war, Alena, too, ceased to be the person she had been until the day before: “I decided to stay in Kherson, with my husband and my son.” The baby, Dobromir, had been born in January and Alena still needed to regain her strength – she’d had some complications – but her decision to stay was dictated not by her health, but by her determination not to abandon Kherson. Dobromir skips around us; he’s now quite at home in the makeshift theatre that his mother and the old Mykola Kulish troupe are looking after. He’s a lively child, a child of war, who has grown up with the sound of drones and explosions to the point where he no longer takes any notice of them.

In war, you cease to be what you were the day before. This applies to both people and buildings: protests against Moscow were organised at the theatre

Alena lets him play on his own; she doesn’t want her anxiety to rub off on him, so she lets him run about the rooms of the building. “Until recently, I used to let him play in the streets, but then one day, in a small playground near our home, we found a landmine. I can’t let him go out like that anymore.” That’s how she’s got used to being a mother; her first few months were spent under occupation, and her pram, with tiny Dobromir sleeping inside it, also served as a cover. When Alena recounts how she used to wander the streets of Kherson during the months of the invasion, it feels as though you’re right there with her. Her name even ended up on a ‘traitors’ list – a chat group containing full names where someone even posted a photo of Dobromir’s little feet covered in blue and yellow socks. Blonde, with a gentle gaze and very youthful features, an unarmed poet, with her child running around her and showering her with attention – in Moscow’s definition, Alena, too, is one of the ‘Ukrainian Nazis’. In the Kremlin, anyone who betrays is a Nazi; nowhere is the term further removed from its historical meaning than in Russia. Alena betrayed, and she did so proudly. She sought out betrayal on the streets of Kherson. “I used to wander round the city’s cafés, taking Dobromir with me – whom she calls Dobromirchyk, in keeping with the sweet-sounding tendency in many Slavic languages to use diminutives – My husband is a firefighter and sometimes had to work for two days on the trot, so I’d go back and forth across the city with the child. We used to live in the city centre, but it soon filled up with Russians, so we moved a little further out, where my parents were also living.”

In those days, there were quite a few residents of Kherson trying to sabotage the occupiers. One of the reasons Ukrainian soldiers managed to liberate the city was also down to the internal resistance movement: it is difficult to liberate a territory where every citizen could be an enemy spy. There are some, there have been some and there still are some, but the majority of Kherson’s inhabitants were waiting for liberation and carrying out small, everyday acts to ensure that the Ukraine that remained – the Ukraine they felt in their hearts – was not suffocated within that occupied space. Alena, too, was among those building this resistance; with her young child, she did not take part in the protests, nor did she go to the theatre’s basement to draw posters against the occupiers, but she would take the bus to a venue in the city centre to join Zoom meetings and discuss Ukrainian culture. “I didn’t take taxis; I made do with whatever public transport was left. I felt safer that way – in those days we feared the Russians were running the taxi services and it could be dangerous. So I’d go into the city centre and hold online literary meetings.” She spoke about Ukrainian culture, and it might seem like a trivial matter to go to a café to discuss books, but it isn’t if the books being discussed are in a banned language: “People from various parts of Ukraine were connected via Zoom; in Kherson, there was almost no internet anywhere, so sometimes I used the Russians’ networks. Once, a poet from Ivano-Frankivsk started saying: ‘We must kill the Russians just as they kill us’.” A statement which, when uttered in Ivano-Frankivsk, in western Ukraine, represents a widely held view that can be voiced openly, could have cost him imprisonment, a conviction and even his life in Kherson. “The situation was telling: I could see the Russian soldiers right at that moment whilst he was speaking; I could see them sitting in the restaurant next to the café where I was sitting. I was taking part in the conversation; I was wearing headphones and no one could hear what they were saying on the other end, but you could tell from my reactions. I was lucky to be sitting in a café full of people I knew.” Not the café owners, but someone had mentioned Alena’s name to the Russians; moreover, some of her conversations with other authors were posted on YouTube, so tracking her down and finding out what she thought wasn’t difficult.

Alena had been managing the literary scene since the occupation: “At a certain point, I realised I would have to start thinking about what to do in case the Russians came to take me away. My husband worked almost all night; he wouldn’t have got there in time for Dobromir, so I just hoped that if it happened, I’d have time to warn my parents.” The fact that the war and the occupation might not seem real is a recurring theme in the accounts of many Ukrainians. Having lived through, suffered and endured these events does not make this feeling any less strange; the horror seems too unreal to have actually been experienced, despite the nightmares and the wounds, and Alena admits: “I felt a certain sense of responsibility; even when I found out I’d been put on the list of traitors, I carried on with my online meetings. It was as if I wasn’t fully aware of what was happening, even though I was convinced I was, because in that life under occupation, in that slow suffocation of an entire city, I was right in the thick of it. Sometimes I imagined that their weapons were made of plastic, like toys. That’s how my mind works, even though horrible things were happening around me and I knew it.” There were stairwells used as torture chambers; there were Ukrainians who were searched during the night, even just to check their tattoos. “My husband was once called out to put out a fire set on a woman’s body; she was completely naked, with the clothes that had been stripped from her still lying beside her, whilst she was burning.” It was hard not to know: “It was as if you were sitting at home, in your living room, and suddenly someone came in and wanted to make you feel like a stranger.” The whole of Kherson’s life during those eight months of occupation was then brought to the stage.

The Mykola Kulish School is now located in one of the most heavily targeted areas of Kherson; drones circle around it, harassing it; many windows are broken, and parts of the walls have been destroyed. For this reason, after a few months, the company decided to move most of its performances to the school, which no longer functions as a school – lessons are still all online – but has been reborn as a theatre, thanks to a hall with a stage that, whilst lacking the trappings of a true historic theatre, allows theatrical activities to continue. Many plays about the war and the occupation are being staged, and not just those set in Kherson. One of the first productions staged after the liberation was about a refugee from the Donbas, who recounted her decision to leave, to abandon the territories where Moscow has moved in and cast a shadow over everything. “We lived through it; they cut off our communications and the internet. They had closed the banks so that we couldn’t withdraw cash. In September, the Russians tried to open a Russian school and had also set up a job centre; they wanted people to work for them.” Memories from that dark period have begun to resurface, and at the theatre, Ukrainians also want to see their own history and their present reflected. “Reflective pieces, veterans’ stories, accounts from the occupied territories. We currently have two productions running: ‘Hero for a Day’, written and performed by an actor who was wounded and tells the story of a friend of his who died on the very first day of the war, on the front line. Then there’s ‘Nel seminterrato’, also by a veteran. We continue to stage the classics; sometimes we blend them with current events – we’ve combined Hemingway with the tragedy of the explosion at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station. We do most of our rehearsals online, to minimise risks and because many of us live outside Kherson.”

The first time the Mykola Kulish Theatre reopened after the occupation, a lady went up to Alena and asked her: “Please, don’t stop.” And they haven’t stopped. On stage in uniform, on stage with grief, on stage with drones. There is a secret that Alena does not hold back; she does not confess it aloud, but it slips out as she speaks: Kherson survived because it held on to Ukraine within itself, whilst Russia hung up its flags, imposed its anthems, its schools and its roubles – in the corners of the city, in private conversations, on public transport, in socks hidden inside shoes – Ukraine survived and was preserved. Now that Kherson is free – even if it has been reduced to ashes, even if it has been struck down, even if at times it lies reeling – what the inhabitants are asking for is this: let’s talk about ourselves, let’s take to the stage, let’s shout out our name, our pain, what saved us; let’s take ourselves to the theatre. It is a necessary moment of self-centredness; the present, or what has just passed, takes to the stage.

The reality of the occupation is now taking to the stage; Kherson asks: let’s talk about ourselves, let’s put on a show. A necessary act of self-centredness

Alena hears that sound in the distance – the motor of a scooter buzzing like a drone. She grows worried, pricks up her ears towards the sky and runs off after saying: ‘I think they didn’t take me away back then because I was always with my son; they thought I was just a mother out and about with a child.’ He saved her; she runs off to save him. It’s not just drones that make that drone-like noise: a tractor appears in the distance round the bend. At the theatre in Kherson, there’s even a chance to have a laugh.

A few figures to give us a better idea. Researchers asked 1,682 participants to read six short stories and rate both their quality and how engaging they found them. Each participant was told – correctly or otherwise – whether the text had been written by a person or by an AI system.

Stories generated by artificial intelligence are rated 6 per cent higher in quality and 8 per cent more engaging than those written by humans. Furthermore, the researchers note, they receive even higher ratings when participants believe they were written by a human author; in such cases, the rating increases by a further 3 per cent.

The study continues with a second experiment and offers further food for thought. A further group of around 900 people were presented with other texts, some generated by artificial intelligence, others written by humans. When asked who the author was, participants answered correctly in 39 per cent of cases in one test and 52 per cent in the other. “Previously reported familiarity with AI systems seemed to help in recognising the typical patterns of AI-generated writing,” says Weisberg. “This suggests that improving AI literacy could help people navigate the new world in which we live, one that is increasingly shaped by AI. Those who claim to have a literary background, on the other hand, proved to be less accurate in their assessments.”

The study also reveals another finding: AI-generated texts often better suit readers’ tastes and are easier to understand. “The models that power AI,” observes Cameron Jones, a psychologist at Stony Brook University who was not involved in the research, “learn to become a sort of average, inoffensive and accommodating individual, capable of appealing to just about everyone.”

Writing in The Guardian, Luke Kennard, a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, goes a step further: “As humans, we tend to personify AI and imagine it as a sort of glowing robot with a benevolent, neutral face, when in reality it is merely predictive code based on a vast, stolen database of real-world texts, physically housed in vast, expensive and destructive data centres with catastrophic repercussions for the surrounding communities.” Kennard adds that artificial intelligence is not a ‘tool’ comparable to a spell-checker or a thesaurus, but rather ‘an existential threat’. Weisberg does not share this view, emphasising that artificial intelligence systems are already capable of generating short stories considered at least as good, if not better, than those written by humans, to the extent that we need to update our understanding of what AI is actually capable of.

In this exchange, however, it seems to us that the issue is not linked solely to the theme of ‘artificial writing’ – which certainly carries its own weight – but also to our notion of authenticity: the idea that a story is worth more because behind it lies a biography, hard work, who knows what insight or what ‘pen’. When put to the test using a scientific method, rather than relying solely on indignation, that idea reveals itself to be what it probably always has been: an aesthetic prejudice – reassuring and almost impossible to recognise when it is one’s own.

Summer 2026, a time for re-reading. An opportunity to revisit the entire Arturo Bandini series by John Fante, that splendid American from Abruzzo who, through a world-famous alter ego – thanks to Charles Bukowski, who rescued him from the depths of oblivion – gave shape to a saga in four parts: "Wait for Spring, Bandini"; "The Road to Los Angeles"; "Ask the Dust"; and "Dreams of Bunker Hill".

Reread the whole thing and see, laid out before you as if on a platter, everything that is missing from most contemporary fiction. And what we, as readers, are becoming less accustomed to expecting. Spoiler: real life instead of a political rally, please. And now let’s start all over again.

Who is Arturo Bandini? A legend. The aspirant within each of us. The aspirant that he himself is: a young Italian-American from Colorado shaped by a deeply traditional Italian family. “A leader,” as Sandro Veronesi described him in an introduction—inevitably full of exclamation marks—to the Einaudi edition of "The Road to Los Angeles". Inevitably: why? Because Arturo Bandini is alive! And he is someone who asserts things with great vigour. He is also someone who denies things with equal vigour. He has been certain, ever since he was fourteen, that he will not end up in the eternal flames, yet he does not seem to meet the requirements – at least, so he confesses in "Wait for Spring, Bandini". Arturo, after all, is someone who never meets the criteria. But he declaims and proclaims. For example, that he is a great writer. Yet he has written only one short story, entitled "The Little Dog Laughed", in which, in his own words, we know that it is not about a dog and nobody laughs. Arturo is an expert on women’s behinds (here, yes, he does meet the criteria: see Dreams of Bunker Hill). And he’s the sort of man who, throughout an entire novel, chases after a novel he wants to write and a woman who’s completely out of reach – Camilla Lopez from "Ask the Dust".

Arturo Bandini first appears on the scene aged fourteen in the first novel about him and leaves it behind in his twenties in the last. He is always in the midst of learning, of struggling with life. His essence, essentially, is precisely this: Arturo Bandini is life, full stop. He is not a reflection on life. He is not a character in the form of a question. Bandini is what it means to be alive, pure and simple, and he is so very much so that he often risks being overwhelmed – yet in the end, no, he does not give in; he stands his ground, chest out; he fails and tries again, because he is someone who both surrenders to and resists life, someone who loves and hates, pursues and waits. And he does so constantly, throughout this so-called tetralogy that sees him in action. And we call it ‘false’ because, more than anything else, it is a publishing arrangement. It wasn’t even written in chronological order: forty-five years passed between the first volume ("The Road to Los Angeles", written in 1936, rejected and published fifty years later when Fante had been dead for a couple of years) and the last ("Dreams of Bunker Hill", dictated to his wife in 1981, by which time Fante was blind and had had both legs amputated due to diabetes). "Aspetta primavera, Bandini" – which tells the story of fifteen-year-old Arturo, still showing little hubris but already at great odds with the world – was published in 1938. "Chiedi alla polvere", the novel about the impossible love of a twenty-year-old Arturo, followed the next year. The first three pages are phenomenal: Arturo has to leave a squalid motel room in California; he falls asleep there, then wakes up and wanders about. Fante’s mastery unfolds in all its purity right from the start: Bandini gets up, does some push-ups, goes out for a coffee, heads to his usual restaurant, smokes two cigarettes, reads the billboards displaying the American League results, thinks of Joe DiMaggio, stands in the middle of the road and bats a ball past an imaginary pitcher, scores a run, sets off down Olive Street and takes us on a tour of it all, thinking back to two friends from Detroit who used to live there, to a pair of women’s legs, to the man in the lift, to an evening at the Philharmonic, then daydreams in front of the Biltmore Hotel and is spellbound by a shop window full of pipes, smoking them all, imagining himself to be a great writer.

Narrative freedom and no amateur psychology. Just observing life without ever judging it. And characters – that is, creatures full of life and contradictions – not arms armed with concepts to be proven. Long live John Fante and his uninhibited, free and vibrant literature: our own, fortunately, not just that of the writer.

It is the widespread tendency towards ‘mosquito-isation’ that one can already experience by tweeting or leaving a poorly worded comment on an Instagram post, from which, on the other hand, those who get the hashtag right (‘the triumph of a clear conscience at zero cost and zero mileage’) may benefit; those who show empathy (branded by Cruciani as the ‘unbearable sentimentality’ of Western society); and, above all, those who are properly outraged, because outrage is the “national sport of imbeciles, practised all year round, requiring no special equipment, involving no personal risk and offering an excellent return in terms of self-esteem” – and what’s more: you can do it without getting off the sofa, “all it takes is a thumb and three lines of comment”.

Crucianism is irritating, vulgar and right-wing; it would like to award a medal to the jeweller who opens fire; it supports nuclear power; it regards coming out as a cunning way ‘to attract attention’; it plays the song ‘Everybody viva el duche’, mocks the antifa who cry ‘authoritarian backlash’ when they’re evicted from the community centre where they don’t pay bills or rent but do good deeds (like the Franciscans, Cruciani notes, who do, however, have to pay for electricity and water); Crucianism takes pleasure in causing offence; whilst pretending to feign, it says what many think but do not say because, according to the presenter-dictator, censorship today ‘manages itself’ and there is no longer any need for a body tasked with enforcing it; ‘Crucianism’ is a factory of freaks who have no right to make demands, from the Brazilian with tattoos on his face to Nico Taurus the swinger, from Mauro Zanasi the flat-Earther to the late Richard Benson, who was – as we believe – the world’s fastest guitarist and the greatest poet of the dwarves.

Cruciani is the yang, just as his reluctant radio partner David Parenzo (“who has an unbelievable capacity to endure evil”) is the yin: they are the Batman and Robin of the “utterly wretched, deeply hated and dearly loved” programme which, at 6.30 pm on Radio 24, sets out on its constitutional mission to get on people’s nerves; a programme that “proudly” boasts of never having promoted a song, but at most of having pilloried a few (Bella ciao: ‘finished, dead, useless’) whilst using hard rock merely as a backdrop for Cruciani’s rants. You can target him with any form of body shaming (see dictionary entry) – he never takes offence anyway.

It’s the other side of the Italian moon, the opposite of Zerocalcare’s – by the way, the presenter asks, at what age does one stop being young in this country? – and of certain guests who also frequently appear on La Zanzara, such as Annarita Briganti, the ‘patriarch hunter’, another sport that can be practised even at an amateur level, especially where patriarchy no longer exists.

If the book has worked as a parlour game – optimising the purchase because your (former) friends have changed, and it can always be reused – spare a grateful thought for the masters of Crux: Gianfranco Funari, “the pioneer”, and Franco Califano, philosopher of “Tutto il resto è noia”. If anyone asks you who they were, do not resort to mansplaining. Refer them to Wikipedia, or send them straight home.

Guido Crepax’s version of the Odyssey, “Nessuno” (“here, the omission of the stratagem in the film, he would have liked it less, because the foundations of the Odyssey – and indeed of the literature that followed it right up to Joyce – rest upon the utìs”) was first published in 1985, but it was not until 1990 that the complete edition appeared from the historic and much-missed Milano Libri, run by the Gandini family – founders of Linus and heirs to a renowned tailor’s shop from the 1930s. A week ago, the last member of the family, Annamaria, passed away at the age of ninety-three. She was idolised by that generation of Milanese who were fortunate enough to develop their own taste through the marvellous items she brought out every day onto the display counters of the premises on Via Verdi opposite La Scala, now occupied by an unremarkable shop: ‘A great sorrow. I still think of how annoyed Annamaria used to get because her husband Giovanni, the publisher, would come round to our house almost every evening on the pretext of having to study the rules of the board games my father was creating, based on the great battles of history, complete with toy soldiers and all: Austerlitz, Waterloo, but also Magenta, Agincourt, and Marco Polo’s journey. ‘But how many more rules do you still have to perfect?’” In the study at 45 Via De Amicis – which was also the address of Valentina’s character; anyone who read *Linus* knew where the Crepax family lived – we’re really talking about another world – they would come up with the most complicated and eccentric ones: “Just imagine: on the game board for the Battle of Pavia (24 February 1525, the French defeat, the end of medieval chivalry, ed.), my father included a drawing of two half-naked maidens fleeing from the French rabble; but, according to a certain rule, you could either free them or even kill them after seducing them.” A perfectly plausible story, yet who else would have had the courage? Apart from in certain boxes “from Enea – do you remember Enea?” (Enea Bracciali, another great name from Milan’s artisan and ingenious past, drowned out by the endless money-grabbing that followed the deregulation brought about by the Bersani law), and the panels “which were kept in a series of specially made crates lined with Morris wallpaper to blend in with the walls”, public traces of those games remain in an advertising insert designed for the launch of the Volkswagen Polo and in certain Christmas gifts that were sent to subscribers of "Tempo Medico" – for which Crepax illustrated the covers for decades – and which included a chess set sponsored by Acutil Fosforo. The rest forms part of the family archive and was exhibited some time ago at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia. “My father had started creating them to entertain us, because he felt guilty about being shut away in his studio all day – a studio which, incidentally, he wanted to be identical in every house: he’d take us to the seaside just long enough for a swim. He hated travelling: he turned down an invitation to the United States because, he replied, he’d only just been to Lugano.”

When we spoke, I had in fact just visited the Brissago Islands, where James Joyce – who was a guest of the owner, the eccentric Baroness Antoinette de Saint Léger – drew inspiration for Circe in his "Ulysses"; Caterina Crepax is, in fact, in the house in Castiglioncello where the large Crepax clan – having sold the famous Villa dei Ronchi designed by Leonardo Ferrari – used to gather in full force until a few years ago. The clan included their second cousin Gigi Zazzeri, a journalist first at "La Stampa" and later at "Il Corriere", and his wife Valentina, daughter of the record producer Franco, from whom Guido took the name for his most famous character; and she, who really bore no resemblance to her at all and was cheerfully blonde and overweight, used to joke about it, just like Rita Hayworth when she said that men went to bed at night with Gilda and woke up in the morning with Señorita Cansino.

In that large holiday home – about which hundreds of thousands of people know everything because Valentina devoted many pages of her collective autobiography to it (“Io e l’asino mio. Storie dei Crepax raccontate da Valentina Crepax”) – there is much of that interplay between classical and pop culture that was the spice of family gatherings in the last century. Homer and William Wyler, Ariosto and the psychedelic flower children – who, on closer inspection, are actually Astolfo. “Exactly. Take ‘Nessuno’, who in the story is Philip Rembrandt, Valentina’s partner, and who was also my father’s alter ego,” observes Caterina: “When he re-emerges from the darkness into which he had fallen after being abducted by the people of the Underworld – who are clearly a symbol of his unconscious – and having blinded the monster, he finds himself in Wisconsin: Guido Crepax was politically hostile to US politics and its interventionism, but he considered certain forms of American art to be unrivalled, such as action films and jazz: in his "Odyssey", Apollo is Jerry Mulligan". His Philip’s journey lasts exactly half the time it took Homer’s Ulysses to return to Ithaca – five years. To depict it – a story spanning nearly two hundred pages – Crepax needed just seven. Valentina, a Penelope torn between bisexual lovers, is dressed in Armani, whilst Calypso, a Black record producer (“he’d got there before Nolan, but it wasn’t the ‘woke’ era; nobody took any notice, let alone made a fuss about it”) is draped in Halston gowns: “He didn’t invent anything; he collected fashion magazines for inspiration”. Complete copies can still be found on the second-hand market.

What interests Blanchot about Kafka? Sacrifice. That is to say, literature and writing as a sacrificial act. ‘We can speak of happiness only if I were able to elevate the world to the pure, the true and the unalterable,’ writes Kafka in his diaries. “Kafka,” says the Frenchman, “always wanted to be nothing but a writer,” but he also felt the desire, whilst knowing he was to die, to destroy his own work, and “perhaps his desire was to vanish, discreetly, like an enigma seeking to escape the gaze”, capable of accepting death, of looking it in the face. If he does not become a writer, Kafka feels lost, because ‘writing makes him exist’; remaining unmarried means having the freedom to be a writer, and therefore no marriage. When he becomes engaged, he feels ‘bound like a criminal’. One can only remain alone. ‘Everything I have done is nothing but the result of solitude,’ he notes in his diaries. He wants ‘to be literature’. Kafka wages a constant battle against the impossible and the mystery of writing, sacrificing himself in the process. ‘Nothing else will ever satisfy me’ – not wine, not women, not music. He wants to escape the real world. He dreams, with anguish, of giving up his job to take the time to do the one thing he wants to do, the one thing he cannot help but do. Kafka is also convinced that ‘the poet’s task is a prophetic one’.

If we sometimes wonder why Kafka has become the pre-eminent writer, almost an allegory, an emblem of purity and dedication, we find the answer in the way Blanchot presents to us the practice, life and questions of the Jewish writer from Prague. And today, in these times of over-production of books – in 2025, over 700,000 were published in Italy alone – and when the label ‘literature’ is slapped onto just about anything, one wonders whether the Kafkaesque example might help to rein in the graphomaniacs, slaves to the publishing-distribution-social media system. Of course, not everyone can be an aspiring monk like the author of "The Trial", but where is the ambition? It certainly isn’t to be found by leafing through the "Lettura" bestseller lists. The way we treat literature and books today is becoming an insult to those who, like a samurai of the written word, suffered terribly when they could not be hunched over their pages, and to those who, like crusaders, regarded writing as the only path. After all, ‘the question “What is literature?”’, writes Blanchot, ‘has never received anything but insignificant answers’.

But how did such a theory come about? “I wrote “Homer in the Baltic”,” says Vinci, “when, confined to my home by Chernobyl, I reread the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”.” It was the spring of 1986. “That’s when I realised there were so many inconsistencies.” Can you give us some examples? “I realised, for example, that the Ithacan archipelago described in the poems was completely different from the Ionian Ithaca. In fact, if we go by Homer’s descriptions, there is only one place in the world with that configuration, and that is in Denmark.” So? “So Ithaca is the Danish island of Lyø, south of Funen.” But in your book there are plenty of examples like this. Another one? “Well, I’m thinking of Telemachus’s journey from Pylos to Sparta. A crossing that Odysseus’s son completes with ease, but which would involve crossing the Taygetus mountain range, which is two thousand metres high. To put it another way, a journey like the one from Rome to Pescara via the Gran Sasso or the Maiella mountains – yet Telemachus completes it very quickly because, in the Danish archipelago, there is a flat island that corresponds to the Peloponnese.”

Let’s recap Mr Mollicone’s question: “Where are the furs, in the Mediterranean? And the misty sea?”. “Eh… Good question. The Homeric heroes, depicted naked on Attic vases, actually fought wrapped in wool, like Nestor with his sheepskin turned inside out. As for the sea – wine-coloured when stormy or white-haired when calm – it corresponds to the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic. But you see, the Odyssey is full of geographical contradictions that are all consistent with one another.” Help us make sense of it all. “It’s simple. The Trojan War was fought before the Homeric Achaeans arrived in Greece from northern Europe. When they founded Mycenae in the Mediterranean in 1600 BC, they wrote their songs, realising that the Aegean basin resembled the Baltic Sea. In this way, they reconstructed their lost world.” A lost world, but evidently well preserved on the shelves of Colle Oppio. And now unearthed by the ruling right-wing government. “Many scholars,” notes Mollicone, “have identified traces, around the Castelli, dating back to pre-Roman populations: cinerary urns with solar symbols very similar to Baltic urns and symbols.” Further evidence of a Homer who sang of Ithaca and Lyø… Of a strange (but real?) Homer who might well appeal to the Mediterranean Meloni and the Baltic Frederiksen. Clues to a pro-European epic? Perhaps, who knows.

To understand what I am talking about, remember that the biblical God created the world by speaking (“God said, and so it was”) – that is, through the Logos – and that the Gospel of John begins with “In the beginning was the Logos”, meaning language. It is no coincidence that in all philosophies, even secular ones, the human being is at the pinnacle of creation because of their possession of the Logos.

What is happening with AI? We are presented with a mechanical device that appears to possess the very ability we knew made the human being unique. So unique that we could conceive of it as the image of God creating the world through the Logos. One cannot help but feel a sense of crisis.

But is that really how things stand? That is the question posed by the numerous books and articles on AI that have been filling the culture sections of newspapers and the shelves of bookshops for some time now. I must confess that, on this subject, I have more problems than solutions.

I would like to set out my view on a much-debated issue at the moment: granted, AI handles language more or less like humans do, but is it conscious of what it is doing? The almost unanimous answer is: no, AI has no consciousness; its actions are ‘agere sine intelligere’ – to use the phrase coined by Luciano Floridi, one of the most authoritative scholars in the field.

But what is consciousness? Since the definitions are all tautological (“consciousness is self-awareness” – and other such platitudes), some scientists and philosophers resort to an operational description by rephrasing the question as follows: “How does a human know that they are conscious?”. The answer may seem strange, but it is the only verifiable one: a human knows they are conscious by telling themselves so. And again: how do I know what I’m thinking? The answer is the same: I know what I’m thinking by telling myself. What’s more, it is often others who help us understand what we are actually thinking by asking us questions or clarifying the meaning of what we tell them. The psychoanalytic consultation is the paradigmatic example of this.

What does all this mean? Human consciousness is inseparable from language. Our own speech and that of others is the mirror in which and through which we seek and construct our sense of self. Without that mirror, there is no such thing as ‘self’. Corollary: if a mechanical device uses language like a human, why on earth should we deny it some form of consciousness? Do we not attribute consciousness to our human interlocutor on the basis of their speech?

It is impossible not to think of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the logos (translated as ‘Word’ in official texts) and the logos was directed towards God (my translation) and the logos was God”. There remains much to study and reflect upon.

So three years later, in 2002, Elisa founded GACI (Greyhound Adoption Centre Italy) to tackle an emergency: the Rome greyhound track was closing and 370 greyhounds needed to be saved. They gave her free rein, provided she took on the problem of those D’Annunzio-esque dogs in a world now indifferent to the declamations of Stelio Èffrena in "Il fuoco", in which he explained to Foscarina, with canine poetry, that ‘there is no machine more precise and more powerful for its purpose in nature’.

Since then, Elisa, president of Gaci, together with a group of colleagues who have become friends through their shared commitment to the cause, has found – and continues to find – homes for thousands of greyhounds. These include not only greyhounds, but also galgos that have escaped an even worse fate in Spain.

It all began that day with Maya.

With the regal air about him. I was unaware, however, that shortly afterwards I would be travelling back and forth between Modena and Rome for a while, when the dog track ceased operations due to a gradual decline in revenue. Fortunately, online betting didn’t exist back then: anyone who wanted to bet on the races had to go there in person, and the dogs, once they were no longer competitive, faced a grim fate because very few people at the time would have adopted an adult greyhound. In Italy, they were only ever seen at dog shows: it was said they were ‘crystal dogs’ and that they needed large plots of land. Gaci was the first association set up in our country to save them.

How did you manage to sort out the instances of ‘Ponte Marconi’?

Thanks to our magical madness. We were a group of runaways, still inexperienced and without the internet communication options we have today, as social media didn’t even exist back then. We embarked on an adventure whose outcome we couldn’t foresee, but fortunately we received help from British organisations, sought the cooperation of various dog shelters and made a name for ourselves through word of mouth.

How does a greyhound retired from racing settle into life at home?

If the environment is favourable, it adapts in no time at all. The greyhound track is a factory of misery, and the change in lifestyle is dramatic for those who have never known stairs, a sofa or a mirror; however, the greyhound settles in well to flat life because it is clean, odourless and lazy, even though it retains a strong predatory instinct. Its athletic abilities are triggered by stimuli with the primal force of a hunter tracking its prey by sight: from hares to wolves, since the dawn of time and all over the world. I would say it is the most cat-like of all dogs.

Where do the animals you are offering for adoption come from?

Particularly Ireland and Spain. Irish greyhounds are retired racing dogs: in their home country, they are regarded as ‘livestock’ in the same way as cows and sheep – farm animals that can be legally put down for a fee of twenty euros. So we have established direct relationships with the owners, who, at the end of the day, are happier to hand the dog over to us than to put it down. The galgos arriving from Spain have never known the racetracks but have spent their lives in the countryside hunting hares and rabbits: when they are no longer needed, the galgueros abandon them or take them to shelters, and although it is less common than before, some people still kill them in the most brutal ways – by throwing them into wells, hanging them or mutilating them. We rescue them from the perreras and bring them to Italy, already fitted with microchips, neutered and with all the necessary vaccinations.

How do you support yourselves?

Through adoption fees, donations and the sale of small merchandise. As a charity, we rely on the voluntary support of our members, who are almost like an extended family. We ask our network of adopters, spread across the country, to personally assess whether a new application can be accepted by visiting the homes and getting to know the families. This means that when a dog arrives, there is already an owner ready to collect it, and if the match doesn’t work out, they bring it back. We do not abandon a single greyhound.

How many families do you find each year?

At times we’ve reached 200–250, but since the Covid pandemic there’s been a drastic drop. Perhaps people are less psychologically receptive or there’s less money around, but something has changed. The percentage of accepted applications remains unchanged, however, at around thirty per cent. We’re carrying on without playing on people’s emotions.

What does this mean?

We do not advocate adoption through heart-wrenching appeals or by playing on people’s sense of guilt. Anyone who wants a greyhound should not be doing a charitable act, but should demonstrate commitment and responsibility.

Did he take on any others after Maya?

I’ve had several. The last one, Merlino, died a few months ago.

Thus begins the preface to a book entitled Russki mir: War or Peace?. It is published by the small Modena-based publisher 21lettere and written by Mikhail Shishkin, born in 1961, one of the most important living Russian writers. He continues: “In recent years I have been tormented by a sense of shame for my country”. Translated into thirty languages, and the only writer to have won his country’s three most prestigious awards – the Russian Booker Prize, the Russian National Bestseller and the Big Book Prize – Shishkin publishes articles in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Independent. In 2022, he won the European Strega Prize for Vanishing Point. He has been living in Switzerland since 1995.

“In recent years, I have been plagued by a sense of shame for my country”

Not surprising. This delightfully hybrid text – part political essay, part memoir (“my mother was Ukrainian, my father Russian”) – cares little for the form it takes but much for the direction it must take – that of clarity, always – is entirely incompatible with the possibility, for its author, of living undisturbed in a country whose nomenklatura he condemns, page after page, without the slightest reservation. With a conversational yet extremely rigorous approach, Russki mir reconstructs an entire historical and political trajectory, right up to the formation of what Shishkin today describes as ‘a criminal police state’ that emerged following a war between factions from which Vladimir Putin emerged as yet another unchallenged ruler of the country – his resistible rise is recounted in a chapter entitled Prostrate. Putin’s poison, Shishkin explains, has seeped into the Russian people, who are now accustomed to systematic suspicion towards the rest of the world. According to the regime’s repetitive narrative, in fact, the Enemy is constantly lying in wait, and, armed with Russophobia, is eager to pounce on the country. Who is the Enemy? Anyone who serves the script (always the same, yet always different). “Putin’s wish list is the country’s true Constitution,” writes Shishkin, whilst portraying a Russia systematically plundered by a regime willing to spend sums with endless zeros on war, especially hybrid warfare. A war “which the West has already lost”.

The most topical chapter is precisely the one that recounts Western collusion with the Russian regime – and the pervasive nature with which these ties have been cultivated and built up. The ‘Young Marmots’ handbook bears the signature of Valery Gerasimov, who in 2013 published an article entitled ‘The Value of Science is Foresight’. The Chief of the Russian General Staff set out, point by point, the ‘strategy of chaos’ – the notion that actual warfare is merely the final phase of a longer and more complex war, which involves weakening the Enemy’s structures through constant flanking manoeuvres consisting of fake news, distorted information repeated ad nauseam, narrative manipulation, smear campaigns, corruption, and all those measures that Gerasimov refers to as ‘non-military’, which must be ‘used in conjunction with the population’s potential for protest’. In other words, a country that does not allow its citizens to demonstrate aims to use the right to free speech granted by the Enemy against it, after having turned it into a loaded gun. “Democracies have underestimated the challenge posed by Moscow,” writes Shishkin. “The corrupt Moscow regime forms metastases that spread throughout the world and brazenly corrupts sections of the elite. Billions in criminal funds end up in Western banks. Politicians and businesspeople are ready to betray Ukraine for personal economic gain.”

The brazen corruption of sections of the elite. “Billions in criminal funds end up in Western banks”

A war with its own techniques and strategies: the propaganda claims that ‘behind every demonstration of discontent lie the Western secret services’, and the strategy is one of intimidation. “To frighten politicians, journalists and the military into believing that Russia is ready for a military confrontation with NATO. Moscow is banking on the West always backing down and not risking a Third World War over Narva or Donetsk. The Kremlin’s strategists think like common bandits: it is not the strongest who wins, but the one willing to see it through to the end.”

Aware that Russia’s future depends on its ‘deputinisation’, Shishkin calls on intellectuals to fulfil their duty to ‘show the world that there is another Russia’. Not all Russians have supported this war, which is not a war between Ukrainians and Russians. It is a war between human beings who speak both Ukrainian and Russian, and inhuman beings who speak the language of lies and are prepared to carry out criminal orders. Putin’s crime is to have poisoned people with hatred’.

Common Kremlin strategists have been banned: “It is not the strongest who wins, but those who are prepared to see it through to the end”

And politics with its cult of domination. “Russia lives by a single law: the boundless power of the Kremlin. Democratic terms in Russia are empty words, devoid of meaning, which have no effect whatsoever,” warns Shishkin. “In the West, governments are judged on the basis of the terms they use; in Russia, only by their façade, and everyone in Russia knows that behind it lies a void.”

One of the book’s most interesting reflections is precisely that on language. One’s thoughts turn to some of the images that have most helped us understand the vile nature and grotesque excesses of Putin’s excessive power: those of the arrest of numerous people who, in March 2022, were holding up placards with no writing on them. (It was the early days of the war, when the word ‘war’ could not be uttered, but now everyone uses it – including Peskov and Lavrov – and who on earth will ever tell those still locked up in prison for having held up a blank sheet of paper four years ago?). Taking censorship as his starting point, Mikhail Shishkin examines the relationship between words and meanings in the Russian world, where ‘words serve a different function: they are a cover. What may seem like a lie to an outsider contributes to general understanding within the Russian context. It is not a paradox; it is the Russian reality of words. When Putin claims to be telling the truth to his country, everyone knows he is lying, and he himself knows that everyone knows it. This is what happens: fake voters take part in fake elections for a fake Duma. Western media and politicians try to judge the Moscow regime by its statements, but these statements have no meaning: the Russian truth is a lie. Marxist dogmas were taught at school, but in the staff room they were mocked behind closed doors. Russia has returned to the Soviet era, to endless lies.”

The writer recalls how, during rallies, it was claimed that the USSR was the greatest bulwark of peace, whilst at the same time it was sending its own tanks to crush the uprising in Hungary in a bloodbath. On television, the fulfilment of the five-year plans was joyfully celebrated, yet the supermarkets were being emptied. “We lived in a country where socialism had triumphed and everything belonged to the people, but we had nothing, and people wiped their bums with clippings from Pravda proclaiming that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. An extraordinary country full of slaves.”

During the harshest years of the Soviet era (Shishkin describes them thus: “Class struggle served as the moral cover for the exercise of violence, whilst the romantics of communism were forced to step aside, usually with a bullet to the head”), in those dark and humiliating years, literature proved to be essential. “Books such as The Wind Blows, and Then Returns by Vladimir Bukovsky were a turning point for my conscience. At sixteen, I had two dreams: to become a writer and to travel the world.”

Literature as a lifeline during the harshest years of the Soviet era. Vladimir Bukovsky was instrumental

Dreams that had to wait, because after the fall of the Wall the nomenklatura reacted, and on the morning of 19 August 1991 a State of Emergency Committee announced on television that it was forced to take responsibility for the country because Mikhail Gorbachev had fallen ill. And it brought tanks into Moscow. “Swan Lake was shown repeatedly on television. It felt like a funeral march. That was the coup. I’d never felt so awful in my life,” confesses Shishkin, “like a prisoner who’d escaped from prison, already hoping to be free, before being recaptured.”

Hope was called Europe. The dream of a dignified life. But it was a time of disappointments because, after Mikhail Gorbachev – who was no reformer; indeed, ‘perestroika was a special operation by the Communist nomenklatura to convert its absolute political power into immense private wealth’ – a brutal war broke out between business clans. And following a settling of scores, chaos and lawlessness, “the desire for a more orderly world took the form of nostalgia: the Soviet Atlantis was idealised after its demise, just as tsarism was idealised during the Soviet era”.

Even under Boris Yeltsin, Russia had already attempted to use war as a means of reclaiming its identity. The declarations of independence by fourteen former Soviet republics were particularly galling, so Minister Pavel Gracëv literally (and publicly) promised Yeltsin: “Grozny in two hours, with a handful of paratroopers”. The war lasted two years, claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, and ended in Russia’s defeat. The country was plunging into a repeat of its own history: provocations, electoral manipulation, bribery, dirty political tactics, poisonings. Vladimir Putin won the election by blaming Chechen terrorists for a number of bomb attacks. And he concocted a pretext for a second Chechen war, whilst “the frightened population enthusiastically welcomed the war on terrorism. A year earlier nobody knew him; now Putin was the saviour of the nation”. And although – Shishkin adds – “his men were caught red-handed with explosives in a basement in Ryazan”, unspecified military exercises were cited as the reason. “MP Sergei Yushenkov and journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, who called for a public inquiry, were killed. The former was shot outside his home; the latter was poisoned.”

Also worth reading is the section concerning the escalation of lies that led to the war of aggression against Ukraine, aka the ‘special military operation’. It all began with the annexation of Crimea, seen as compensation for Ukraine’s drift away from Russia, and naturally presented as a blatantly Russophobic American plot. “Television implanted in people’s minds the idea of Crimea’s return as a sign of restored greatness,” says Shishkin. “That drunkard Khrushchev had given it away to the Ukrainians, and now historical justice had to be restored. Militias were sent in to destabilise the region.” Only to deny it, and finally admit it. The point is that “Ukraine was never forgiven for the Maidan”. It is interesting to note that, at the time of the Euromaidan, people in Russia expressed admiration for the Ukrainians’ courage. And that a certain unmentionable envy even crept in. In fact, the revolution “was immediately smeared by Russian television” and it was claimed to be a NATO conspiracy “attacking Moscow via Ukraine. When Maidan then triumphed, the television changed its rhetoric yet again: the Ukrainians were Nazis, admirers of the SS, and it was time to save oneself from the genocide they were set to carry out. Unidentified troops occupied Crimea, and the annexation sparked hysterical jubilation’. The victory over the United States, Europe, the West and the whole world was celebrated, Shishkin recalls. ‘Many took up arms voluntarily, believing they were going to fight fascism. The resurrection of the Empire was declared the supreme meaning of existence’.

Mikhail Shishkin, a true writer – his splendid novels are all published by Voland, and in this writer’s opinion, "The Capture of Izmail" ranks amongst the finest pages read in recent years – does not spare the West a few well-deserved slaps on the wrist either. And he reminds us of the need to reinvigorate the European dream. “It is more likely,” he wrote in Russki mir in 2022, “that Westerners, alarmed by the chaos and the possibility of war, will re-elect their governments, replacing anti-Putin figures with pro-Putin allies, rather than Russians rising up in rebellion.” A prophecy that we hope will prove wrong – and soon.

A case that is purely essayistic in nature, originating in that Bloomsbury group in which the novel broke away from its classical form, concerns Lytton Strachey. In his "Eminent Victorians" (1918), Strachey observes that we now know too much to be able to write history – a discipline that is, in fact, aided by that touch of ignorance which helps to simplify and make choices: we must therefore approach the subject by capturing it from foreshortened and unexpected perspectives. The same theme recurs in "Miniature Portraits" (1931), now published in a sumptuous volume by Palingenia and translated into Mario Fortunato’s beautiful Italian. In the second section, devoted specifically to historians, the author writes of Gibbon that, fortunately for him, ‘the material he had to deal with was not yet so voluminous as to be beyond the capacity of a single, highly gifted mind’, whereas ‘in the following century’ even he ‘would have buckled under the weight of the accumulated knowledge’. As in the work of his mentor Aubrey, brevity lends a humorous touch to the biographies here, as well as to the vast historical panoramas summarised in a single paragraph (the one on the transition from feudalism to the bourgeoisie – that is, from ‘armour’ to ‘wigs’ to ‘good manners’ – is masterful). This is a very English brand of humour, just as English are the attention to customs, the pride in eccentricity and local traditions, the amused pragmatism (which, in the chapter on Harington, brings together the invention of the flush toilet and the translation of Orlando Furioso), as well as the portraits of the Cambridge pedants – irascible big kids fixated on a sort of meta-historical Victorianism that, by poetic justice, descends into madness. After all, the most frequently cited period is the 17th century, when, amidst new science and esoteric legacies, it was the English themselves who ensured the triumph of the individual, whilst sects ran riot in the streets of London and heretics, in keeping with the race’s compromising habits, were neither left in peace nor put to death, but were merely annoyed in moderation: it was then that an inelegant, anti-mystical National Church, composed entirely of bourgeois scholars and organisers, came fully to light.

When faced with his subjects, Strachey insists on asking the questions one would expect of a worthy grandson of Montaigne. What is the relationship between what people believe and their private or social behaviour? And between physical features and thought – for example, between Hume’s dull-witted face and his mental agility? How do ideas change as we move from season to season, or from place to place? Why do intellectuals so often choose subjects so far removed from their own world? Which cultural ‘foods’ are beneficial or harmful to a particular type of person? Is there a link between a narrow outlook and productive happiness? Gibbon’s egotism was capable of ‘turning even an absurdity into a virtue’ – and it was precisely the incongruity between his milieu and his subject matter, namely the decline of the Roman Empire, that yielded his masterpiece. Boswell was aided by his lack of modesty, and Macaulay even by his liberal philistinism, which cost him a lack of understanding, though this was offset by the robustness of his style. The same would have held true for the thunderous Carlyle, had he known himself better – that is, had he possessed the one quality that enables one to remain credible even when venturing into an almost unknown realm. Portrait after portrait, an implicit and mischievous comparison emerges with the other architects of modernity, the French, who are branded as grotesquely frivolous. Thus, in the piece on de Brosses and Voltaire, caught up in a long-standing dispute between landowners, the author strikes a blow against both: the President of Dijon loses his seat at the Académie, and the doyen of the Enlightenment loses face. Never, however, as much as Abbé Morellet – the Enlightenment thinker who, when the Revolution snatched away the priory he had only just acquired, shamelessly turned against the new era he had once extolled.

Vannacci is not concerned with the art of war but with the art of propaganda. With him, generals might leave their troops to set up their own

The New Art of War

Sun Tzu or Clausewitz? Rommel or Georgy Zhukov, Colin Powell or Mykhailo Fedorov? Strategy and tactics, men and resources, doctrine and practice – everything is constantly changing; our security is never entirely guaranteed. There is endless debate on defence, on Italy’s rearmament or, rather, on its adaptation to the new international and European landscape, but the dilemma is always the same: butter or guns. Let us set aside this economic-based approach (important though it is) and ask ourselves whether the armed forces are ready. Doing so immediately opens two doors: the first leads us to the question of what needs to be done, the second to who does it and how.

We could divide the post-war period into four phases – plus a fifth, which is, however, only just taking shape. The first, that of reconstruction, is still a legacy of the bloody past, caught between defeat at the hands of the Anglo-American Allies and the internal Resistance. It was from this period that the senior officers emerged who would play a leading role right up until the 1960s. The second phase is marked by the ‘dark knights’, those who controlled foreign and domestic intelligence services that grew ever more powerful as the Cold War intensified: General De Lorenzo, to name but one. The third phase is dominated by internal security, the fight against terrorism and the Mafia, and here the hero is undoubtedly Dalla Chiesa. The fourth phase began in the 1980s, under President Pertini, with the Italian armed forces’ first major overseas mission, in Lebanon. Since then, the entire military leadership has become increasingly internationalised, gradually integrating with NATO, both in doctrine and in practice. Commanders develop strategy, tactics and organisation alongside their colleagues in the Atlantic Alliance, under a dominant American influence. The armed forces have become professionalised, and compulsory military service has also come to an end. Now is the time for a twofold leap forward: technological and strategic.

Deployment to hotspots – indeed, scorching hotspots – is expanding, from Bosnia to Afghanistan, from Central Africa to the Indian Ocean, across north-eastern Europe, and even in Saudi Arabia with 400 troops; as a result, international missions and operations have risen to 40 and have so far cost one and a half billion euros a year. Generals no longer study the art of war solely from books; they are becoming its protagonists, whether in the form of peacekeeping or even the ‘imposition’ of peace. The fifth phase is that of a new global imbalance accompanying the digital revolution, a phase being forged with the blood of Ukraine and the massacres in the Middle East. The Italian armed forces are not yet ready; they need to adapt fundamentally to the new scenario, and following the American model does not help – quite the contrary.

The United States’ approach to warfare remains the same as it has always been: to deploy the maximum available force to attack the centre of gravity of the enemy’s forces and destroy it. General Colin Powell applied this strategy in the first Gulf War, with the liberation of Kuwait following its invasion by Saddam Hussein. Its application proved far more complicated during the invasion of Iraq, particularly once urban guerrilla warfare broke out. Against Iran, the Pentagon followed the same doctrine once more, and it did not go well. Why? Paul Scharre, deputy executive director at the Centre for New American Security, explains this in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs: “The United States still has the most powerful military in the world, but it is not prepared for the new era of warfare – an era of drones that have transformed both the dynamics of combat and the economic landscape,” writes Scharre. ‘It is already clear that the US military must produce its own low-cost drones and interceptors, adapting them to the imperatives of artificial intelligence.’ The American military-industrial complex has been caught off guard and is struggling to adapt; this is even more true of its European and Italian counterparts, which were largely formed under American auspices and adopted its doctrine. But before we delve into the equipment, let’s take a look at who is piloting them.

The guardians of security

The post of Chief of the General Staff was introduced in 1985 by Giovanni Spadolini, then Minister of Defence, to streamline the high command, mediate, bring together different perspectives and, as far as possible, avoid traditional rivalries between the different branches of the armed forces. It is standard practice for there to be a rotation at the top. From 2024, the role will fall to General Luciano Antonio Portolano. A 66-year-old Sicilian from Agrigento and a Bersagliere, he has held various roles ranging from operational command to military attaché at the Italian Embassy in London. Commander of the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon from 2014 to 2016, in August 2021 he led Operation Aquila Omnia, which enabled the transfer of over five thousand people, mainly Afghans, to Italy. The Army is led by Lieutenant General Carmine Masiello, born in 1963 in the province of Caserta; an artillery officer, he attended secondary school in Belgium (his father was posted to NATO headquarters) and holds three degrees (from Bologna, Turin and Trieste) as well as having graduated from the Modena Military Academy. A paratrooper with the Folgore Brigade, he saw his first action in Bosnia, followed by Lebanon, Somalia and Afghanistan – where he criticised the work of the AISE (foreign intelligence service), addressing the then Chief of the Defence Staff, Biagio Abrate. In short, Masiello is a tough character. To Gianni Alemanno, who described the Folgore as “the quintessence of the Italian right”, he replied: “We are the quintessence of the homeland”. The Navy is commanded by Admiral Giuseppe Berutti Bergotto, a graduate of the Naval Academy in Livorno, who has undertaken a wide variety of deployments and missions; he has also taught at Annapolis, the US Naval Academy. At the helm of the Air Force for the past year has been Antonio Conserva, an Air Force General from Taranto, aged 63, who cut his teeth flying the F-104 Starfighter; he spent three years in the United States before returning to Italy, first to the 61st and then to the 36th Wing. He then moved on to ‘bureaucratic’ and organisational roles, eventually rising to the General Staff. Since 2021, he has served as chief of staff, first to Minister Lorenzo Guerini and then to Guido Crosetto. The fourth branch of the armed forces, the Carabinieri, welcomed Salvatore Luongo, a native of Naples and one of the ‘Nunziatella boys’, in 2024. He commanded the most important regional commands, such as those in Rome and Milan; from 2006 to 2011 he served at the Quirinale alongside Giorgio Napolitano; and he also has extensive experience as Chief of Legislative Affairs at the Ministry of Defence.

How different are today’s top generals from those of the past? In the immediate post-war period, there were only two sources from which to draw military personnel: the royal armed forces and the anti-fascist Resistance fighting against the German occupation. These were often opposing forces, but during the harshest years of the Cold War they demonstrated a remarkable convergence. Following General Raffaele Cadorna’s brief tenure, Efisio Marras was appointed to lead the army in 1947. He had been imprisoned by the Germans and handed over in 1944 to the Salò regime, which detained him in prisons in Verona and Gazi Ligure, from where he managed to escape to Switzerland. Alberto Briganti, a pioneer of aviation who was entrusted with rebuilding the Air Force, was also imprisoned by the Nazis. Since 1947, the Navy has been under the command of Francesco Maugeri, who organised clandestine activities from Rome after 8 September.

A singular figure from that tragic era remains the moustachioed Admiral Gino Birindelli, a war hero (for having managed to penetrate Gibraltar), a prisoner of the British who was released in 1943, loyal to the King; with the establishment of the Republic, he became a rear admiral and held important posts, including at NATO. In 1972, having completed his service, he became president of the Social Movement and a member of parliament. A staunch monarchist, his ‘fiery temperament’ meant he failed to fit in here either; he came into open conflict with Giorgio Almirante and even ended up on the P2 lists. Giovanni De Lorenzo served in the Russian campaign as an artilleryman; after 8 September 1943, he became a partisan, first in the Alps and then in Rome. He forged links with the National Liberation Committee, was also held in high regard by the left, received decorations and was promoted; in 1952, he was put in charge of SIFAR, the intelligence service, where he became extremely powerful. Backed by the President of the Republic, Giovanni Gronchi, and his protégé Enrico Mattei, the head of ENI, he began a systematic programme of profiling in the very style of Edgar J. Hoover’s FBI. Around two thousand files were ordered to be destroyed by Giulio Andreotti in 1974. De Lorenzo also pulled the strings in the fierce battles for the Quirinale between the Christian Democrat heavyweights. He organised the ‘Solo’ plan, but in 1962 he became commander of the Carabinieri thanks to the decisive vote of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Four years later, he was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Army, with the support of the left, starting with Nenni and Saragat. In 1967, he was dismissed for ‘deviations’ during his time at SIFAR when – as later revealed in L’Espresso, edited by Eugenio Scalfari – he had plotted a military-political coup. All the contradictions of Italy – both the monarchy and the republic – seem to be concentrated in the figures of the ‘dark knights’ or the generals who wore ‘fake beards’, as Francesco Cossiga put it, a man who knew a thing or two about spies. Among them, Vito Miceli stands out; he too became an MSI MP once he had hung up his camouflage uniform.

Admiral Gino Birindelli was a war hero and held posts within NATO. A member of the MSI, he came into sharp conflict with Almirante and even ended up on the P2 lists

Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa has attained legendary status. A leading figure in the fight against terrorism and the Mafia, he was murdered in Palermo in 1982, along with his young wife Emanuela Setti Carraro and his bodyguard Domenico Russo. A carabiniere and the son of a carabiniere, he too took part in the Resistance and, from 1947, devoted himself to combating banditry and organised crime, first in Campania and then in Sicily, until 1973 when he was transferred to Turin, promoted to brigadier-general and tasked with defeating the Red Brigades. He set up an anti-terrorism unit and, in 1978, was granted special powers – though not without facing both external and internal opposition. In 1982, he was appointed Prefect of Palermo; he took office on 30 April, and on that very same day, Pio La Torre – secretary of the Sicilian branch of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the MP who had tabled the bill criminalising mafia association – was murdered. A decisive and imperious figure, Dalla Chiesa secured a scope for action that had previously been impossible, experiencing both successes and defeats, such as in the Moro case. His assassination at the hands of Totò Riina and Beppe Provenzano paved the way for the rise of Cosa Nostra.

It was NATO that established the rules for external security, but ever since the number one enemy – the Soviet Union – collapsed, the number of enemies has begun to multiply. Traditional wars in the forests of Bosnia and, today, on the plains of Ukraine, but also asymmetric conflicts and widespread terrorism. Defence doctrine and practice had to change. And so emerged the intellectual generals who introduced new or revitalised visions. A prime example is Carlo Jean, a general and former adviser to Cossiga, who revived geopolitics in Italy – a Nordic doctrine (originating in Sweden, practised in Germany as ‘Lebensraum’, or living space) that had been eclipsed by the political and ideological clash between the American and Soviet empires. Generals have played important roles as advisers to the President of the Republic, who chairs the Supreme Defence Council and holds command of the Armed Forces.

There are now many officers who have been thoroughly integrated into and trained by NATO, with experience gained in the United States and on dangerous missions across various theatres of operation. We should remember Franco Angioni, who died a year ago. He was a colonel in 1982 when, immediately after the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila at the hands of the Lebanese Phalange, under the indifferent gaze of the Israeli army, he was entrusted with leading the Multinational Force in Lebanon. It was a true baptism of fire, even though their task was one of ‘interposition’, acting as a buffer between the combatants. Appointed in 1989 as an adviser to Ciriaco De Mita, then Prime Minister, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 2001 as a member of the Democrats of the Left following his retirement from the military. The Birindelli era was over.

How to become a general

The cursus honorum begins as soon as pupils leave compulsory education. Between the ages of 15 and 17, after completing two years at a civilian school, it is possible to sit a public entrance examination to join a military institution such as the Nunziatella in Naples or the Francesco Morosini Naval Academy in Venice. Upon completion, those who choose to continue must pass another entrance examination to gain admission to the academy. There are three such academies, but only the one in Modena prepares students for a career that could lead to the rank of four-star general. Students study various subjects as part of a standard university programme, alongside military training. After two years, cadets are promoted to second lieutenant and alternate between theoretical study and periods of practical training within operational units. Promotion to the rank of lieutenant is possible upon obtaining a degree, whilst appointment as a captain takes place only seven to nine years after graduation; this is followed by five years in that role for those wishing to apply to become a major and, subsequently, a lieutenant-colonel. Most generals have decades of military experience.

Knowledge of several languages is essential, starting with English at the very least. A handbook for those wishing to embark on this long and difficult journey sets out the fundamental qualities one must possess or acquire: study, dedication, courage, experience, strong communication skills, active listening, commitment, cultural awareness, insight, the ability to solve complex problems, a strong sense of organisation and discipline, but also adaptability. With all this, one can achieve a good level of leadership, but to become truly outstanding, one needs that certain something that not everyone possesses. A young person, reading all these guidelines, is bound to feel daunted, but the secret, ultimately, lies in the ability to take it one step at a time.

Vannacci, too, rose through the ranks from Modena onwards, eventually reaching the intermediate rank of Major General (two stars – higher than Brigadier General and lower than Lieutenant General) and only in 2023 upon his return from Moscow. He undertook field missions – in Afghanistan, for example – and worked in embassies; he commanded the paratroopers of the Col Moschin and Folgore regiments, and headed the international relations office at the Defence Staff. It was precisely this exposure that earned him a network of contacts which he now intends to put to good use for the New Right International.

This brief overview makes it clear that the military leadership, particularly that which has emerged since the 1990s, possesses a broader range of expertise than the average member of a fundamentally domestic political class. There is a gap in competence, experience and vision compared with the vast majority of MPs and ministers; a difference that must be utilised with loyalty and respect for the Constitution and the institutions.

Vannacci headed the international relations office at the Defence Staff. He now wants to capitalise on his network for the International Right

The players involved

This is not stated out of caution or modesty, but Italy is one of the world’s strongest military powers, ranking tenth in the Global Firepower Index and second within the European Union (just behind France). There are 165,000 soldiers on active service at all levels, out of a total strength of 288,800 personnel, including reservists and security forces. The defence budget stands at approximately 37.3 billion dollars. The Air Force has nearly 1,000 aircraft, including advanced fifth-generation fighter-bombers (such as the F-35). The Navy has a modern fleet comprising aircraft carriers (the Cavour and the Trieste) and advanced submarines. The Army is equipped with armoured vehicles, artillery and highly specialised infantry for international missions. Following the end of the Cold War, whilst serving as Minister of Defence, General Domenico Corcione initiated a transformation, though without changing the model of the armed forces. After the 2003 attack in Nasiriyah, under the auspices of the ‘Antica Babilonia’ mission, various investigations highlighted the limitations of the recruitment system based on compulsory military service. The armed forces were caught off guard by the emergence of other small-scale conflicts, such as those in Iraq and Bosnia. In 2005, under Minister Antonio Martino, compulsory military service was suspended (it can be reinstated if necessary; a decree is all that is required). A professional army was thus adopted, with training tailored to NATO and UN standards (peacekeeping and peace enforcement).

These are the strengths; the weaknesses stem from insufficient financial resources to adapt the Italian defence system to new threats and to the geopolitical landscape in Europe – particularly following the invasion of Ukraine – and to the new ‘perfect storms’ sweeping across the Middle East, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Since the Lebanon mission, the Italian Army has demonstrated its ability to manage peacekeeping missions, but it has not been deployed in open combat operations. The Navy is effective at patrolling the seas and combating piracy off the Horn of Africa. The Air Force had its baptism of fire in the first Gulf War in 1991 and then in the Kosovo campaign eight years later. In any case, however, a dilemma has arisen that needs resolving. Deployment on international missions absorbs the bulk of resources and leaves the rear exposed, so to speak. And this calls into question the role of the Army in particular.

The Navy is amongst the best, and the Air Force holds its own, although there is a need to make the leap to Superjets to replace the 115 American F-35s. Submarine warfare is a key focus. We have submarines, but a weakness in our submarine fleet has been addressed by the agreement with Germany for the U-212s, which are not nuclear-powered but can remain submerged for 15 to 20 days without needing to surface to take on air. Control of the underwater world is truly vital; a network of cables, pipes and oil pipelines, through which both energy resources and data flow, is fundamental.

New technologies do not replace those of the past; rather, they complement and transform them. It is in the field of mechanised equipment that Italy finds itself at a disadvantage compared with other powers, with just 200 Italian-built main battle tanks, the Ariete C1s, designed in 1984 and entering active service in 1995. The Defence Minister has launched a plan to procure German Panther tanks, manufactured in Italy by a joint venture between Leonardo and the Franco-German firm KNDs. The agreement with the German group Rheinmetall will supply the Lynx infantry fighting vehicles. By 2040, there should be 271 Panthers and over a thousand Lynxes. If we are talking about people rather than machines, it is not just a matter of making the technological leap based on what we have learnt from Ukraine; we also need to strengthen those carrying out the manoeuvres – that middle echelon which does not, in itself, possess a combat mindset. General Masiello is aware of this and is working on it, experts say, but time and resources are needed for training.

Recruitment has become more difficult for demographic and cultural reasons. In the navy, it is hard to say ‘I’m signing on’ and be away for months whilst one’s wife lights the lamp by the door. The legend of a girlfriend in every port is more befitting a merchant seaman than a combatant. Rebuilding and maintaining an adequate reserve of personnel is one of the main challenges, and this too requires years and resources – a point that Minister Guido Crosetto never tires of emphasising. Two draft bills provide for an increase of 40,000 personnel by 2033 and the establishment of a reserve divided into an ‘operational mobilisation’ reserve, comprising personnel who can be recalled to service for up to five years after discharge, and a specialist voluntary reserve.

Recruitment has become more difficult for demographic and cultural reasons. Rebuilding an adequate pool of personnel takes years and resources

There’s a bug on the right

Let’s return to Vannacci. There’s always a first time; who knows if this will be the last. He has written and spoken about everything, but amidst all this display of words and images, amidst dressing gowns and Roman tunics, we do not know which ‘doctrine’ he follows or what the Generalissimo would do to defend his country from external enemies. Here we immediately encounter his greatest weakness. In Moscow, during his three years as a military attaché at the Italian embassy, he encountered Mother Russia and Father Vlad. His infatuation was so blatant as to arouse suspicions that, for a member of the Italian Armed Forces, go very, very far indeed. When Vannacci published his book in August 2023, Crosetto spoke of “personal ramblings” and the entire army general staff were taken completely by surprise. In February 2024, the general was suspended for 11 months; Matteo Salvini then had him elected as a Member of the European Parliament, before realising he’d let a poisonous worm into his own house. Now Futuro Nazionale’s ‘dirty dozen’ is gnawing away at the League, nibbling at Fratelli d’Italia and pecking here and there at the scattered grains of Italian politics.

According to one school of thought, even he isn’t quite sure where to go; the opposing school wonders whether this is truly a flash in the pan or the harbinger of a far greater storm; a third school suspects an internal conspiracy – and, far more likely, an international one – with its sights set on Moscow. It is striking that, amongst all the comments made on television and online, there is nothing about what a general ought to know and what he ought to be dealing with. The new threats coming from the East, from the Far East and from those closer to home? We must place our trust in Tsar Vlad and send neither money nor weapons to Zelensky. A just peace? No, the only peace is that of the victors – the most common of clichés. What does the general think of the ‘organisation’ that gave him a career and a not-bad salary (as a major-general, the highest rank he attained, he earned around 5,000 euros net per month)? For the time being, he’s floundering somewhere between Junio Valerio Borghese and Beppe Grillo, perhaps dreaming of Charles de Gaulle, or maybe Augusto Pinochet. All his own ideas? Ah, if only we knew, if only we knew…

Third on the list was Dr Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and the dark soul of the regime. His loyalty to Hitler was so blind that, following the Führer’s death, he poisoned his own children, witnessed his wife’s suicide and, in the end (it seems), shot himself. His charred body was found – and photographed – alongside the six innocent children dressed in white, lying as if asleep: a Dantesque depiction of angels and demons.

Finally, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s and the party’s secretary, the dictator’s right-hand man, who managed his life and perhaps his habits. No one had access to the War Lord except through this silent, ambiguous and detested bureaucrat. Nothing was known about him: some believed him to be dead, having fled the Berlin bunker. Others considered him to be on the run, protected by complicit organisations. Amidst the uncertainty, he was tried in absentia.

At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Big Four had instructed the public prosecutors to publish an initial list of ‘criminals’ by 1 September. And this is where the difficulties began, because nobody seemed to have a clear idea of what was required. In fact, the Nazi organisational structure was virtually unknown: for example, the figure of Adolf Eichmann, who is today the most brutal symbol of the Holocaust, was completely unknown. Moreover, the Americans and Soviets wanted to see in the dock representatives of the financial world that had funded Hitler, of the industrial world that had armed him, and of the propaganda apparatus that had supported him. Finally, the intention was to bring charges not only against individuals but also against organisations and associations, such as the Wehrmacht General Staff, the SS, the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst. From this perspective, the confusion was enormous, and in a sense it still remains so. The Gestapo and the SD were both organisations within Himmler’s SS, and therefore the charge was superfluous. Above all, however, it conflicted with the long-standing principle that criminal liability is personal: even today, the Latin maxim ‘societas delinquere non potest’ is so binding that, in our legal system, the liability of legal entities – as provided for by the famous Law 231 – is referred to, with modest understatement, as ‘administrative’.

At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Nazi organisational structure was virtually unknown

The British – who intended to shorten and streamline the proceedings – had already submitted, on 21 June, an initial list of ten defendants, those most conspicuously implicated in war crimes. This included, in addition to Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall and the regime’s second-in-command; Robert Ley, head of the Labour Front; Rudolf Hess, formerly a close confidant of Hitler, who had fled to Britain in 1941; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister; Wilhelm Keitel, head (after Hitler) of the OKW, that is, of the entire Wehrmacht; Julius Streicher, editor of the crude anti-Semitic newspaper "Der Sturmer"; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Security Main Office, comprising the Gestapo and the SD; Alfred Rosenberg, official theorist of Aryan racism and Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories; Hans Frank, Governor of Poland, with its associated extermination camps; and finally Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior and head of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Deputy Chief Prosecutor Maxwell Fyfe explained that the choice had been determined primarily by the fame these individuals enjoyed. As for the evidence, the team of deputy prosecutors would set to work to find it. For some, it took little effort; for others, the task proved to be rather complicated. The Americans considered the list to be inadequate and unrepresentative: they added Hjalmar Schacht, former President of the Central Bank and Minister for the Economy; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands; Admiral Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy from 1943 to 1945 and Hitler’s designated successor; Walter Funk, Schacht’s successor following the latter’s fall from grace; Albert Speer, Minister for Armaments; and finally Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth. For the Russians, of course, this was not enough. Nikitchenko insisted on expanding the list to include industrialists, starting with Gustav Krupp. The reader may wonder whether this Nikitchenko was the same man who, as we have seen, was a member of the panel of judges. Paradoxical as it may seem, that was indeed the case. Even the Frenchman Falco, who was to become the substitute judge for Donnedieu de Vabres, took part in the selection of the defendants. It seems that no one had any objections. These were not the only anomalies. The ineffable Nikitchenko, during the second session of the Preparatory Conference at Church House in London, had put it this way: ‘We are dealing with major war criminals, who have already been convicted and whose sentences have already been announced by the heads of government in the declarations of Moscow and Crimea’. In any democratic country, such a pre-emptive pronouncement of the verdict would have disqualified him as a ‘iudex suspectus’: here too, no one had any objections. But the height of judicial eccentricity was reached with the Krupp case, which warrants a brief mention.

This dynasty of industrialists had played a decisive role in the Kaiser’s warmongering policies, supplying him with the deadliest artillery. The founder’s daughter, Bertha, had lent her name to a gigantic cannon which propaganda would later confuse with the much heavier one – also made by Krupp – that was bombarding Paris from a distance of over one hundred kilometres. With Hitler’s rise to power, Gustav Krupp had re-armed Germany even more decisively. A staunch Nazi, this man had been identified as the leading figure in the war industry, and was therefore indicted alongside the political and military leaders. But by June 1945, he was a mere shadow of his former self, consumed by senile dementia, and could not be brought to court. Judges and prosecutors were divided. Some wanted to try him in absentia. But this ran counter to every basic rule: a defendant is considered to be in absentia only if they voluntarily evade trial, not if they are unable to attend. Having discarded this outlandish idea, Jackson came up with an even more bizarre one: to summon his son Alfred in his place, who until a few years earlier had been enjoying life, and had only recently, following his father’s illness, taken on operational responsibilities. According to Telford Taylor, one of Jackson’s key associates, this was ‘the lowest point’ in his boss’s arguments. Fortunately, President Lawrence, who described this proposal as ‘compelling’, dismissed it as a disgrace. But it was a long and deplorable battle, which did no credit to either Jackson or his supporters.

The height of judicial eccentricity in the case of Krupp, the industrialist, who in June 1945 was little more than a human shell

And now we come to the defendants. In addition to those already mentioned, others were added, whom we shall look at later. However, for reasons of space, we shall describe only the most representative ones.

Hermann Goering was, formally, second only to Hitler. Or rather, he had been until April ’45, when, with Berlin under siege, he proposed to the Führer that he should hand over his powers to him as his designated successor. The dictator, enraged, ordered his arrest on charges of treason. The portly marshal was, however, already safe, and shortly afterwards he surrendered to the Americans. He was treated with every honour, and appeared at a press conference with the pride of a satrap standing alongside an American colonel. Eisenhower was outraged: he sent the prisoner to a cell and the unwary officer home. Göring was no petty braggart. He came from a distinguished family, and during the First World War he had earned a reputation as a hero as a fighter pilot with the legendary ‘Red Baron’s’ squadron. A staunch Nazi, though not a fanatic, he had gone along with Hitler’s rise to power without neglecting his own countless vices. He had created the Gestapo and the first concentration camps, but had soon left this thankless task to Himmler, turning his attention instead to rebuilding the Luftwaffe and enriching his own estates. In 1940, he had lost the Battle of Britain and the Führer’s trust. He did not let it get him down: he devoted himself to plundering the artistic treasures of the occupied countries, and to heightening his enjoyment of them with the aid of drugs. He had put on weight without losing any of his intelligence: at his trial, psychologists considered him the sharpest and most lively mind; Jackson would soon realise this at his own expense. But behind this brilliant intellect lay a personality of ruthless unscrupulousness. Goering had countersigned the most heinous orders concerning deportations and exterminations. He knew the gallows awaited him, and he wanted to play the leading role right to the very end, mocking the court. After the sentence was read out, he poisoned himself with cyanide in his cell.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, like Goering, was formally one of the most powerful men in the Reich. In reality, he was an obedient bureaucrat, whose cruelty was surpassed only by his unquestioning subservience to Hitler and Himmler, his immediate superior. This unassuming Austrian lawyer was, in fact, the head of the Reich Security Main Office, established and run by Reinhard Heydrich until his death in May 1942 in Prague, following an ambush carried out by Czechoslovak soldiers trained and parachuted in by the British. As is often the case, the importance of an office depends on the personality of the person who heads it. Heydrich was exceptionally intelligent, cultured, athletic, a music lover and a violinist. His ambition matched his ability, and was surpassed only by the ruthlessness of his character. He had organised and presided over the Wannsee Conference, where the ‘Final Solution’ for the extermination of over 10 million Jews had been adopted, many of whom came from allied countries, such as Italy, or even countries yet to be conquered, such as Great Britain. The RSHA comprised the best of the best, or the worst of the worst, of the SS. First and foremost was the Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service (SD), divided into two branches. The internal branch, commanded by Otto Ohlendorf – whom we shall encounter later – was also responsible for the composition of the Einsatzgruppen, the murder squads which, in the wake of the occupying forces, exterminated political commissars, partisans, priests and, of course, Jews. The external branch, headed by Walter Schellenberg, was more sophisticated; it managed espionage and counter-espionage, and was essentially aimed at eliminating Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, who was considered a traitor. Worse than the SD, within the RSHA, was only the Gestapo, the notorious secret police tasked with tracking down and killing the Reich’s real or supposed enemies, and above all with eliminating the Jews. The head of Section IV B4 was none other than Adolf Eichmann, who reported directly first to Heydrich and then to Himmler, bypassing his superiors, including Kaltenbrunner. The RSHA also included the Kripo (criminal police), which dealt with a bit of everything, often meting out summary justice. Its head, Arthur Nebe, after having committed the most heinous crimes, joined the conspirators plotting against the Führer’s life. He was discovered and executed.

Kaltenbrunner was a bureaucrat whose cruelty was matched only by his passive acquiescence towards Hitler and Himmler

Heydrich had become so powerful – it was rumoured that he even had Himmler spied on – that the latter began to fear him, and perhaps even to encourage his assassination. In any case, after his death, Himmler was no longer willing to take any risks. He left the post vacant, and in 1943 appointed Kaltenbrunner to head it; apart from his callous cruelty, Kaltenbrunner was characterised by an acromegalic physique and a face disfigured by a scar from a duel in his youth. This puppet never became the effective head of the organisations he was supposed to lead. The SD was run by Schellenberg, and the Gestapo by Heinrich Müller, who disappeared after the war and, unlike Eichmann, was never tracked down. But whilst Kaltenbrunner’s actual capabilities fell short of the high rank he held, his orders had nonetheless led to the deaths of millions of Jews and other groups of dissidents. The defendant put up a cowardly and grotesque defence, claiming that he had never known anything about the extermination camps and had never seen one. He was contradicted by photographs and by the testimony of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who, with meticulous diligence, laid out the figures of the massacre. For Kaltenbrunner, too, the verdict was already a foregone conclusion.

Like the two previous figures, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was also, formally speaking, the second-highest military authority after Hitler, as head of the OKW, or Supreme Command of the Armed Forces. In this role, and by virtue of those paradoxes that occur only in dictatorships, he even issued orders to Goering, the head of the air force. But in reality, Keitel was merely a devoted yes-man, so subservient to Hitler’s influence that everyone called him ‘Lakeitel’ – a sycophant. He was a handsome man, and on the surface could have passed for an aristocratic Junker. But seen up close, and when compared with von Rundstedt – the senior-most of the field marshals and a figure of the highest prestige – he appeared for what he was: Hitler’s butler. It was precisely because of this servile subservience that the dictator had placed him in the most prominent position within the armed forces, without fearing any objections even to the most reckless plans and the most disastrous decisions. When Hitler, following the failure of the conquest of Moscow in December 1941, dismissed Field Marshal von Brauchitsch from command of the army and appointed himself in his place, he placed himself beneath Keitel in the chain of command – even though Keitel was, in reality, obeying him. The reader may well lose their way in this labyrinth of absurdities. But one of the reasons why Hitler lost the war was also this: he had created a sea of hell and a mountain of stupidity. Keitel, however, had nothing in common with thugs like Kaltenbrunner or depraved individuals like Streicher. He was an old-school officer, capable and diligent. He did not consider himself a genius, and was the first to be surprised when Hitler appointed him to the helm of the Wehrmacht. His fault lay in adapting to Hitler’s strategy, endorsing its wickedness and carrying out his criminal directives. He signed the infamous ‘Night and Fog’ decree, which provided for the elimination of the so-called ‘enemies of the Reich’, who were made to vanish without trial like ghosts evaporating into the darkness. His authority enforced the most criminal acts, such as the massacre of defenceless civilians and the killing of prisoners. Yet during his trial he conducted himself with dignity: he did not deny his guilt, and his repentance was not a shameful whinge. After being sentenced to death, he requested the punishment meted out to a soldier – the firing squad. His request was denied. During the hanging, his head struck the wooden block, and the post-mortem photograph shows his bloodied face. Even Eisenhower himself was saddened by this.

Keitel, the highest-ranking military officer, Hitler’s devoted yes-man, whose authority enforced the most criminal acts

Alongside Keitel, the prosecutors sought to include Alfred Jodl, a colonel-general who even today is invariably mentioned alongside Keitel, owing to that twin-like association found in the most diverse fields: in mythology, such as Castor and Pollux; in literature, such as Euryalus and Nisus; in films, such as Gianni and Pinotto; in fashion, such as Dolce and Gabbana; and even in politics, with Bonelli and Fratoianni. Jodl had been the Chief of Operations at the OKW, subordinate to Keitel but in fact far more efficient. Whilst his superior, as has been said, merely passed on the Führer’s directives, Jodl oversaw the operational plans and, with his staff, directed all the fighting on the Eastern Front and, during the Battle of the Ardennes, that on the Western Front as well. In his role, he was obviously aware of the violations of every human and divine rule of war: the pogroms against the Jews, the massacres of civilians, the indiscriminate reprisals, and so on. Yet even today, historians remain uncertain as to the extent of his criminal liability. His case was debated at length, but in the end, reasons of state prevailed. He too, like Keitel, was sent to the gallows. Many Allied military officers did not agree with such severity.

(2 – Continued)

Eighty years ago, around this time in August, the proceedings of the greatest trial in history, conducted by an international military tribunal, drew to a close: on trial were the crimes of Nazism, embodied in the 22 defendants – senior political, civilian and military leaders of Hitler’s Germany. Carlo Nordio, Minister of Justice, presents a six-part account of the events. The first instalment, “There is a judge in Nuremberg”, was published on Friday 31 July.

The point is that the cat is an incredibly problematic animal for ecosystems, so much so that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has listed it among the ‘100 most harmful species in the world’. Comparable to the blue crab or the coypu. Why is that, you might ask? After all, we’re used to thinking of cats as pleasant pets; when we see them on screen, they’re just cute, funny kittens. The reality, as mentioned, is very different from what one might imagine. Cats, in fact, are animals that continue to hunt even when fed by humans. The fact is that this animal has only recently become part of our environments and, as it has colonised them quickly and without difficulty, the animals it hunts have not developed the strategies needed to escape it.

A study published in "Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution", involving several Italian, Spanish and Portuguese universities and research institutes, investigated the impact of domestic cats on Italy’s native wildlife. The findings revealed that these animals are responsible for preying on species considered to be threatened and that their presence may even drive some of them to extinction. These findings are widely confirmed in the scientific literature, to the extent that the Polish Academy of Sciences has declared domestic cats to be an ‘alien and invasive species’. The Australian government takes a similar view; indeed, estimating that cats “kill over one and a half billion native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs, and one billion one hundred million invertebrates every year”, thereby contributing “to the extinction of over twenty species of Australian mammals”, it has launched a campaign to limit their numbers.

But where is this heading – what may seem like a gratuitous anti-cat tirade? Just a little more patience, please.

To the south of Sardinia lies a small island with a curious history: the island of San Pietro, which, despite being Sardinian, is considered a Ligurian linguistic enclave. The reason for this curious circumstance is linked to the arrival of its last inhabitants, who landed there in the first half of the 18th century. They were Genoese but did not come from Liguria; rather, they came from Tabarka, a Tunisian island. They were there for commercial reasons, but when, for political reasons, their stay became untenable, King Carlo Emanuele III of Savoy allowed the exiles to settle on an uninhabited island within his kingdom – namely, the island of San Pietro.

In the westernmost part of the island lies a headland, Capo Sandalo, a place which, thanks to its strategic position, serves as a resting and nesting site for various species of birds. One species in particular arrives on these rocks every summer after setting off from Madagascar: the Queen’s Falcon. This bird of prey breeds exclusively on Mediterranean cliffs. For this reason, the area is a permanent wildlife sanctuary managed by Lipu. The problem arises because human compassion – that irrepressible urge to do good – has failed to grasp that the presence of cats in this place is simply impossible. Yet, kitten by kitten, the cliffs have become populated with cats. In fact, as is often the case, the cat colony was established by people with no training in natural history.

What better place than a nature reserve dedicated to bird conservation to breed cats – predators considered to be among ‘the hundred most harmful species in the world’? The answer to this question seems obvious; what is less clear, however, is why this was allowed to happen. After all, not everything we believe to be right yields good results.

Legal and political thought has always linked force to sovereignty, that is, to the power to decide on the state of exception. Under ordinary conditions, force is channelled through rules; in the state of exception, it is the rule itself that is suspended in order to safeguard the overall form of order. It is in times of crisis that it becomes clear who is truly capable of deciding, that is, of taking upon themselves the responsibility for an act of force. This power of exception does not coincide with visible violence: it is the faculty to select political possibilities, to close off certain avenues and open up others, to determine what is still feasible and what has become impossible. Force is not measured solely by the power of the means employed, but by the capacity to define the very realm of the possible. Constitutional democracy has sought to distribute this power, to disperse it amongst a set of bodies, procedures and checks and balances; and yet the figure of the one who ‘truly decides’ in an emergency continues to loom large, inevitable and elusive, because every political order experiences, sooner or later, the moment when the exception demands a figure – or a handful of figures – to take it upon themselves.

If one looks at the history of democracies from the perspective of power, a long process of containment emerges. However, containment does not mean annulment: every political decision retains an irreducible core of power. Closing a budget, imposing a tax sacrifice, redefining the hierarchy of collective priorities is always an act that favours certain interests and penalises others. The myth of politics reduced to mere technical management or the distribution of rights obscures this fundamental fact: behind every ‘optimal solution’ lies a choice involving the exercise of power, an asymmetry that determines who commands, who obeys, and who is sacrificed. In the art of governance, positive-sum games remain a utopia.

Parliamentary democracy has sought to transform force into a majority: as long as a decision is taken by a representative majority, force may appear to be a legitimate expression of the will of the people. But the translation is never complete. The relationship between force and law remains conflictual: the law seeks to rein in force, yet depends on force to be effective. A law without enforcement mechanisms, a judgement that is not enforced, a constraint that is formally accepted but effectively ignored – all reveal just how little the law can achieve without force to underpin it. Political power exists within this permanent paradox: on the one hand, it promises to limit force through the law; on the other, it knows that without force, the law is a harmless text. It is within this ambiguous space that the raison d’état is situated – a concept now condemned and forgotten – as a body of knowledge that takes seriously the continuity of the body politic even when the ordinary forms of legitimation falter.

The relationship between force and law is conflictual: the law seeks to rein in force, but depends on force to be effective

The raison d’état is the noble doctrine that explicitly posits force as the very heart of political decision-making. It is not a theory of violence, but a theory of order. The question it poses is brutal and clear: what must be done to ensure that the state survives, sustains itself and prevails over the internal and external threats that besiege it? The answer is not measured by the purity of principles, but by the ability to hold the body politic together when every other form of legitimacy crumbles. Reason of State is the knowledge that enables those in power to choose between norms and necessity, between rights and security, between ideal consistency and the preservation of order. It is the grammar of force when force can no longer be concealed behind formalities. It is the language that those in power speak when they cease to delude themselves that they can govern history solely through the categories of law.

What needs to be done to ensure the state survives and prevails over the internal and external threats besieging it?

Over the last thirty years, ‘humanitarian’ wars and international police interventions have revealed the paradoxical nature of the use of force that purported to be free from the dictates of state policy. Afghanistan, Iraq and the Arab Spring have shown that military superiority does not guarantee political control. ‘Light’ warfare, conceived as surgical and limited, has produced heavy consequences, often contrary to those declared: failed states, ungovernable areas, widespread radicalisation. Force, deployed in the name of universalist values, has at times ended up eroding the very democratic and liberal legitimacy that it sought to export, blurring the distinction between intervention based on principle and the naked projection of power. Meanwhile, war has returned to the heart of Europe with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, dispelling in a matter of months the remaining optimism of those who believed the continent to be safe from high-intensity conflicts. Recent history has thus disproved the notion that force could be confined to the margins of the international system, as a residual tool in a context dominated by rules and interdependencies.

Vladimir Putin’s role in this process is emblematic. The Russian president has built his domestic legitimacy not only on the promise of stability and a return to greatness, but also on his willingness to use force in a visible, theatrical and demonstrative manner: from Chechnya to Georgia, from Crimea to the Donbas, right up to the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Force becomes a language of identity, a tool for reconstructing an imperial myth, the hallmark of a policy that presents itself as disenchanted, immune to the ‘weaknesses’ of liberalism. From this perspective, the raison d’état takes the form of a will to power that does not hesitate to sacrifice lives, wealth and international standing in order to maintain the continuity of domestic power and the narrative of a historic mission. The use of external violence reinforces, at least for a certain period, the internal contract between the state and society: force beyond the borders becomes a guarantee of force within them.

Power cannot be reduced to a residual tool in a context dominated by rules and interdependencies

In a different context, Benjamin Netanyahu embodies another manifestation of the return of force. Israeli politics in recent years has been operating within a state that could be described as a permanent emergency, in which national security is not merely one issue amongst others, but the axis around which the entire institutional framework revolves. Military force is presented as a safeguard for survival, and war as a recurring and structural event, rather than a traumatic exception. This results both in a progressive distortion of the democratic system – the urgency of security drives a redefinition of rights, the balance of powers and spaces for dissent – and in an unscrupulous use of force and a willingness to disregard the provisions of international law. In this context, the raison d’état is not merely a cynical calculation within the corridors of power, but the mindset of a society that perceives itself as constantly exposed to an existential threat. Once again, force is not merely an action on the ground, but a criterion that reshapes the very forms of political coexistence and the hierarchy of lives deemed worthy of protection.

On the Western front, the story of Donald Trump signals a shift that is less military and more symbolic, but no less significant. The American leader has not only launched new wars, in the name of reasons of state and national security, after promising peace during his election campaign. He has also brought the language of force back to the centre of domestic political discourse. The language of confrontation, the simplification into terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and the systematic delegitimisation of judicial and technocratic institutions are ways of reintroducing force into the domestic sphere – not as the direct use of coercion, but as the dissolution of that formal respect which previously kept the resort to exceptional measures in check. The threat not to recognise election results, the pressure on the administrative and judicial systems, and the reduction of the opponent to an internal enemy are already forms of potential violence: they define the limits of what is deemed acceptable in order to retain power. Here, the raison d’état takes on a domestic dimension: the state is identified with a leader and his political bloc, and force becomes the means of defending that identity against institutions and procedures perceived as obstacles to the achievement of political objectives. But when force is imposed domestically without pacifying society, it soon becomes a tool to be exported abroad. And the Trump case is proof of this.

These three cases cannot be equated in terms of context, background or institutional structure. Yet they are converging symptoms of a prevailing climate. In a world rife with open warfare, geopolitical crises, and economic and identity-related insecurities, force is once again emerging as a plausible – and at times inevitable – solution in the eyes of growing segments of public opinion. The idea that history is moving towards the gradual marginalisation of violence seems less convincing than it did thirty years ago. The rationale of state has not disappeared; it has simply set to work again: it governs energy choices, migration policies, military alignments, and definitions of security and the enemy. The promise of a politics free from the harshness of conflict is giving way to a politics that is once again thinking in terms of survival and power relations.

From the perspective of raison d’état, force is therefore not a moral issue but a structural element. It is what enables the state to defend itself not only against external enemies, but also against its own self-destructive tendencies: internal fragmentation, paralysis in decision-making, and the erosion of its capacity for leadership. Institutional politics may long harbour the illusion that it can postpone the use of force indefinitely, but there always comes a point where inaction itself becomes a decision to use force, because it surrenders the community to the forces that erode it. A power that does not know how to use force when necessary is a power that condemns itself to being overwhelmed by the forces of others, who are less hesitant and less scrupulous. Reason of state thus poses a question that the democratic conscience prefers to postpone: to what extent is it permissible to sacrifice principles, norms and customs in the name of the state’s continuity? What threshold cannot be crossed, even in the name of necessity? The critical point is the moment when force is laid bare, and the politician is forced to choose.

There comes a point when inaction becomes a deliberate choice: when it hands the community over to the forces that are eroding it

This choice is not made in the realm of abstract ideas, but within the concrete fabric of power relations. Power can take the form of military, police, fiscal or regulatory force; it can manifest itself as the power to strike or as the capacity to take away: freedom, wealth, rights, positions. It may be concentrated at the very top or dispersed across a constellation of institutions. It may be exercised openly or almost invisibly, through the manipulation of timing, constraints and opportunities. The raison d’état is the compass that indicates which means are considered viable, which limits may be crossed, and which sacrifices may be imposed. When a power faces a conflict, a terrorist threat or a systemic crisis, it is confronted with a range of possibilities that is not dictated by legal textbooks, but by the combination of available force and force deemed legitimate. At that point, politics ceases to be administration and returns to being decision-making, in the strongest sense of the term: to cut, to separate, to choose.

A political culture that refuses to consider the use of force and the reasons of state surrenders itself to the rhetoric of innocence and, consequently, to passivity. It imagines that history might be a realm of cost-free policies, of decisions with no losers, of balances without sacrifice. But when reality disproves this image, disappointment paves the way for two opposing and symmetrical paths: pure cynicism, which celebrates force as brutal domination, and impotent moralism, which condemns force in the name of principles it is unable to defend. The only alternative is a form of politics that recognises the necessity of force without turning it into an idol, and which regards the raison d’état as the point at which decision-making is measured against its limits.

Power in politics, then, is neither a mere accident nor a taboo, but the raw material from which institutions, orders and balances are built. The raison d’état is the knowledge that governs its use when all else fails, when the language of rights and procedures is no longer sufficient to conceal the harshness of the conflict. To think about politics is to reflect on this core issue: who holds power, under what conditions they exercise it, and what conception of the state they seek to preserve when they decide to assert it. Everything else, in the final analysis, is secondary. It is by the way in which a power addresses its relationship with force, and by the way in which it justifies its raison d’état, that the truth of a political civilisation is measured: whether it is capable of reconciling necessity and limitation, continuity and justice, survival and meaning. Whether it recognises that force is inevitable, but that precisely for this reason it cannot be left to its own devices.

Lorenzo Castellani is a Lecturer at the Luiss School of Government and teaches History of Political Institutions at the same university. His latest book, co-authored with Gaetano Quagliariello, is "Il Principe e la Repubblica – Potere e istituzioni in Italia dal 1943 a oggi" (Luiss University Press, 2026). His article continues Il Foglio’s series on the concept of power. Each week, a different author examines this concept from the perspective of a specific discipline. The other instalments were published on 7 July (Michele Silenzi, “The Power that Sustains the World”), 14 July (Luca Amendola, “Between Power and Matter”), 21 July (Luigi Marco Bassani, “The metre of us Europeans”) and on 28 July (Alberto Frigerio, “The plight of modern man”).

But, as the Jesuit Michel de Certeau – the most brilliant pupil (alongside Hans Urs von Balthasar) of the French theologian Henri de Lubac – once stated, cities should not be understood from above, perhaps from a skyscraper, because this reduces one to a view external to life and to a mere scheme of urban-architectural planning power; a city must be ‘walked’; its map is ‘written’ by each urban traveller through their steps, their destinations, their routes, their detours, their shortcuts and their desires. Therefore, Rotterdam too must be walked, in search of its authentic present but also its past, both ancient and recent: one must go as far as Spangen to see Brinkmann’s remarkable social housing (1919), and to Kiefhoek to observe J.J.P. Oud’s social housing (1930). And little by little, a story emerges of Dutch pragmatism and Erasmian benevolence, of a propensity for experimentalism and an aptitude for social thought. Erasmus, its most illustrious citizen – the Augustinian who, according to the Franciscans, ‘laid the eggs that Luther hatched’ – asserted, in a spirit of community, that ‘the city is a vast monastery’, but he was not referring to his own Rotterdam, nor was he certainly foreshadowing the city as it is today, which for decades has been in the grip of a building frenzy reaching for the heavens and aspiring to overtake Amsterdam’s status as a leading tourist destination.

The strongly modernist identity of this ‘Manhattan on the Meuse’, with its voracious appetite for the future, rests, however, on the ruins of its recent past. ‘After all,’ states the Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas with a paradox, ‘it is thanks to the Nazis that Rotterdam is what it is.’ And here a historical explanation is needed. On 14 May 1940, during the infamous Rotterdam Blitz, the Nazis bombed the city, almost by mistake: of the two Luftwaffe squadrons sent into the skies over the Netherlands, the first managed to return in time, having heard over the radio that the Netherlands had surrendered; the second did not. And so, within a matter of minutes, the bombs razed the precious medieval centre of Erasmus’s city to the ground, claiming hundreds of lives, destroying more than 25,000 homes, 13 hospitals, 24 churches, 4 stations, and so on, leaving 80,000 people homeless. Just four days later, the tenacious people of Rotterdam – accustomed to braving the millennia-old waves of the North Sea head-on – began to consider what to build on that grey sea of ruins: should they rebuild everything exactly as it was before, or forge new paths? Not without some tension, they chose to leave the past behind and explore the future. It was precisely in that Schumpeterian storm—transposed into urban planning—that Rotterdam’s destiny as Europe’s architectural Mecca, a hotbed of countless projects, was forged. It was there that the city’s almost metamorphic nature took shape: every time you return, you find it enriched with new colossal buildings and bustling with new projects. Here, in the city of Europe’s first skyscraper, the Wittehuis, the White House (1898, an Art Nouveau gem), I discovered – after a few years’ absence – the Fenix, the Museum of Migration: a colossal disused warehouse converted into a cultural space. At the top of the building stands the so-called ‘Tornado’, the polished steel structure leading up to the terrace. All designed by the international practice MAD, led by architect Ma Yansong, a protégé of Zaha Hadid. And here, at last, we come to a significant Italian presence: Andrea D’Antrassi, aged 44, a student of Botta and Fuksas, was deeply involved in the iconic Fenix and spoke about it in Rotterdam at the Utopian Hours Festival, a regular gathering of architects. D’Antrassi is also head of the European branch of the young and renowned MAD (one is amazed when looking at the projects already completed or under construction), a team of 40 architects based in Ostiense. Why did he choose Rome, rather than Milan or London, Rotterdam or Madrid? “I firmly believe that Rome, despite Italian bureaucracy and the legitimately conservative attitude towards urban planning, offers excellent prospects. It is a city that is less saturated in urban terms than those you mentioned, and there is also a great deal to regenerate.” Rome is setting its sights on Rotterdam.