Just last December, the Italian government re-opened its decades-long dispute with the Getty Museum over the life-sized bronze statue Victorious Youth (c. Such a narrative resonates particularly widely in Italy, not only due to current economic anxieties but because it is deeply embedded in the collective psyche. Today’s fascistic progeny, meanwhile, prefer a more fear-ridden narrative, based on a vague notion of a pure, white, Christian, Italo-Roman West under threat from barbarian refugees. In the 1920s, Benito Mussolini famously used Roman icons – the eagle or fasces, for instance – as part of his militaristic call for the nation to toughen-up and fall in line.
In Italy, this has often benefited the far right. It’s a living, breathing field of culture and art that remains open to ideological co-option. Antiquity, it’s sometimes easy to forget, is not confined to a fixed historical period.
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