Italy Archives - Public Seminar

Film

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, La Grazia

An interview with the Italian film director on ordinariness, doubt, and jealousy at the heart of his new film

December 8, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Paolo Sorrentino

Editorial note: This interview contains spoilers. Paolo Sorrentino’s films are grand affairs, with elaborate camerawork and stunning settings underscored by memorable music. The plots match the grandeur of the mise-en-scène. In his new film, La Grazia, the purely cinematic elements of the film remain grand—and at times knowingly bizarre, like the ...

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, <em>La Grazia</em>

Kinships

Family Values or Family Exclusion?

How right-wing policies fail working mothers

January 22, 2025 • by Elide Vincenti

Parental entitlement policies represent a complex interplay of cultural, social, and economic priorities for far-right leaders in both Italy and the United States. On the one hand, many religiously minded conservatives uphold traditional family values, which would seem to support policies that promote marriage and the growth of families. At ...

Film

La Chimera‘s Tomb Raiders Unearth the Intersections of Past and Present

Do the souls of the dead miss what we have taken and sold?

October 16, 2024 • by Taylor Stout

One setting in Alice Rohrwacher’s 2024 film, La Chimera, collapses two thousand years of Italian history: an Etruscan gravesite in the shadow of a power plant. Here, where polluted ocean water laps at ancient dirt, the film’s merry band of tomb raiders (tombaroli) discover an untouched tomb brimming with artifacts—most ...

<em>La Chimera</em>‘s Tomb Raiders Unearth the Intersections of Past and Present

Uncategorized

Behind Milan’s Millennial Renaissance

The hidden costs of becoming an Instagrammable global city

October 27, 2022 • by Giorgio Fontana

I love Milan. I was born in its suburbs and have been living here for fifteen years; it’s still a very special place, a unique city in Italy. But its ruling class (and its residents) must tackle the problem of architectural and social inequality seriously before this place swallows itself....

Politics

Giorgia Meloni and the Far Right’s Transatlantic Turn

Italy’s formerly fascist party aligns itself with American Republicans, British Conservatives, and Likud in Israel

October 3, 2022 • by Lucas Dolan

Giorgia Meloni now represents a cadre of European far-right leaders whose views are fully legible to the American Far Right. ...

Giorgia Meloni and the Far Right’s Transatlantic Turn

Public Health

A Jesuit Went to Milan to Learn Italian

Covid-19 taught him something more

April 28, 2020 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

After sunset each night teenagers gather in the piazza below the windows of my fifth-floor room. They are not rowdy, not really. They are just young. And here, apparently, that means they talk and sing a bit, and then drink a bit and sing a bit more. Then they sit and laugh and ...

Democracy

Is Democracy in Italy Secure?

Fascism’s appeal to Italian youth is a worrisome trend

January 13, 2020 • by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi

Beginning in the early 1990s, however, a normalizing trend has overturned these institutional guarantees, undermining the legacy of all those who struggled to reestablish democracy. Coinciding with the ascent to the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, naive, if not altogether nostalgic, recollections of Mussolini and his regime have become ...

Feature

The Sovereigntist of Reality Television

The Tangles of Diego Fusaro

August 2, 2019 • by Donatella di Cesare

Have they invited a member of CasaPound, the infamous neofascist party, onto television? That sort of thing tends to happen these days. Instead, peeking out on screen is the well sought after tan of Diego Fusaro, with the camera lingering over his shaggy hair and his glaucous eye-catching look. The ...

Make Rome Great Again

Populism in the Late Roman Republic

July 23, 2019 • by Conor Morrissey

Nearly every Roman leader revered the wisdom and the virtue of their forefathers. They were traditionalists, primarily interested in maintaining the status quo of the Roman state. If we understand the term “conservatism” to mean a school of thought that is heavily interested in preserving traditional values and is typically ...

Uncategorized

Why Freedom of Expression Is At Stake In Italy

The suspension of a teacher is sparking debate across the country

June 6, 2019 • by Valerio Alfonso Bruno

At this very moment, hundreds of Italian teachers are expressing their open dissent with this decision on social media, and writing in solidarity with the recently suspended 63-year-old teacher. My aim is not to analyze whether the comparison between Interior Minister and rightist populist League party leader Matteo Salvini and Benito Mussolini ...

Feature

Another Mother

Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism

April 8, 2019 • by Cesare Casarino and Andrea Righi

In recent years, the tradition of Italian biopolitical thought has become immensely popular and increasingly influential. Most interpreters, however, focus on thinkers such as Agamben, Esposito, and Negri, while the contribution of Italian feminist movement is most often neglected. Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism , brings to ...

Feature

By Land and By Sea

Salvini’s war on immigration

November 1, 2018 • by Enrica Rigo

The decree recently approved by the Italian government restricting the right to asylum is the terrestrial counterpart to the criminalization of NGOs operating in the Mediterranean. The climax to Matteo Salvini’s ongoing campaign against humanitarianism, it will have a fundamental impact on the management of migration within the country. Salvini’s war ...