This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
What has been whispered for a while on podcasts and in the books of ideologues on the fringes of power has come to pass. Gramsci is the thinker of the day. Christopher Rufo, architect of MAGA’s attempt to dewokeify American universities cites in his new book the Italian communist’s writing on how ideological power operates, particularly the concept of “cultural hegemony”.
Rufo did not come to Gramsci’s thinking directly but rather via the cultural policies executed in the early days of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. It is there that the right has grasped the significance of how Gramsci tried to reconcile Marxist economic theory with the way in which the Italian working class had drifted to Mussolini through the concept of “cultural hegemony”, a form of ideological power that operated through cultural and academic institutions.
Meloni’s clearest Gramscian move was to appoint, in March 2024, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, polemicist and literary impresario, as the head of Italy’s most influential cultural organisation, the Venice Biennale. It didn’t happen in isolation. Alessandro Giuli, now culture minister, wrote a book called Gramsci Lives in which he extrapolated from Gramsci the need of the new right to be a ruling class not simply by cranking the levers of state apparatus but by being disseminated throughout civil society.
The right needs to supplant a mentality of being both in power but somehow excluded from culture discussion with a mentality of “perceiving oneself as a ruling class with a vision”.
Buttafuoco’s appointment is perhaps the most controversial example of how that is taking place. Once leader of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, a party created by a minister in Mussolini’s government, he has become the first overtly right-wing leader of the Venice Biennale in nigh on a century.
His appointment initially apalled leftists. A Democratic Party member of the House of Deputies culture committee said: “The right has taken another step in its conception of the state as something it owns. Its assault on the cultural institutions of our country is extremely concerning.” A left-wing parliamentarian representing Venice described Buttafuoco’s appointment as “a chilling vision of how the right thinks about the cultural institutions of our country”.
Buttafuoco began his journalistic career writing for Il Secolo d’Italia, the official organ of the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale, but he moved on to work for more conservative right-wing publications like Il Giornale and Panorama. Now he heads an organisation that produces the world’s largest art and architecture biennale — the latter opened in May. Under its aegis is also a major film festival and key events in the international theatre, dance and music calendars. However, the Biennale has never shaken off its soixant-huitard, art-as-formenter-of-social-change philosophy, although it may have mutated into a more efficient managerialism under former international trade minister Pablo Barrata, president between 2008 and 2020.
It was only half-ironically that Italy was dubbed “Country of the Future” in the book The End of The End of History. Not only did Berlosconi’s “anti-politics of the everyday” prefigure the noughties explosion of populism but the media landscape in Europe is only slowly catching up with that of Italy; one in which political debate takes place on an apparently endless series of debate shows. Buttafuoco excelled in these.
Pugnacious, comic, aphoristic and clever, he progressed to his own TV show Questa Non è Una Pipa, in which each week he’d explore an object — the Wonderbra, Coca-Cola, the kebab — that determined daily life in Italy. It drew compliments from even those to whom he was ideologically opposed.
So those expecting some kind of fascist putsch at the Biennale may be disappointed. The first question mark against his right-wing credentials may have been the fact that, on top of taking charge of a regional theatre, Buttafuoco set up a publishing house with, amongst others, Umberto Eco in 2015. Around the same time he did this, Meloni was actually distancing herself from the maverick Sicilian author.
When Matteo Salvini, head of the separatist Lega Nord, was toying with offering Buttafuoco the role of governor of Sicily, Meloni, president of the newly founded Brothers of Italy party, interjected. “Pietrangelo Buttafuoco is undoubtedly a very valid intellectual and an icon of the right, I consider him a friend of mine, but in extreme sincerity I don’t think it’s a good idea for a personality that decided to convert to Islam to run for the leadership of Sicily.”
Buttafuoco’s conversion is not a fancy but part of a profound reconceptualising of Italian culture and history. On one level, his literary debut The Dragon’s Eggs (2006) is a fabulist retelling of the Allied invasion of Sicily in which the naive Americans and perfidious British are the bad guys. It is a comic assault on the Resistance as a founding myth of post-war Italy, not just in historical terms but also in terms of representation.
It gives neo-realism a kicking, in favour of a literature conversant with the golden age of Islamic Sicily. Its story of 11 Muslim militiamen, who fight alongside the Fascists and a glamorous female German spy is grand guignol. No one was as surprised as Buttafuoco when it was a huge literary hit.
Buttafuoco has become a Marco Polo, travelling the modern Silk Road
One could make much of the fact that he declared in an interview when his book was topping bestseller lists that “the cultural hegemony of the left doesn’t exist” but, typically for the hard-to-pin-down writer, he was making a wry comment on The Dragon’s Eggs success. And yet on a more serious level, how could he be part of a hegemony in a Catholic nation given his faith? Buttafuoco would describe his next book, The Devil’s Last Woman (2008), as “the first Muslim novel in the Italian language” and later in The Ferocious Saracen (2015) address his faith directly. This was important in that it overthrew a number of cosy assumptions in the Italian centre-left about their moral authority.
In the book he writes of his life-changing journey to Mecca and how ultimately his conversion was a return to the origins of Sicily, where “every market is a casbah, every club is a transfiguration of the archaic social code … it is the Saracen that still endures”. The book embraces the Mediterranean history of Islam and, in the present, is honest both about Islamic violence and critical of Western interventions — Afghanistan, Libya and Syria — which have destabilised the Middle East.
This double outsider status makes him a mercurial figure, less keen on party lines and the fascist revisionism of others close to Meloni. His recent book Salvini e/o Mussolini (2020) compared the Lega Nord leader unfavourably to Il Duce, suggesting it was like comparing Rita Hayworth to an influencer. If historical models are to be used, Buttafuoco is Malparte, the free-thinking journalist who marched with Mussolini on Rome but then was regularly thrown in prison by him. At various openings across the Biennale in May he portrayed in poetic Italian (he doesn’t speak English) his event as a venue for open debate. He has, he says, successfully sold to Meloni the idea that Italy be a haven to those who have suffered censorship elsewhere.
And what does the Meloni administration get out of it? The answer might be found in the Giardini, one of the key venues of the huge cultural event he now heads. Napoleon established the site following his invasion in 1798, creating a garden from marshland. A century later, national pavilions, mostly European, were built to house displays of art: the Venice Biennale.
The last pavilion to be completed was the South Korean pavilion in 1995. Until now, that is. Just in time for the Venice Architecture Biennale, it was announced that a new pavilion will be constructed for Qatar at the heart of the Giardini.
The British art critic John Ruskin made much of Venice’s eastern qualities in his book The Stones of Venice, in an architectural sense. Today, Buttafuoco makes the point politically. “Venice is the only European city to have had, since the year 1000 AD, a name in Arabic, Bunduqiyyah, a fact that testifies to the teeming mixture of languages and ethnicities that have long sheltered here,” he said at the launch.
Here we have a cultural ambassador for the multipolar age albeit one with a historical model. Buttafuoco has become a Marco Polo, popping into the Saudi pavilion during the Biennale, travelling the modern Silk Road. In March he was in Mongolia. The outgoing president Roberto Cicutto has no reason to praise him but thinks Buttafuocco is doing well, although he must find a new curator for the 2026 Biennale, as his first choice, the Cameroonian-born Koyo Kouoh, died suddenly in May.
What happens now should be watched closely. Meloni’s premiership has created an odd window of stability in Italy’s legendarily fractious political history, aided in part by the election of Trump with whom she can act as arbiter with the European Union. Albeit from a deeply nationalist perspective, she has grasped that we live in an increasingly multi-polar world, and this has clearly informed her re-evaluation of Buttafuoco.
There is more nuance here than in the USA where Vice-President JD Vance, now a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, is taking a swing at everything. The usefulness of Buttafuoco’s unique worldview, of which his conversion to Islam is only a part, must go beyond Venice, even beyond Italy.
