Statues and architecture that bear witness to the diversity of Italian history are once again being targeted. Since Trump’s election, a blow that seemed to have dumbed down the woke front in Italy as well, there has been a more or less flat calm on the cancel culture front. In our country, the biggest controversy was the initiative of the municipality of Rome regarding the toponymy of the African Quarter, which plans to keep the names of streets (after all, thousands of people live there and remapping a neighborhood would be complicated…) but update the descriptions on the plaques from a decolonizing perspective. In this blessed year of 2025, the statue of Montanelli in Milan, that of Giorgio Parodi in Genoa, the ‘Dux monolith’ at the Foro Italico in Rome, and the naming of the Coppa Volpi at the Venice Film Festival had all been sleeping peacefully.
Until January 20, when the online newspaper Fanpage, with one of its leading writers, Saverio Tommasi, published an article (and related video) entitled L’Italia è piena di statue di fascisti e violenti: è giusto abbatterle? (Italy is full of statues of fascists and violent people: is it right to tear them down?). A full-blown Overton window opening operation. The title poses a provocative question, but the text makes a partial tactical retreat: we are not asking for the statues to be torn down, but only to be given a new meaning, with explanatory signs or other initiatives. But the strategy is obvious and has been seen in action thousands of times, as described in detail by the author together with Emanuele Mastrangelo in the essay Cancel culture. L’arma di distruzione (culturale) di massa che il wokeismo ha scagliato contro la civiltà occidentale, (Cancel Culture. The weapon of mass (cultural) destruction that wokeism has unleashed against Western civilization), recently published by Signs Publishing: ‘recontextualizing’ a work by affixing signs certifying that the work is ‘controversial’ is inevitably the first step towards its removal.
From Geopop to Fanpage
But let’s take it one step at a time. A few months ago, the science channel Geopop, in its video on the Architecture of the Ventennio, asked, ‘People often wonder whether these works should be demolished once and for all’ and concluded with the last chapter of the video entitled ‘Would it be right to demolish fascist buildings?’.
And now it’s the turn of the decidedly more direct Fanpage (note that both Geopop and Fanpage are part of the same publishing group, Ciaopeople).
In short, cancel culture never goes out of fashion, and our new book at the end of 2025 is proving to be even more relevant than ever. A glory we would gladly have done without.
What’s happening in America
In the United States, Trump issued a federal order last March to reevaluate the removed Confederate statues, and in October, a statue of General Albert Pike, removed in 2020, was restored in Washington, D.C. But the situation is far from a return to normalcy, so much so that in the same days in California, an exhibition was inaugurated that not only displayed vandalized and mutilated statues as trophies, but also presented reinterpretations of them, including a statue of Stonewall Jackson cut into pieces and reassembled in a grotesque parody.
And there is no shortage of vandalism. As we recount in chapter 5 of Cancel Culture, with the statues of the Confederates and Columbus removed, the new target of the cancellers is none other than Abraham Lincoln, the president who symbolized the end of slavery. For several years now, Columbus Day has become an occasion to deface Lincoln statues. With the Trump presidency, the phenomenon has diminished, but there are still cases: the most recent in Spokane, Washington, at the end of December.
And things are no better for other figures once symbolic of brotherhood, such as Gandhi, whose statue was vandalized in London last October.
In short, while the Trump presidency and cuts to the US Agency for International Development’s woke propaganda machine have clearly reduced the phenomenon of cancel culture (no money, no honey…), a glance at the local news is enough to discover that there is still a fire smoldering under the ashes.
Against re-semantization or re-contextualization
As mentioned, the Fanpage article and related video are not in favor of the radical solution of demolition. This is a very different media spin from the one that began back in 2017 with the New Yorker article “Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?” written by the attentive and knowledgeable academic Ruth Ben Ghiat. This outburst caused an uproar in Italy (for which we refer you to chapter 11 of the previous volume Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa della cancel culture che sta distruggendo la nostra storia (Iconoclasm: The contagious madness of cancel culture that is destroying our history), Eclettica, 2020).
Yet the recontextualization of a monument in a public square is a far worse fate than its demolition at the hands of an angry mob. Because recontextualization means that the work is declared controversial and branded with the equivalent of the scarlet letter that was given to adulteresses in New England. It certifies that the work is “harmful” to the community, and that sooner or later it will be understood that it is better to remove it.
In short, recontextualization or re-semantization is a trap that must be avoided at all costs from a political and organizational point of view, as it is the final crack that will cause a monument or statue to collapse. Unfortunately, many conservative administrations still do not realize that giving in to these sirens, hoping that “they will stop there” or that they are giving wokeists a sop to keep them quiet, only means signing them a promissory note. They will be quick to cash it in as soon as they have a little more power in their hands…
The weak link
The Fanpage article is yet another demonstration of what we have theorized in our essays about cancel culture: the weak link in applying cancel culture is Italian colonialism, whether Umbertine or fascist. A historical and political phase that is summarized first as “ragged colonialism” and then as “mustard gas and racism.”
So much so that the Fanpage video and article even mention the small obelisk in front of Rome’s Termini Station dedicated to the Italian victims of the Battle of Dogali, the 500 heroes of Dogali who give their name to the square, finally restored. It was left out of the decolonization operations initiated by the municipality of Rome in the northernmost African quarter.
Passannante, a very young boy
Tommasi’s arrows are then directed at King Umberto I, both for Bava Beccaris and for the fate of the assassin Giovanni Passannante. Tommasi focuses one of the video’s ‘light-hearted’ moments on this character: Passannante is presented as a ‘very young boy’, almost as if he were a predecessor of the fifteen-year-old Anteo Zamboni. In fact, Passannante was twenty-nine years old when he tried to stab Umberto I, at a time when men were considered grown up once they reached their twenties. This distortion of reality is a litmus test of how much the woke lens of the present can distort the objective view of the past.
Then, inevitably, there is Montanelli, considered by the left to be a secular saint as long as he was good for going against Silvio Berlusconi, and then thrown into Cain’s cauldron as a colonialist, pedophile, and fascist. The source of the scandal was his statements about having taken advantage of the local custom of madamato for a temporary marriage with a 13-year-old girl. A choice he defended on more than one occasion, but which probably falls among the many boasts of a great journalist who also had a taste for invention. But even if it were true, Montanelli would simply have been complying with a local custom, at a time when—it is worth remembering the case of Charlie Chaplin—it was not unusual for a young woman to have relationships with older men. In short, without bothering Gabriel Michel Hippolyte Matzneff (cherished and defended by the European left for decades), Montanelli’s case was not one of sexual predation at all, but simply a reflection of the spirit of the times (and places). Assuming, of course, that it was true…
New to Italian cancel culture is the appearance on the list of ‘bad guys’ of the tomb of Francesco Feroni (1614-1696) in the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence. Feroni was an entrepreneur, an exquisite patron, a prudent administrator, and a generous defender of Tuscan peasants and workers. Certainly, one of his sources of income was the slave trade from Guinea (who knows who supplied him…) to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. However, what remains of him is his magnificent work as a patron, which has left us with immortal masterpieces. Such as those that Saverio Tommasi would like to ‘re-semanticize’.
The monument in Livorno
There is also room for the monument to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Livorno, the Quattro Mori monument.
The monument celebrates the victories of Ferdinando I de’ Medici and the knights of the Order of St. Stephen, founded by his grandfather Cosimo I, against the Barbary pirates and the Ottoman Empire: the battle of Bona and the capture of Prevesa (also the subject of a cycle of frescoes in Palazzo Pitti by Bernardino Poccetti). The Tuscan fleet led by Admiral Jacopo Inghirami also managed on two occasions to defeat the ships of Murat Reis the Elder, one of the most famous Barbary pirates.
The four “prisoners,” as the chained figures (in Latin captivi) were called, often depicted in monumental art until fairly recent times, therefore represent real sailors and officers of the Barbary navies: pirates dragged in chains whose careers as raiders, looters, and scourges of the Italian coast had finally been crushed by the grand ducal galleys, avengers of the many sufferings endured by our peoples. A triumph over cruel enemies, not a hymn to slavery.
In fact, a permanent conflict was fought in the Mediterranean for eleven centuries, and if anything, it was our ‘white ancestors’ who most often ended up as slaves. Between one million and two and a half million Europeans ended up in slavery, raided by Barbary pirates, dragged to North African cities and sold in Constantinople and Cairo (especially young women), chained to the oars of galleys or held prisoner awaiting lucrative ransoms paid by sovereigns and religious orders who collected alms for that purpose. The entire economy of North Africa was based on this vile trade (which was considered vile even at the time), which should raise more than a few questions about the current human trafficking that passes through those shores, only in the opposite direction…
Of course, those were the times: and when possible, even the Europeans gave the Muslims a taste of their own medicine: in Bona, the Tuscans captured 1,500 slaves. Meanwhile, at Lepanto, where between 12,000 and 15,000 Christian slaves were freed, 7,200 Ottomans were captured and enslaved, then divided between Spain, Venice, and the Papal States. For most of them, their fate was to end up rowing on galleys.
And, since we began the paragraph with “those were the times,” it is worth remembering that even free rowers ended up chained to the oars (it seems strange, but there were some who were desperate enough to accept that backbreaking work) and the only difference in treatment from the convicts was the right to keep their mustaches…
When looking at the monument in Livorno, we must remember what the century in which it was built was like. And we must not forget that it represents one of the victories in a war that is considered one of the causes of the infrastructural backwardness of southern Italy: due to the massive investments required to build and maintain the extensive network of watchtowers along the coast, half of Italy had to empty its coffers, while prosperous towns were destroyed by pirates and abandoned by the survivors. The flourishing of Italian coastal villages called “Marina di…” began in the 19th century, when European colonialism put an end to the threat of Barbary raids and the Italians of the South could finally return to live on the coast without fear.
So, instead of glorifying Ferdinando I de’ Medici and European colonialism as a bulwark and then the end of Barbary slavery, Saverio Tommasi manages to turn reality on its head and turn him into a kind of Florentine Bluebeard. It is pointless to remember that the Medici in Livorno, precisely because of the commercial nature of the city and the enlightened spirit of the dynasty, made it one of the most multi-ethnic and tolerant places in the world at the time. Ferdinand, on the other hand, becomes “a Christian and white grand duke who dominates four Muslim and very black slaves.”
But the ‘monument to a slave owner with four slaves’ actually shows four prisoners with very different physical features, precisely because it had no racial connotations (like slavery in the Mediterranean at the time) and realistically represents the ‘multiethnicity’ of the Barbary pirates. Only one of the four is ‘very black’, with sub-Saharan features, and he remains unknown. The other three are Morgiano, the Greek in his prime, Ali Melioco, the old Turkish pirate, and Ali Salettino, the North African: a renegade European, a Turk, and a Maghrebian. So, three white men.
If we really had to reinterpret the four Moors of Livorno…
Let’s play a mind game and for a moment give in to the wokeist delirium of “re-semantization.” If we really had to reinterpret the four Moors of Livorno, well, then we would need a nice sign telling the story of the Barbary pirates and their raids on our coasts. Raids that only ended with the arrival of gunboats in European navies in the late 19th century and which Ferdinand tried to stem with his brave sailors and knights. We should remember the suffering inflicted by Morgiano, the two Alis, and their companions in the merry multiracial brigade of Barbary pirates on the Italian, French, Spanish, and even Northern European populations subjected to raids and massacres. En passant, we should remember Ferdinand as an enlightened and liberal grand duke, a patron who left us with outstanding masterpieces such as the opera La Pellegrina, commissioned for his magnificent wedding to Christina of Lorraine in 1589.
On closer inspection, it might be a good idea for some Livorno public administrator who wants to close this Overton window by taking away ‘the thirst with the ham’ from the iconoclasts de’ noantri.
Livorno and the other ‘Moors’
Fanpage does not dwell on other cases similar to that of Livorno. The fountain by Marino from 1632 commemorating the Battle of Lepanto, with two pairs of slaves, two men and two women in chains. The funeral monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, with four slaves in black marble supporting the upper entablature. This monument, along with the four Moors in Livorno, was at the center of controversy when a media spin against monuments in Italy was attempted a few years ago.
But it must be said that even those who openly called it A Racist Monument before Racism were forced to acknowledge that the Moors in question had nothing to do with the Atlantic slave trade, but rather with the wars against the Ottomans, in which even white Europeans ended up in chains as slaves.
Another monument that has been left out of the Italian ‘cancel culture’ censorship, despite being located in Florence, is the Arch of Triumph of the Lorraines, erected between 1738 and 1739 to celebrate the transition of the Grand Duchy from the Medici to the Lorraines, in addition to the equestrian statue, and the two winged victories, two trophies of arms are represented, with panoplies and trophies of chained slaves, clearly visible from the north side.
Finally, although dating from the late 19th century, there are two monuments by Ettore Ximenes. One is of Vittorio Bottego in Parma, with the explorer standing on two natives symbolizing the rivers he explored. The other is the monument to Major Pietro Toselli, gold medalist for military valor in the battle of Amba Alagi in 1895. Here, among the figures surrounding Toselli, there are an Ascari and an Ethiopian soldier engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
Alessandro il Moro…
The video accompanying the Fanpage article also criticizes the equestrian statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici in Piazza della Signoria. Among other things, this statue was commissioned in 1587 from Giambologna by Ferdinando I himself.
The equestrian statue is a pretext to talk about Michelangelo and his Brutus, an “extraordinary anti-tyrannical manifesto” which, given the way the video is edited, seems to contrast with the tyranny of Cosimo I, as it seeks to present Buonarroti’s work as a liberator alongside the tyrant.
Michelangelo’s Brutus in the Bargello is certainly a clear example of anti-tyrannical sculpture. However, rather than Cosimo I (1519-1574), Brutus should be associated with Alessandro de’ Medici (1501-1537), who was killed by his cousin Lorenzino de’ Medici and an assassin in 1537. Michelangelo’s Brutus, dated around 1538, would therefore be a celebration of Lorenzino against Alessandro, rather than a wish for Cosimo I to meet the same fate.
One Medici is as good as another. Yes and no, but certainly not in this case. As PBS, the US public broadcaster whose funding Trump cut, points out, Alessandro il Moro is the first black head of state in the modern western world. In other words, before Obama there was Alessandro de’ Medici. And with the progress of woke ideology, many have begun to speculate that Lorenzino’s tyrannicide was not a political murder. Rather, it was a racially motivated murder, as we reported in 2021 on Storia in Rete. Ça va sans dire that the ethnically correct identification of Alessandro de’ Medici is a complete fabrication, like Black Cleopatra, Black Beethoven, and other cases of attempted enlistment of European historical figures into the ranks of Africans.
In short, note to Overton window openers: it would be better to include Bruto al Bargello in the Italian-style cancel culture blacklist, as it is a dark glorification of Italy’s first racially motivated crime.
Photo: by SIG SG 510 – Own work, CC0
