Geography Archives: Italy

Pope Francis telephoned a church in Gaza nearly every night since October 2023. But the New York Times didn’t include that fact in its obituary.

You don’t have to be Christian or a religious person or even a supporter of Pope Francis to appreciate his willingness to speak truth to power, and his efforts to get U.S. Catholic Bishops to do the same.

Today’s countries such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, and France have, to varying degrees, confronted their imperial legacies, however incomplete or contested these reckonings may be.

In this republished essay from 2017, John Bellamy Foster discusses how U.S. neofascism in certain ways resembles the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

Faced with the threat of mass redundancies, GKN automotive workers in Florence occupied their factory to save jobs and build green technology. Their actions can be an inspiration to British workers fighting similar fights.

After meeting with Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer expressed admiration for the Italian prime minister’s plans to deport refugees to camps in Albania—signaling the Labour government’s willingness to embrace the policies of neofascism.

Andy Merrifield went to Sardinia searching for Gramsci’s phantom. We can’t reinvent Gramsci’s past, shouldn’t reinvent that past. But we might keep his memory alive, find solidarity in that memory, keep him free from any renaming, from the encyclopedia and the axe. His phantom, his death mask, can haunt our present and our future. To remember what happened to him is never to forget his dark times, the dark times that might well threaten us again.

In France, the far right is likely to be the leading political force in the European elections of 9 June 2024, and probably the second (or third) force in the European Union. A relatively large number of far right parties are now on the winning side in national elections, and are even taking part in national governments.

This is truly a new political fact: particularly on the issue of war, but not only, the 20-year-olds are coming back on the scene.

Piero and Nino exchanged ideas, criticized one another, encouraged each other; Nino often used Piero, seven-years his junior, as an intellectual sounding board, as a trusted interlocutor, asking for advice, for suggestions, whether his friend could chase up a source, a book or journal, a magazine or newspaper article, could he confirm this fact and that, find out some precise detail about Croce’s historical studies, if Machiavelli ever wrote anything about economics, or David Ricardo about philosophy.

University professors and activists are calling on the Italian government to cancel joint research funding with Israel unless the country ceases its bombardment of Palestinian civilians.

Since the great climate strikes of 2019, and even more so after the acknowledgment of the environmental roots of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ecological transition seems to be everywhere.

Mattarella: ‘Batons against young people are an expression of failure.’ The president issues a sharp warning to the police and interior minister. The government: ‘Law enforcement is not to be touched.’

Laid-off workers of the former GKN plant in Campi Bisenzio, who have been leading a 900-day long struggle, have proposed to take over the plant by forming a cooperative to facilitate futuristic production.

Some 85 percent of staff of the National Health Service and private medical facilities stayed away from work.

Fifteen thousand people marched through the streets after a young woman’s murder. ‘Femicide is not a crime of passion, it is a crime of power. It is a state murder, because the state does not defend us and does not protect us.’

Ninety-seven years back, via Giovanni Battista Morgagni, number 25, was a more modest lodging house, home of a quietly discreet pensionante called Antonio Gramsci.

Though much marxist theory has explored the recurrent cycles and patterns of historical capitalism, not enough attention has been given to the tendency of moments of politico-economic crisis to become an ideological contestation between fascism and communism in the context of a crisis of liberalism.

“A week or so on, John Berger was still with me, there in spirit. Or, better, I was still with him. When in Rome, I told myself…well, what better thing to do than to visit Gramsci, the great Marxist, whose grave lies in the city’s ‘Non-Catholic Cemetery’ in Testaccio.”

Newly declassified British files shed disturbing light on the origins and internal workings of Operation Gladio, a covert NATO plot deploying fascist terror militias across Italy. Have spies in London applied these lessons in Ukraine?