Thursday, November 5, 2026, 9:00 PM "The Continuity of Evil. What Remains of Fascism in Today's Italy?"
With Tomaso Montanari, art historian, essayist, full professor of Modern Art History, and Rector of the University for Foreigners of Siena. His studies focus particularly on 17th-century art and cultural heritage, themes he has always intertwined with civic and political engagement. Among his latest books: Libera Università, Per Gaza, and La continuita del male- Perché la destra italiana è ancora fascista.
Reading Tomaso Montanari's latest book – TheContinuity of Evil – means coming face to face with everything our anti-fascist Constitution sought to erase: race, nationalism, identity, patriarchy, inequality, authoritarianism.
Tomaso Montanari explains what remains of fascism in today's Italy by analyzing the language and mentality of current leaders and activists of the Italian right. They are obsessed with the defeat of fascism, neither regretting nor denying the past, and are seeking, even with revisionist historical theories, to construct a new reality based on Mussolini's dictatorship.
For Tomaso Montanari, calling things by their name becomes a democratic necessity to understand what is happening in that dark thread of continuity from the post-war period to the present day. This idea of a nation led by a leader with full powers, whose borders must be defended, even violently, against foreigners, cannot tolerate conflict within its borders and defends inequality by contesting the legitimacy of social conflict, with a patriarchal conception of the family and the need to "return women to their place," that is, to bear children in service to the country, along with the goal of shaping and standardizing "true Italians" by strengthening order and discipline in schools, including through new sanctions and punishments, and by defending "the race" by creating fears against immigrants who would steal Italians' jobs and "identity.".
To break this “continuity of evil” and exercise a nonviolent right to resist, Tomaso Montanari tells us that “it is urgent to begin implementing the project of the Constitution of the Republic, taking the human person as our supreme compass (...) and it is even more urgent to learn to love people who are different from us: equal in rights and unique, unrepeatable, uncontrollable and free in their marvelous diversity”.
