Meloni fails to hit high note in Italy’s culture wars
Opera houses, museums and Venice Biennale roiled by rightwing government’s bid to control the arts
As culture wars go, little beats Venice’s opera house La Fenice, where the orchestra rebelled for months against a new musical director seemingly chosen for her political affinity with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The dispute recently came to a head when Beatrice Venezi told an Argentine newspaper that the orchestra itself was a hotbed of nepotism “where positions are practically passed down from father to son”. Within days, she was sacked for denigrating the prestigious theatre.
While the termination of Venezi’s contract brought curtains down on that drama, the conflict was just one in a series of controversies that have blighted Meloni’s right-wing government quest to put its stamp on Italy’s cultural life.
“They seem to be stumbling from one error to another,” said Marianna Griffini, author of The Politics of Memory in the Italian Populist Radical Right. “What they refer to in terms of culture is Lord of the Rings. How do you then translate that obsession with Lord of the Rings into policymaking?”
Since taking power in late 2022, Meloni has pushed for the government to exert stronger influence over prestigious cultural institutions such as theatres and museums, which she had complained had been dominated by “the left”.
While at a more modest scale, her moves echo the culture wars waged by Donald Trump, as the US president seeks to reshape arts institutions such as the Kennedy Centre to fit his taste.
The Meloni government is in “a fight to appoint their own people — to show that they have good right-wing intellectuals or artists”, said Andrea Mammone, a professor of politics at La Sapienza University.
Andrea Estero, president of Italy’s National Association of Music Critics and editor of the monthly journal Classic Voice, said the prime minister and her allies “think culture is strategic”, and have an impulse to “centralise control of culture in general”.
Yet many appointments have backfired, generating controversy, even legal battles, leaving opera houses and museums in turmoil and creating major embarrassments for Meloni.
“It’s obvious there is a fundamental lack of professional expertise in these politically motivated appointments,” said one arts professional, who asked not to be identified. “If you put somebody with no experience in charge of a major cultural institution, things go wrong.”
The Venice Biennale, the prestigious international art fair, opens this week amid fury in the EU over the decision to allow Russia back despite its ongoing war in Ukraine. The pavilion is curated by two daughters of top lieutenants of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The biennale’s president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco — appointed by Meloni’s government in 2024 — has defied pressure, including from Rome, to reverse course on Russia’s participation.
Brussels has cut €2mn in funding to the biennale organisers over Moscow’s participation. But Buttafuoco dug in his heels, citing a desire to oppose “exclusion or censorship in any form” and billing the fair as a “place of openness, dialogue and artistic freedom”.
Such is the embarrassment for Meloni, who strongly supports Ukraine, that her culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, is skipping the opening. The international jury appointed to select the winners of the fair’s art prizes resigned on Friday.
“It’s an internal culture war,” Griffini said of the stand-off. “They are facing tensions between their own far-right intellectuals and the more pragmatic necessities imposed when you are in government.”
When it comes to their own aesthetic tastes, Meloni and her political allies veer distinctively towards popular culture — with strong emphasis on pop.
In 2023, the government held an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art dedicated to British writer JRR Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings fantasy epic — a longtime inspiration for Italy’s far-right. Displayed items included a pinball machine, costumes from the film, book covers and fan art.
Opera is another strong focus, as it is a genre born in Italy that spread across Europe. But Estero said Rome wants Italy’s opera houses to prioritise a handful of popular “best-sellers” from the “Italian traditional repertoire”, rather than to experiment and evolve as a living culture.
“They focus heavily on tradition — traditional composers — Verdi, Bellini, Puccini and so on,” he said. “Their strategy is to focus on a sort of museum of this legacy: these great composers of these great operas.”
Shortly after coming to power, the government imposed a new maximum age of 70 years for any foreign citizens directing one of Italy’s 13 state-run opera companies. It used the new age rule as a pretext to remove famed French director Stéphane Lissner from Naples’ Teatro San Carlo, where he had won accolades for his innovative stagings and recruitment of major stars.
Lissner — who previously directed Milan’s La Scala and the Paris Opera — successfully challenged his ousting in court. When he finally bowed out last year at the end of his five-year contract, he complained of “too much politics in the theatre”.
Prosecutors are now investigating Lissner, his team and opera stars they hired over allegations that singers were overpaid in violation of Italian rules. Lissner and his team said they could not comment while the probe is ongoing.
German opera tenor Jonas Kaufmann said he was “surprised” to learn from Italian media that he was under investigation. “It is only correct that the allocation of public funds is carefully scrutinised,” he said in a statement, adding: “I have met my contractual obligations in full.”
In Venice, La Fenice will be seeking a new musical director while Venezi describes herself as a victim of a “hate campaign”.
Estero says her appointment process was so unusual that it was impossible for musicians to accept: “It was a political appointment for a job that cannot tolerate political appointments,” he said. “Artistic choices must be made for musical reasons.”