The nightmarish visions of Dante Alighieri, with their many circles of hell, ringed in blood and fire, would seem perhaps a natural draw for politicians who traffic in the rhetoric of us versus them, good versus evil. But this doesn’t fully explain why the poet—who, after all, lived and wrote 700 years ago—finds himself quoted and adored like a medieval poster boy by Italy’s newly resurgent extreme right.
Asked to name the two most important things about Pinocchio, most Americans would answer: First, his nose grows when he lies, and second, he is a wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy. At this, Carlo Collodi would most likely shake his head.
When Benito Mussolini founded, on March 23, 1919, the organization that would become the National Fascist Party, Italy’s top newspaper relegated the news to a blurb, roughly the same space devoted to the theft of 64 cases of soap. That’s where Antonio Scurati’s novel M: Son of the Century starts.