The influence of the Nouvelle Droite in Italy: the Voce della Fogna and the 1977 Hobbit Camp

It is difficult to draw an overall profile of the Nouvelle Droite in the 1970s. In attempting to identify some of the cornerstones of its political thought, mention should first be made of metapolitics, an expression by which the Nouvelle Droite understood that area of values which, although not strictly part of politics, has a decisive influence on consensus in society (Capra Casadio Reference Capra Casadio2014). The metapolitical strategy of the Nouvelle Droite therefore aimed to initiate a cultural counter-movement, capable of defeating the cultural hegemony that the Left had gained after 1945. For de Benoist and the GRECE it was therefore necessary to rebuild the Right on an intellectual level, in order to raise it from its state of cultural inferiority, caused by both external elements – the Right’s identification with Nazism and the Left’s cultural activism, and internal elements – the Right’s cultural indolence and its nostalgia for the past. It was a project to create a renewed and aggressive Right, capable of promoting an alternative hegemonic project and seducing the elites (Taguieff Reference Taguieff1994). De Benoist and the GRECE were driven by the conviction that cultural debate was more important than a purely political debate in winning consensus. Politics, in fact, was a secondary sector of the broader cultural field. In shifting its focus from politics to culture, the Nouvelle Droite encountered Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (Nacci Reference Nacci and Ventrone2010). It thus coined the phrase ‘right-wing Gramscism’, later the subject of a specific Colloque (GRECE 1982). With this perspective, GRECE set out to initiate a culture war.

The rejection of Judeo-Christianity – understood as the kind of mentality that characterised liberal, democratic, capitalist and Marxist currents – characterised the discourse of the Nouvelle Droite during the 1970s (Germinario Reference Germinario2002). From the point of view of the GRECE, Judeo-Christianity had introduced egalitarianism into Europe, which, after taking on a secular guise with the Enlightenment, had become the dominant ideology in the West. Especially since the mid-1970s (François Reference François and Dard2012, 165), the enemy of the Nouvelle Droite was no longer the Soviet Union, but rather the West and in particular the USA as a direct expression of egalitarianism (de Benoist and Locchi, 1979). In the early 1980s, Nouvelle Droite thus introduced the theme of ‘ethno-differentialism’, that is, the defence of the specificities of peoples, against liberalism, the ‘silent killer’ of cultural differences (Faye Reference Faye1981).

The Nouvelle Droite’s rethinking of the cultural identity of the Right and its engagement in the intellectual debate, facing new issues and experimenting with new organisational strategies, was taken up in the 1970s by some young neofascists around Pino Rauti who, during those years, tried to oust Giorgio Almirante from the leadership of the MSI. The two figures embodied very different political and ideological options.

Returning in 1969 to the leadership of the MSI, Almirante inaugurated during the following year the Destra Nazionale current, with the intention of transforming the party into a beacon for a broader anti-communist front. Armando Plebe, a former Marxist philosopher, was chosen as a cultural reference point, but he failed to propose an original and unified ideological synthesis (Plebe Reference Plebe1971). The Destra Nazionale’s electoral results in 1972 were encouraging and in 1973 MSI celebrated its merger with the monarchists (Chiarini Reference Chiarini1995, 129). The positive trajectory was interrupted between 1973 and 1974. The killing of a policeman by a young neofascist during a demonstration in Milan (12 April 1973), the Brescia massacre (28 May 1974, see Chiarini and Corsini Reference Chiarini and Corsini1983), and the Italicus train tragedy (4 August 1974) undermined the MSI’s representation as a party of law and order and reaffirmed the relevance of antifascism (Ferraresi Reference Ferraresi1996; Cento Bull Reference Cento Bull2008; Dondi Reference Dondi2015). The defeat suffered in the referendum on divorce (12–13 May 1974), during which Almirante had aligned his party with the Democrazia Cristiana, further isolated the MSI. The Historic Compromise, the 1976 electoral decline and the split of Democrazia Nazionale (Parlato Reference Parlato2017) demolished the MSI’s ambitions.

In opposition to Almirante, Pino Rauti, who had rejoined the MSI in 1969, called for a change in right-wing mentality and a new focus on civil society (see his speech in the newspaper Il Conciliatore in 1972, reproduced in de Turris Reference de Turris2003, 340). For Rauti, the MSI also had to exploit the growing social protest against the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and its policy of Historic Compromise (Ignazi Reference Ignazi1989, 181). He organised a network of publications around the Centro Librario Europa in Rome that disseminated writings not only by Julius Evola, the main cultural reference point for many young neofascists of the time, but also by Drieu La Rochelle, Ernst Jünger, Ezra Pound, Robert Brasillach, Oswald Spengler, Joseph de Maistre, Knut Hamsun and the Romanian Iron Guards leader Codreanu. With the motion ‘Linea futura’, voted for by 22 per cent of the delegates at the 1977 MSI congress, he proposed shifting the MSI’s focus to young people and social issues. He also emphasised the party’s ‘desperate need for culture’ (Secolo d’Italia 1977). This was a rather unprecedented focus in a party like the MSI, where culture was usually considered an ‘optional’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2024, 102).

The Voce della Fogna emerged within the Rauti current and was a reaction to both the difficulties of the MSI and the transformations of youth culture in the context of the post-’68 socio-political upheavals (Falciola Reference Falciola, Galfré and Simone2018, 131–132). It was promoted by the Florentine Fronte della Gioventù (FdG) centering around Tarchi and constituted a fundamental step in the formation of the human and cultural environment from which the Nuova Destra would spring.Footnote ² The influence of GRECE was crucial for the activists who animated the Vdf. The latter had become aware of the existence of GRECE thanks to Pino Romualdi’s newspaper L’Italiano, with which Tarchi and Stenio Solinas collaborated. L’Italiano published a series of articles on the right wing in France (Rallo Reference Rallo1970a, Reference Rallo1970b, Reference Rallo1970c, Reference Rallo1970d; later collected in Rallo Reference Rallo1971) given the interest aroused by the publication of Fascismi sconosciuti by Maurice Bardèche (Reference Bardèche1969; see Martini Reference Martini2023; Sorgonà Reference Sorgonà2024). Bardéche had played an important role in inspiring a new generation of neofascists, including de Benoist himself (Mammone Reference Mammone2011, 310). In addition, L’Italiano provided a list of the French ‘national-European press’ in which Nouvelle École appeared (L’Italiano 1971). In 1973 a former Ordre Nouveau leader, Jack Marchal (Novak Reference Novak2011, 164–167), advised the group that shortly afterwards founded the Vdf to get in touch with GRECE. In the summer of 1974, Tarchi, Mario Sanesi and Susanna Tre Re, members of the Florence FdG, met alain de Benoist and other GRECE members in Paris. In the following years, the relationship was further consolidated through close correspondence and participation in the annual Colloques and Université d’éte organised by GRECE (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 445).

The Vdf published 31 issues between December 1974 and spring 1983. In 1977 it reached a peak of subscribers – 1,200 – and a circulation of 4,500 copies (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2019, xviii). The Vdf was characterised by a provocative and often vulgar style. Its very name referred ironically to a well-known slogan used by the radical Left – ‘Fascist scum, go back to the sewers!’ (‘Fascisti carogne, tornate nelle fogne!’). From the very first issue, the magazine set out to create ‘not out of nothing, the basis for a rebirth’ and to represent ‘a new voice’ against ‘the false myths of this age’: ‘egalitarianism, collectivism, materialism’ (Vdf 1974), three themes that would also characterise the Nuova Destra. The ‘old right’, the Vdf argued, was ‘lost’, locked in a ‘ghetto’ (Vdf 1981b), unable to confront the present because of its nostalgic rhetoric and cultural poverty (Vdf 1981c). For the neofascist press of the time, the Vdf devoted an unprecedented attention to the products of mass culture and youth cultures.Footnote ³ Indeed, the young right-wingers of the 1970s (Guerrieri Reference Guerrieri, Livi and Sturm2010; Chiarini Reference Chiarini and De Nicolò2011) consumed the same products of the mass culture industry (literature, music, comics and cinema) as their left-wing peers and, like them, represented themselves as outsiders and hostile to institutions. In 1977, Stenio Solinas, one of the founders of the Nuova Destra, described neofascist youth in this way: ‘a decidedly revolutionary youth, which is uncomfortable with the combination of order and legality; which hates the system more than communism, which dreams of a complete overhaul’ (see Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 153).

The first Hobbit Camp in Montesarchio on 11–12 June 1977 represented a further important chapter in the history of the Nuova Destra (Guerrieri Reference Guerrieri2005). For Marco Revelli, in fact, the first Hobbit camp was

The rally was held a few days after the national assembly of the FdG which, despite the majority obtained by Tarchi – supported by Rauti’s current – nominated Gianfranco Fini, supported by Almirante, as the new secretary (Ignazi Reference Ignazi1989, 188–198). Breaking with the party’s traditional youth events characterised by political debates, physical exercises and ideological training courses, the first Hobbit Camp focused on the recreational and community dimension, with concerts, open debates, and moments of conviviality. For the Vdf it represented ‘the example of a community revolution’ and ‘the disruptive force of free time’ (Vdf 1977). It was a ‘liberation’, the birth of a ‘new way of “doing politics”, of being political’ that, from the right, was ready to confront contemporaneity (see the reprint of the book Hobbit/Hobbit published in 1982, in Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 90–91). According to the situationist Gianni Simonetti – an exponent of the extra-parliamentary left – it was instead a right-wing strategy of appropriation of left-wing initiatives such as the Parco Lambro festival of the previous year (Bessarione Reference Bessarione1979). Certainly, in the Montesarchio rally the ‘ambiguous fascination’ (Lenci Reference Lenci2012, 72) exerted by the 1977 movement manifested itself (Falciola Reference Falciola2015).

Starting with its very name, the first Hobbit Camp manifested the role played by the ‘atypical’ reference (Livi Reference Livi2023, 81) to Tolkien’s universe in terms of the renewal of languages and imagery undertaken by the Vdf. Read with interest by Evola’s followers as a manifestation of the rejection of industrial civilisation, progress, and materialism (Del Ponte Reference Del Ponte1971; De Turris Reference De Turris1974), the Vdf celebrated The Lord of the Rings as ‘the most phantasmagorical book that ever came into our hands’ (Vdf, 1975). Within it, Tarchi recognised ‘a vision of the world and of life’, the opportunity for an evasion without desertion in which actuality and myth outlined ‘a different model of humanity’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi1978, 85). Through Tolkien, the Vdf and the first Hobbit Camp tried to reformulate some of the typical themes of right-wing culture (the primacy of the spirit, the defence of the hierarchically organised community) and to put Rauti’s 1976 call for new ‘myths, strength of ideas [idee–forza] and symbols’ into action (cited in Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 356).

Studies have identified the terminus a quo of the Nuova Destra either in the launch of Vdf in 1974, or in the first Hobbit Camp in 1977. The first option, supported by Tarchi and the scholars who have adhered to his interpretation (Raisi Reference Raisi1990; Angella Reference Angella2000; Capra Casadio Reference Capra Casadio2013a), emphasises the internal maturation of the MSI youth in the process that led to the Nuova Destra. In short, focusing on 1974 makes it possible to avoid identifying the Italian Right with the dramatic phenomena of violence in those years and, on the contrary, to shed light on the plurality of political cultures existing in neofascist youth (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 9). Instead, the choice of 1977 as the terminus a quo (argued in different ways by Revelli Reference Revelli and Ferraresi1984; Tassani Reference Tassani1986; Zucchinali, Reference Zucchinali1986) foregrounds the role of the general historical context and the influence of youth cultures.

The first publishing initiatives of the Nuova Destra and the break with the MSI

Diorama letterario and Elementi were the first initiatives ‘under the label of the Nuova Destra’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2024, 137) and emerged from the milieu that referred to the Vdf and animated the first Hobbit Camp. The two journals accompanied the echo of the debates generated in France by the GRECE in the summer-autumn of 1979, which brought the expression Nouvelle Droite into the public domain (Duranton-Crabol Reference Duranton-Crabol1988, 170). From this time on, Alain de Benoist appeared several times in the Italian right-wing press (Tassani Reference Tassani1986, 26). His theses also found ample space in Linea, a fortnightly journal founded in 1979 by Rauti with a circulation of 14,000 copies, to which Solinas – as editor-in-chief – and Tarchi regularly contributed.Footnote ⁴

Founded in 1976 as a supplement to the Vdf, Diorama letterario became an independent magazine in 1978. It declared its opposition to the two ‘vices’ of right-wing culture, namely ‘sectarian dogmatism and absolute ideological permissiveness’ (Diorama letterario 1978). Its explicit aim was to give rise to an ‘alternative anti-materialist culture’ (1977c). Consequently, the journal insisted on the importance of a solid cultural background for a lasting political commitment (1976). What was needed were ‘men of culture and cultural organisers’ together with ‘suitable structures to foster them’ (1977a) such as an ‘organic publishing house’, ‘following the example of what the Left had done’ (1976). Picking up on de Benoist’s theses on right-wing Gramscism, Diorama letterario argued that ‘today culture is the major tool for reconquering political space’ and that ‘the Communist Party’s “Gramscian scheme” has had and still has weight in the form of minds conquered, tools prepared, opinions constructed in homage to the principle of the conquest of civil society’. An ‘equal and opposite counter-strategy’ was therefore necessary (1977e). The magazine reiterated the accusations launched by the Vdf against the rest of the Right, which remained in the ‘narrow and closed field of nostalgia or transformism’, far ‘from the due confrontation with reality’ and from the themes that fascinated young people: travel, music, fiction and cinema, i.e. ‘free time’ (1977d). Preferring ‘parades of “‘well-known names”’ (1977a) – referring polemically to Armando Plebe – the major part of right-wing culture was characterised by the dismissal of any intellectual proposal and by amateurism (1977b).

The first series of Elementi, of which three issues came out between 1978 and 1979, appeared after the second Hobbit Camp and in conjunction with the founding in Florence of the publishing house Il Labirinto, headed by Solinas (Raisi Reference Raisi1990, 39). Held in Fonte Romana di Pacentro on 23–25 June 1978, the second Hobbit Camp was generally considered a failure, so much so as to be remembered as the ‘Gollum camp’. The names Elementi and Il Labirinto recalled similar initiatives of the Nouvelle Droite, Élements and le Labyrinthe respectively, testifying to the solid relations across the Alps. Elementi concluded an agreement with Élements whereby Stenio Solinas and Gennaro Malgieri wrote for the French journal, while de Benoist, Guillaume Faye and Michel Marmin wrote for the Italian one (Mammone Reference Mammone2015, 174–175). The first two volumes published by Il Labirinto were an essay by de Benoist on Nietzsche (de Benoist Reference de Benoist1979) and an interview conducted by de Benoist himself with Konrad Lorenz (Lorenz Reference Konrad and de Benoist1979). The founding nucleus of the Nuova Destra gathered around Elementi. The editor-in-chief was Stenio Solinas, the editor-in-chief Maurizio Cabona, the editorial board consisted of Marco Tarchi, Giuseppe Del Ninno, Enrico Nistri, Piero Visani, Gennaro Malgieri and Carlo Terracciano – the defection by the latter two caused the end of the first series of the journal. In addition to them, de Benoist, Faye and Marmin, Claudio Finzi, Giorgio Locchi, Franco Cardini, Sigfrido Bartolini, Enzo Erra and Gianfranco de Turris also contributed to Elementi. In pointing out the three fundamental lessons learnt from the post-’68 decade, Elementi emphasised the importance of culture – ‘cultural power is the primary engine, the indispensable weapon for those who have ideas and want to make them successful’, the importance of confrontation with the present, and finally the willingness to face an era of crisis by questioning everything – ‘to confront the ideas of others without prejudice, to polemicise and even descend, if necessary, into the opposite camp’ (1978). In this passage we recognise the topics that would distinguish the Nuova Destra in the following years: the metapolitical choice, the denunciation of the ‘incapacitating myth’ represented by Evola’s legacy, and right-wing Gramscism.

Between 1980 and 1981 the Nuova Destra became a subject of debate in the media.Footnote ⁵ Meanwhile, signs of an imminent break with the MSI accumulated. The Elements group convinced de Benoist to refuse Almirante’s invitation to speak at the 1979 MSI congress, considering it to be manipulative (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 449–450). This congress represented another defeat for Rauti and indicated Amirante’s clear supremacy over the MSI (Ignazi Reference Ignazi1989, 206–207). A few months later, between 4 and 6 January 1980, the first convention of the Nuova Destra was held in Cison di Valmarino, entitled ‘Hypotheses and Strategies of a New Right’. Tarchi, Solinas, Cabona, Umberto Croppi, Giuseppe Del Ninno and Giovanni Monastra spoke, amongst others. The convention was a moment of collective reflection to define the profile of a Right ‘new enough to break [the] mould’ (Vdf 1980a). Underlying it was ‘a single, unitary world view, but not a single ideology’ – a clarification that manifested the presence within it of different political and cultural sensibilities (Tarchi Reference Tarchi1980a, 114).

In his report, Tarchi emphasised the differences between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ right, without, however, assuming a formal break with the MSI. According to his reconstruction, after 1945 the Right had lost the ‘will’ to ‘affect the formation of mentalities and values’. The ‘revolt against the modern world’ predicted by Evola had turned out to be an ‘incapacitating myth’, which distanced itself from confrontation with reality. The ‘new right’, on the other hand, advocated the ‘metapolitical choice’, i.e. ‘confrontation, and to some extent an exchange, with the modern world’. No longer therefore ‘revolt against the modern world’, but ‘rejection of the modern world’, combined with a search for legitimisation (Tarchi Reference Tarchi1980a, 109–111). The ‘corollary’ of the primacy of cultural choice (metapolitics) was ‘right-wing Gramscism’, defined as ‘one of the most interesting indications provided to us by the French Nouvelle Droite’, which implied the ‘reinterpretation of Gramsci’s methodology of conditioning and shaping mentalities, tending towards the constitution of a cultural hegemony, a premise for the conquest of stable political power’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi1980a, 119).Footnote ⁶

Thus, Tarchi acknowledged the influence of the Nouvelle Droite, but specified that it was necessary ‘to grasp from the phenomenon what can be useful to translate into Italian experience’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi1980a, 113). ‘The theses developed by GRECE, and more particularly by Alain de Benoist’, he wrote shortly afterwards, offered ‘further keys to interpreting the development of that “modern world” … too often schematised and neglected’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi and De Benoist1981, 13). Nevertheless, he reiterated the ‘absolutely autonomous forms’ of the Nuova Destra with respect to GRECE (Tarchi Reference Tarchi1980b). Within the core of the Nuova Destra there were in fact different views on the Nouvelle Droite. Giovanni Monastra, for example, harshly criticised GRECE’s empiricism and scientism and added: ‘I really would not like it if, after 20 years of “traditionalist” scholasticism [the reference is Evola], we had to put up with a decade of “Grecist” scholasticism!’ (M[onastra] Reference M[onastra]1980, 89–90).

A few months later, on 16–20 July 1980, the third Hobbit Camp was held at Castel Camponeschi. The celebratory volume Hobbit/Hobbit, published two years later, described it as the expression of an ‘organic community, the ability to create a new spirit’ that had dismissed ‘the somewhat sad rituals and hymns to death, to discover together the joy of participating’ (see the book reprint in Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 79). For the Vdf it was a crucial turning point, at once a community and a celebration (Vdf 1980b). For Linea, similarly, the young participants in the third Hobbit Camp had perceived ‘themselves and others in a different, renewed and richer way’ (Linea 1980). According to Tarchi’s memory, the Nuova Destra’s intention to make itself independent from the MSI was already present at this time (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 450). The Vdf described the first convention in Cison di Valmarino as a sort of dress rehearsal for the Nuova Destra: ‘discard the rest, once and for all. Incapacitating myths, rejection of the political, nostalgia’ (Vdf 1980c). ‘It is necessary to spread, jumping over fences’ it added shortly afterwards (1980e).

However, it was the MSI leadership that took the initiative. In 1980, the party had proposed the introduction of the death penalty by exploiting the fear of terrorism in those years. Together with Rauti’s current, Tarchi expressed his opposition in an interview with the popular magazine Panorama (Fioretti Reference Fioretti1981). Towards the end of the year, the Vdf published a harsh satire against some MSI leaders (Vdf 1980f). Although he was not the author of the article in question, the responsibility fell on Tarchi, who was expelled for this reason without any significant opposition from Rauti. The latter, in fact, merely challenged the manner of the expulsion and invited the party to give Tarchi a chance to explain himself (Linea 1981). The expulsion of Tarchi from the MSI was the culmination of the party leadership’s aversion to the intellectual contribution of the Nuova Destra (Guerrieri Reference Guerrieri2009, 110). For his part, on the contrary, Tarchi attributed his expulsion to ‘a breakdown of nerves in the face of the growing popularity of the new-right project’.Footnote ⁷

The parabola of the Nuova Destra as an autonomous cultural current

As early as 1979 Franco Cardini, who was closely following the path of the Nuova Destra¸ had hypothesised its autonomy from the MSI (Tassani Reference Tassani1986, 27). Moreover, the ideas of the Nuova Destra were now incompatible with both the MSI and Rauti. For the Nuova Destra, in fact, Rauti’s aspiration to reorganise the MSI according to new criteria was now inadequate (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2024, 141). Several of the GRECE’s ideas were in turn unacceptable to the rest of the Italian Right. The extreme right-wing Catholic journal Cristianità, for example, accused de Benoist’s paganism of introducing modern and, as such, revolutionary ideologies to right-wing youth (Introvigne Reference Introvigne1977). De Benoist’s nominalism, claimed Catholic traditionalist Piero Vassallo, opened the door to an exaggerated relativism and subjectivism, which would reduce the Right to a sterile ideology (Vassallo, Reference Vassallo1978). The same right-wing Gramscism was considered by Marcello Veneziani – a young right-wing intellectual who had initially followed the activities of the Nuova Destra with interest – to be an unacceptable homologation to the Left. For Veneziani, one learned ‘more from a Mussolini than from a Gramsci’. Moreover, he expressed significant perplexity about certain topics ‘discovered’ by the Nuova Destra, such as ecology, ethology and fantasy, which risked leading the way ‘into a magical but harmless universe’ (Veneziani Reference Veneziani1982).

In the light of Tarchi’s expulsion, the second convention, ‘Constants and evolutions of a cultural heritage’ (held at Cison di Valmarino, 12–14 March 1981) defined the cultural and political coordinates of the Nuova Destra, now considered an autonomous and self-sufficient project with respect to the MSI. In fact, it was considered necessary to emerge ‘from the tunnel of fascism’, thus sanctioning ‘the end of the postwar period’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi1982, 28). It was therefore necessary to be open to confrontation, to overcome the logic of dichotomies in order to arrive at ‘a culture of et-et rather than a culture of aut-aut (“either-or”)’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi1982, 21) – an aspect on which the Nuova Destra would insist in the following years. As the Vdf wrote, what was needed was ‘a new synthesis capable of melting away the blinkers of categories – right, left, centre … the wreckage of a time gone by’ (Vdf 1982). Following up on these intentions, a public meeting was held in Florence on 27 November 1982 dedicated to ‘The Left and Nuova Destra: Notes for a Debate’ during which Tarchi and Del Ninno dialogued with the Marxist philosopher Massimo Cacciari and the left-wing Catholic intellectual Giovanni Tassani. This seemed to realise the hoped-for dialogue beyond the right and the left and, at the same time, accredit the Nuova Destra as a legitimate interlocutor (Vdf 1983).Footnote ⁸ Predictably, the initiative received harsh criticism. The Left saw the Nuova Destra as simply another declination of the old radical right (Angella Reference Angella2000, 134–135). The MSI accused it of denying its fascist roots and of seeking an impossible mediation with the Left (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2024, 148).

In the following years, the Nuova Destra acquired a recognisable editorial presence for itself, although it continued to suffer from a certain instability. Indeed, from its very beginnings it was characterised by continuous departures and new entries. The departures were generally in favour of returning to the MSI (Malgeri, Mario Bozzi Sentieri, Del Ninno), towards more radical right-wing circles (Terracciano) and towards the world of information (Cabona, Solinas – see Tassani Reference Tassani1994, 126). The publication of Diorama letterario continued, joined by the second series of Elementi between November 1982 and December 1983, and the four-monthly Trasgressioni from 1986. The main publishing houses were Akropolis – which published de Benoist’s two seminal books Visto da destra (Reference de Benoist1981) and Le idee a posto (Reference de Benoist1983b) – and La Roccia di Erec (another reference to Tolkien’s world), which printed Diorama letterario and Trasgressioni.

The third conference in 1982, entitled ‘The West: Decay of a Myth’, prepared the publication of the pamphlet Il nemico principale, which de Benoist identified with the USA, breaking with the traditional pro-Western majority in the Cold War Right (de Benoist Reference de Benoist1983a). A year later, between 21 and 22 October 1983, the fourth convention was held on ‘The Forms of the Political. Ideas of the Nuova Destra’ (Reference Nacci1984), which was also attended by Cacciari and the sociologist Sabino Acquaviva. In the subsequent convention, ‘Nuova Destra and Radical Right. From evolution to specificity’ of 23–24 June 1984, the Nuova Destra distanced itself from totalitarian and traditionalist conceptions, recognising itself in the democratic camp (Diorama letterario 1984). Between 1985 and 1986, the Nuova Destra attempted to organise its sympathisers – 700–800, with another 3,000–4,000 people interested in its ideas (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 472) – into a national metapolitical association (Angella Reference Angella2000, 159–161). According to Tarchi, the project failed because of the

This phase was followed by a sort of ‘breaking of ranks’ that led to the adoption of a purely editorial strategy attempting to attract media attention by means of certain publications such as de Benoist’s Oltre l’occidente (Reference de Benoist1986).

In addition to this, one has to consider the lack of economic resources, the unfavourable political situation and the role as a pole of attraction that the MSI continued to exercise in the rest of the Right. If in its early stages the Nuova Destra had been able to benefit from the attention of the mass media, by the mid-1980s this interest had waned. The break with the MSI, moreover, had been induced by Tarchi’s expulsion, and not by an internal maturing process. This break was not to be taken for granted, since the party was deeply rooted in the political itinerary of the young neofascists who had grown up in the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, in the right-wing political space the Nuova Destra was discounting the presence in Italy of a hegemonic force – the MSI – which was absent at the time in France. Moreover, criticism of modernity according to Evola’s lesson still carried great weight in the Italian Right (Germinario Reference Germinario2005, 10).

During the 1980s, the Nuova Destra tried to initiate a dialogue with other political forces that can only be touched upon here. Attempts to do so included interest in the Italian Green Party (Bulli Reference Bulli and Forchtner2020; Bernardini Reference Bernardini2024) and Craxi’s ‘tricolour socialism’ (Accame Reference Accame1983, 60). More fruitful was the relationship with the Lega Nord, based on a common interest in local identities (Saresella Reference Saresella2023, 353–356). The start of Rauti’s short-lived secretariat in the MSI raised new hopes in the Nuova Destra, which launched the third series of Elementi. In February 1991 and September 1992, the last two national seminars were organised, respectively ‘Greatness and Misery of Nationalism: Europe Facing the Challenges of the Year 2000ʹ and ‘Racism and Anti-Racism. The challenges of the multicultural society’ (Diorama letterario 1992, 1993). After Rauti, Fini took over the leadership of the MSI, later transforming it into Alleanza Nazionale (Ignazi Reference Ignazi1994; Tarchi Reference Tarchi1997). After Berlusconi’s electoral victory in 1994, the Nuova Destra dissolved into a series of individual paths: ‘1994 therefore marked the end of an experience that had lasted 20 years, and awareness that the cycle was over was immediate in those who had helped to start it’ (Tarchi Reference Tarchi2010, 459).