With a long article in Repubblica yesterday, Filippo Ceccarelli celebrated the transgressive Parco Lambro (1976), a sort of proletarian Woodstock and antithetical to the PCI, and then the revolutionary first Campo Hobbit held a year later that outraged Almirante with his “ice eyes.” For Ceccarelli, the Campo Hobbit was a sort of right-wing Parco Lambro, certainly liberating but with some important differences, starting with the absence of drugs. The experiment was announced and promoted by the magazine of Jack Marchal’s black mice, La Voce della Fogna, directed by Marco Tarchi. The organizers were Generoso Simeone and Umberto Croppi, and the MSI leadership did not take it well. All true, but the Campo was part of an internal dialectic between the Rauti faction and the Almirante faction, which in those years sought to overcome the bloody confrontations of the Years of Lead. The former wanted to set aside certain muscular and nostalgic postures, the latter saw in every element of modernity something to reject outright.
In short, it was Il domani appartiene a noi against the Inno a Roma, the poems of Vertex against Mussolini’s Opera Omnia, the magazine Eowyn against the proposal of the housewives’ allowance. A scandalous experiment, true. But where does Ceccarelli go wrong then? When he says that after so many years it is clear that the official left and right, not recognizing those experiences as “orthodox,” were already condemned to the current regression. As for the right, the observation is completely unfounded. Giorgia Meloni, in fact, began her political path within a world that saw the Campi Hobbit as a model, a point of reference, the recognition of the adversary as a subject to dialogue with without using clubs, the idea that modernity was to be accepted as a challenge to change what was wrong but without reactionary retreats backward. Meloni (unlike, for example, CasaPound) is absolutely a product of that climate, that cultural atmosphere, that anthropological transgression that replaced Roman salutes with alternative guitar strumming. FdI is not the antithesis of the Campi Hobbit; it was nourished by it, to the point that its festival is inspired by a hero of fantasy literature like Atreju, while the right of the Seventies chose the peaceful Hobbits as symbols of a joyful people attached to the traditions of their land but ready to fight for a higher cause if called to take part.
It is true that a human Celtic cross was made in Montesarchio, and here the SS evoked by Ceccarelli are as irrelevant as a fish out of water. The Celtic cross was chosen as a symbol of the Giovane Europa movement of which Franco Cardini was, in the Sixties, a young Florentine exponent. Only later did party circulars arrive banning its use, emphasizing that only official symbols, the flame and the torch of the FdG, could be used. Ultimately, however, there was not another right-wing in Montesarchio opposing the MSI one. There was a right-wing that wanted to play its part in the MSI world and did so to the point that the young people who came after could not ignore that experience, re-proposing it in different and updated forms but always with a clear concept in mind: to put an end to activism that caricatured the squadrismo of the Ventennio. And among those young people were also Giorgia Meloni and her current collaborators. Have they regressed? Have they advanced? The voters will say. The important thing is not to pretend they are “other” than a history of which the current right, perhaps unknowingly, is nevertheless heir.
