Luca La Rovere’s book offers a comprehensive account of the history of the Perugia branch of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, or Italian Social Movement) by drawing on archival collections that had previously received little, if any, scholarly attention, including those of the MSI Federation of Perugia and of one of its leading figures, Marzio Modena. The emphasis the author places on these sources is far from incidental: the lack of a national archive for the MSI complicates the task of writing the party’s history. However, according to La Rovere, the study of the so-called ‘Party of the Flame’ presents other difficulties that every scholar must contend with. One of these is the need to deal with a research subject onto which a series of labels have accumulated, making it hard – or, at any rate, more difficult – to conduct clear and objective analyses. Additionally, there is the risk of devoting excessive attention to the party’s three political currents: the left-wing current, which is said to have drawn on ‘the ideals of the final phase of Fascism in Salò’; the centrist current, described as ‘Atlanticist’ and ‘anticommunist’; and, finally, the ‘spiritualist’ wing, inspired by Evola and said to have been closer to Nazism than to Fascism (p. 274). Equally problematic, as La Rovere highlights, is the tendency to identify three distinct factions: the nostalgic one, the political one, and a third allegedly characterised by the reproduction of fascism as a lifestyle. These are undeniable ways of interpreting MSI militancy, but, if overemphasised, they risk obscuring the ‘evolution’ and ‘mobility of trajectories’ that shaped the party and its leadership, as well as its rank-and-file members (p. 275). Even the label ‘neofascist party’, which is usually associated with the MSI, is problematic. La Rovere does not deny the usefulness of the category – indeed, he employs it in the title – but he argues that it is inadequate for describing, and therefore interpreting, the history of the MSI as a whole. To do so would be tantamount to treating the party as a ‘monad’ (p. 267). The reference to fascism is said to have played an important role in the immediate postwar period, only to be reduced subsequently to a ‘lexical encrustation’ and a ‘mere verbal residue’ (p. 271).
To account for this evolution, La Rovere reconstructs the history of the party in Umbria from the MSI’s origins to 1976. The choice of 1976 as the ad quem is a particularly apt one, even though it may seem somewhat eccentric. It was precisely in that year that the MSI experienced the split that led to Democrazia Nazionale (National Democracy). This political experience had a limited impact at both the national and the regional level, yet this split constitutes another sign of a community in motion: not necessarily one that was definitively turning its back on its original values, but certainly one that was increasingly questioning its relationship with democracy.
La Rovere provides readers with a chronological history of the party, divided into four chapters. The first sheds light on the origins of the MSI in Umbria, a period characterised by difficulties – which are understandable given the stigma hanging over the party’s members. The second and third chapters cover the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, marked by factionalism, personality cults and power struggles. The figure of Aldo Chinea, born in 1929 and serving as MSI secretary for Perugia, stands out here as someone who was able to bring new stability to the party, the membership of which reached 1,427 in 1960, rising to 1,668 in 1961. According to the author, these were the years in which the MSI managed to emerge from the underground existence in which it had been confined and to redefine its role in politics – or, more precisely, within the various democratic institutions – by challenging the majority while simultaneously putting forward alternative proposals. Finally, the fourth and last chapter is devoted to the period between 1968 and 1976, which La Rovere regards as the MSI’s definitive acculturation to democracy. This is the most interesting part of the book, not least because it is ‘counterintuitive’. It should be remembered, in fact, that these were the years when the party proved barely capable of keeping pace with the developments within youth culture, and thus found itself unprepared for 1968. Above all, however, these were the years of far-right violence and the so-called ‘strategy of tension’. Yet La Rovere’s analysis is convincing in demonstrating how the party sought to engage more actively in politics, going so far as to establish its presence on a regional scale – a veritable paradox, given that the MSI leadership opposed the regionalisation process.
La Rovere’s book, therefore, is a valuable contribution that both enriches and challenges existing research on the MSI, placing itself within the tradition of local, bottom-up studies pioneered by Roberto Chiarini and Paolo Corsini’s Da Salò a Piazza della Loggia (1983) and recently revived by Matteo Albanese and Michelangelo Borri’s edited volume Le fiamme in provincia (2025). What is less convincing is, first of all, La Rovere’s tendency to characterise his work as micro-historical. It is, rather, a local analysis that prioritises political events over the social practices of the community – practices that are certainly mentioned, but which would have deserved a more in-depth examination. Furthermore, La Rovere seems to suggest that the ‘bottom-up’ approach is essentially the only one capable of freeing the MSI and the far right in general from all the clichés in which they have long remained entangled. In doing so, the author launches into a fierce critique of those who favour other approaches, while at times confusing broader methodological perspectives with the specific findings of individual studies. His main targets are the ‘Italian exponents’ (p. 12) of transnational studies, accused of overestimating the strength and consistency of far-right organisations operating across national borders. Transnational studies – and perhaps other approaches, too (the author is ambiguous on this point) – are also criticised for placing excessive emphasis on the cultural dimension. According to La Rovere, this risks conflating ‘intellectual circulation that is little more than underground’ with ‘a symptom of an actual resurgence of fascism’ (p. 13), leading him to label such work as ‘culturalist’. Here, the negative connotation of the term is evident, seemingly suggesting a lack of scientific rigour among scholars working in this field.
This contrast – local history/micro-history versus transnational history – raises more than a few concerns. The local focus is as urgent as the transnational one, just as it would be important to rediscover comparative analyses. Political history – which has dominated scholarship on the MSI for decades – should likewise be brought into dialogue with cultural history, without granting methodological primacy to either. In light of the historiographical shortcomings so accurately highlighted by La Rovere, the answer is not to privilege the methodological approach over others, but rather to integrate them.
