This week, thousands of American wine professionals will travel to Verona, Italy for Vinitaly — the Italian wine trade’s annual fair.

They will represent the U.S. citizenry in all of its walks of life and gradations: from the fat-cat CEOs and managers of behemoth importers and distributors to average punters who hit the streets each day with a wine caddy in tow.

Between the long days of tastings and meetings on the fairgrounds and the bacchanal parties and dinners hosted by wineries throughout the city every evening, few of them will take time out to experience Verona’s cultural riches.

And even fewer of them will have any inkling that Verona is now the bona fide capital of Italy’s fascist resurgence and the backdrop for Italy’s pitched culture wars.

On Thursday of last week, Jason Horowitz, the Rome bureau chief for the New York Times, published this excellent piece about Italy’s current political climate and Verona’s status as the epicenter for regressive policy and institutional racism and sexism: “Italy’s Right Links Low Birthrate to Fight Against Abortion and Migration.”

(Anyone headed to the fair this year should read it. And I also highly recommend following his feed.)

In his article, he offers an overview of Verona’s openly fascist local government (a eye-popping primer on who’s in charge of the city and what they stand for). And he obliquely references a recent and frightening episode that took place at a Verona city council meeting last year.
Continue reading →