Paola Maria Chiesa, the FdI MP who celebrates her comrades of the past: "A shining example."

It's a great historical passion, you might say. The problem is that it's one-sided: a constant and brazen commemoration of comrades from the past. The leader of the Defense Committee of the Brothers of Italy party and the party's Defense Director, Paola Maria Chiesa , a 46-year-old from Pavia, has made memory the hallmark of her social media communications. She celebrates the colonialist army in Africa, the X MAS, the "sacred ideal" (what could it be? The figures are all united by their service to fascism), visits the Monte Soratte bunker where the Nazis "resisted even the bombing of May 12, 1944"—a resistance seen backwards, an "exciting journey through History," with a capital H. And then, the celebration of Italo Balbo , one of the leaders of early fascism , with a photo casually cropped from a larger one attached: he had Adolf Hitler next to him. Not just anyone passing by, mind you.

Chiesa's nostalgic overview is extensive, and there's something for everyone when it comes to memoirs in black shirts, perhaps hidden behind uniforms. From the Battle of El Alamein, where Italian fascist troops fought led by Nazi leader Rommel, to the "supreme holocaust"—a quote from the citation for his gold medal—of an air force sergeant who died on July 22, 1943; "example," "high sense of duty," "purest heroism," "present!", "daring paratroopers," "heroic youth," "honor and glory"—it's all a deluge of nationalist, militaristic, and—since the vocabulary is almost always the same—even neo-fascist rhetoric and propaganda.

In the past, Democratic Party Senator Dario Parrini had pointed out the small problem of celebrating Balbo, a squadrista from Ferrara who later became Benito Mussolini 's minister, when one is an exponent of the institutions of an anti-fascist Republic. Response: "Balbo is a gold medal, and gold medals don't deserve to be tarnished." Except, as mentioned, the medals Chiesa likes are of the same "matrix." And if there really is someone to remember without a uniform, here is, for example, Marilena Grill , an auxiliary of the Republicans who was honored with a stamp (she was killed by partisans, a victim of the civil war climate of those years, but the attempt at ideological equality is clear).

Who knows how Giorgia Meloni sees it, when she spoke to Time magazine and was careful to ask her interlocutor if she really seems so fascist. Perhaps without bothering the Prime Minister, the question could have been asked of the congresswoman herself, but the request for a chat fell on deaf ears. On WhatsApp, the congresswoman introduced herself with a quote that's very popular in the post-fascist world: "Do not deny, do not restore." It was Giorgio Almirante , and he was speaking about the experience of fascism, the twenty years of a brutal dictatorship that ended with a destroyed country and hundreds of thousands of deaths.