Our Empress Angelica Frey on the way social media talks about Italy.

A lot of focus is placed on right-wing portrayals of the country, which, as a general trend, depict a perverse fairy-tale, midnight-in-paris-adjacent version of Southern Europe as a cradle of an ancestral civilization that has to be protected from the blight of modernity. Italy is where your average startup bro or basic lifestyle influencer think they can utter “philosophical” life lessons while angling for a local spouse with a nonna who is seen, by all means, as the de facto house servant.