Padua, Italy, 2024

“You know, even though I don’t agree with her on basically anything, since I’m about as far left as they come,” Giacamo, a 20-something-year-old Italian student at Padua University (UNIPD), says with a shrug, “I still like the way she makes Italy look internationally.”  

He looks at a copy of “Libero,” an Italian magazine, sitting in front of him on a table. An image of Giorgia Meloni is featured on the cover. She’s Italy’s blonde-haired, boisterous prime minister — traits which naturally draw comparisons to former U.S. President Donald Trump — and Libero named her the “Man of the Year” in 2023. 

Meloni ascended to the premiership in late 2022. Political pundits and academics were calling the coalition that appointed her Italy’s furthest right government since World War II. The rhetoric surrounding her time in power hasn’t changed much over the last two years. The phrase “Italian government” is often preceded by the adjective “far-right” in most mainstream headlines.  

“You know, in America, saying something like that about Trump will get you canceled,” chirps Matt from the other side of the table, a similar-age American college student from St. Lawrence University on the other side of the world. 

Matt is on a 10-day trip for a class he took on Renaissance Venice. A member of his party knows Giacamo from highschool and figured that stopping by Padua and catching up was in order.  

“I’m aware of it,” Giacamo takes a sip from a glass of red wine. A silence momentarily falls over the table and the other seven faces put their forks back in their pasta and turn towards him.  

“Are the people here not afraid of that?” Matt wipes his mouth.  

“Cancel culture doesn’t really exist here,” Giacamo still holds the glass in his hand. “At least not like in America.” 

“How so?” asks Matt. 

Giacamo gestures with his head towards the street below. “I’ll show you.”  

The phrase “cancel culture” is a relatively recent addition to the American lexicon — evolving from fringe Twitter threads, to semi-sporadic use in mainstream internet discourse before peaking during the later years of the Trump presidency and at the height of COVID-19. Since then, you would be hard pressed to find an American that doesn’t know what it is.  

After dinner, the party—led by Giacomo—walks around the University of Padua’s campus. Like SLU to Canton, UNIPD is located centrally in the city. A significant amount of the people living in Padua’s downtown are students, also like Canton. However, the similarities end there.  

SLU has 2,000 students on a good day. UNIPD has more than 80,000.  

SLU is one of the oldest universities in New York State. UNIPD is the fifth oldest in the world.  

SLU students visit UNIPD. I can’t recall having met a UNIPD student at SLU.  

After about 20 minutes of walking, Giacomo stops the group in front of UNIPD’s Department of Pharmaceutical Science.  

“I walk by here almost everyday,” Giacomo jokingly pumps his arms and lifts his legs. “Look up, and you’ll see something pretty interesting.” 

The heads of the group rise. Near the roof on the left hand side of the building, there are three stone lines protruding from the exterior wall. They formed the shape of the Roman numeral III.  

“What does that mean?” asked Matt.  

“It’s historic,” Giacomo points to an inscription below the numerals. “There.” 

Although the inscription is written in Italian, Matt picks up one part of it.  

“Benito Mussolini,” Matt’s head shifts slightly upwards. He doesn’t know he’s looking at one of more than 1,400 monuments, street signs, and plaques honoring Mussolini’s fascist regime still left in Italy. Everyone in Italy knows what they mean.  

“If that was one of your Civil War soldier’s names on a college hall in America,” says Giacomo, “it’d be gone.” 

Following a 2015 shooting at a black church in South Carolina, a lone black woman scaled a flagpole and removed a confederate flag after the government continued to fly it. Other Americans also grew restless and petitioned for the removal of other monuments commemorating southern Civil War soldiers who fought to uphold slavery.  

The 2020 murder of George Floyd again amplified citizen action and calls to remove confederate symbols. Over the last decade, more than 160 of them have been removed. Still, unlike Italy, there’s not a national consensus on what these historic symbols mean.  

“I’m amazed they just leave it on there like that,” Matt touches his face. “Why do they want that stuff out in the open?” 

“It’s better to learn from history than sweep it under the rug,” says Giacamo. “You Americans today understand your history, but once you’re all dead, nothing will be left for the future Americans to learn from.”  

“I think we’ve done that a lot. Like you said, with the South, but also with what we did to the Native Americans, and Japanese-Americans during World War II,” responds Matt. “No one ever talks about that shit, let alone displays it.”  

“Those displays are why some here compare Meloni to Mussolini,” said Giacamo. “Not because she’s necessarily even close to him, but because when we look up and see stuff like that, we’re constantly reminding ourselves not to fall for it again.”  

Matt silently looks back up at the inscription. Giacamo’s gaze follows.  

“If we got rid of that stuff, who knows how soon we’d repeat the mistakes we made back then,” Giacamo breaks the silence. “I’d tell you more, but we have to get you guys to the train, we should head to the station.”  

The group members take one last look at the inscription above them as they start walking.  

Italians and Americans take vastly different approaches in confronting their respective nation’s history. Italians preserve their physical  history, anticipating that it serves as a tangible reminder of how their nation had once been caught by the undertow of facism. Americans choose to remove theirs, hoping that the harmful ideals their likenesses represented die along with their busts, quelling social unrest. Both nations and their people have to make a choice — walking a tightrope between facing their past on the daily and pushing it aside in the name of much needed social progress.  

In the end, both countries are on politically similar paths and don’t seem to have made much headway on their exclusionary and xenophobic tendencies. Trump, who is considered divisive and right-winged, was leading polls for most of the 2024 campaign. Even now the election is still a coin flip, meaning it’s still possible we see a President Trump again. Italy’s right-wing coalition is still in power and Meloni does not appear to be losing appeal. Different approaches to problematic histories, similar electoral results. Why debate the means when the ends are the same after all? Or maybe we’re just debating the wrong means.