Giorgia Meloni, the former fascist and current prime minster of Italy, is a distant relative of the communist theorist Antonio Gramsci. On its face, this revelation, which Italian genealogists disclosed earlier this month, might seem like an interesting piece of trivia — funny but ultimately meaningless. However, Meloni, despite sharing none of her ancestor’s politics, emerged out of a process of social transformation that the author of the Prison Notebooks would not struggle to understand.

Meloni’s rise was fueled by a broader right-wing cultural shift that normalized her outlook by tying it to Italy’s self-image in a bid for what Gramsci would have called hegemony. Accordingly, the Brothers of Italy, Meloni’s party, takes its name from “Fratelli d’Italia,” the words in the opening line of the country’s national anthem.

Just like war, culture is the continuation of politics with other means. Since her settling in Palazzo Chigi, Meloni’s praetorians have been briskly dispatched to every key post in the country’s cultural administrative infrastructure. A furious power grab on museums, theaters, orchestras, literary fairs and prizes, the Venice Biennale, and universities has taken place.