All winter, in a room of Rome’s National Gallery of Art, a flatscreen TV was playing the Lord of the Rings movies on repeat. Nearby was a Lord of the Rings pinball machine, and an LP called “J. R. R. Tolkien reads and sings his Lord of the Rings.” Silhouetted against an open doorway, through which one could make out pieces from the museum’s collection of nineteenth-century and modernist art, a headless mannequin was wearing a sparkly white dress. When I visited, I couldn’t work out which character it was supposed to represent. Galadriel, the lady of the woods, maybe.

The display had been arranged for the benefit of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister and the leader of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party whose coalition government currently heads the world’s eighth-largest economy.

Meloni loves fantasy fiction. Most of all she loves the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Oxford professor whose genre-inaugurating Lord of the Rings trilogy has always been associated with the far right in Italy. She has posed next to statues of Gandalf. She has quoted Tolkien in her articles and in her speeches. “To me,” she has said, “Lord of the Rings is not fantasy, more a sacred text.”