Nicholas Farrell

Nicholas Farrell

Nicholas Farrell is the author of Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfield & Nicolson/Orion Phoenix)

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

France has become Italy – and not in a good way

France is taking the place of Italy, it seems, as the basket case of Europe. The turn-over of prime ministers in France – five now since the start of President Emmanuel Macron’s second term in 2022  – is worse even than Italy has ever managed. Since the fall of fascism in 1945 Italy has notoriously had 69 governments – roughly one a year – which has made governing a tricky people even trickier. But France has had nearly two a year of late. That France is now, in the words of Marine Le Pen, ‘the sick man of Europe’, is especially pleasing to Italians. Macron, who refuses to step down as President, or call another snap parliamentary election, presides over a political system in a state of paralysis and a country bracing for serious social unrest.

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Why the canonisation of the first millennial saint is a cause to celebrate

37 min listen

On Sunday the Catholic Church will acquire its first millennial saint, when Pope Leo XIV canonises someone who, if he were alive today, would be young enough to be his son.  Carlo Acutis, a ‘computer geek’ from a prosperous Italian family, died aged just 15 in 2006. In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson talks to Mgr Anthony Figueiredo and the Italian-based journalist Nicholas Farrell about the extraordinary phenomenon of St Carlo, the miracles associated with him – and the scepticism they arouse – and a mean-spirited attack on him by one of the late Pope Francis’s closest advisers.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Sunday

Nicholas Farrell

Meloni is winning her war on left-wing squats

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has won what looks like a significant victory in her quest to eradicate squatting. About 250 carabinieri and police officers took possession this week of a former paper mill in Milan which had been occupied by numerous groups of squatters for 31 years. The 4,000 square metre building was a citadel of far-left extra-parliamentary politics and culture, and also of loud late-night music and hard drug abuse. The parliamentary and mainstream left, meanwhile, were and remain, complicit. Fourteen governments and four Popes came and went but an ever-changing cast of protagonists remained limpet-like inside what they called the Centro Sociale Leoncavallo to keep the revolutionary flame of 1968 alight.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

How Italy’s ‘new young’ party

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The Feast of the Assumption began for me just after midnight with a WhatsApp message from my eldest son, Francesco Winston, 20, which said: ‘Papà don’t come, the police are everywhere.’ He and my eldest daughter, Caterina, 21, had invited me to a party on the beach organised by their group of friends to mark Ferragosto, the most important day of summer. There would be a bonfire and sausages, booze and guitars, and all the rest of it, until the blood-red sun emerged out of the sea at about 6 a.m. to bring it to an end. The huge, shimmering sun rose up out of the sea, a wondrous way to end a party I cannot remember the last time I went to a party. I avoid small talk if possible and am currently not drinking.

Monday

Nicholas Farrell

Is Italy really doing better than Britain?

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna News that Italians now enjoy a higher standard of living than the British made me think: my God, life must be truly awful in Britain. Yes, the Italians do have much to feel good about in terms of the quality of their lives thanks to the beauty of their country, the splendour of their history, culture and cuisine, and their impressive defence of the traditional family and way of life from the threats to them of the modern world. When I’m drinking, I buy a superb local Sangiovese for €2.60 a litre dispensed into plastic mineral water bottles from a huge cask in a wine shop in Ravenna run by a man whose nickname is God But on the face of it the Italians would seem to have precious little to crow about on the economic front.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Our seven chickens are ruling the roost

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna All seven chickens we recently acquired are now laying eggs – except the one called Giovanna, which is walking with a limp thanks to our youngest child Giuseppe, who is ten. The other day, Giuseppe somehow shut Giovanna’s right foot in the back door as he shooed her out of the house. These chickens are proving portentous. I am convinced they are the catalyst, if not the reason, for why our middle daughter, Magdalena, 17, has just split up with her boyfriend Simone after three years together. Simone, a truly brilliant pianist, is terrified of chickens, a fairly common phobia apparently, though that is not why we got them.

Friday

Nicholas Farrell

How to deal with a crying woman

A woman crying elicits sympathy – even if, à la Rachel from Accounts, she is some kind of nightmare soap-opera figure from the suburbs of south London. When a woman we do not know bursts into tears in public our gut reaction is to assume she must have a good reason for doing so. She has, until proven otherwise, right on her side. And even if she does not, it does not usually matter. She may be wrong in terms of the rational truth, but she is right instinctively. Otherwise she would not have cried – would she? Let us be clear: women often cry, men rarely do. I speak from experience. I live with an Italian wife and our three disco-age daughters. We have three boys as well, but there is no doubt that it is the four femmine who rule the roost in Casa Farrell.

Tuesday

Nicholas Farrell

The key to Giorgia Meloni’s resounding success

Giorgia Meloni has emerged as one of the most significant politicians in Europe since she became Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022. I Am Giorgia, already a bestseller in Italy, is her account of how a short, fat, sullen, bullied girl – as she describes her young self – from a poor, single-parent family in Rome managed to do it. Her explanation is that she refused to play the victim, and found iron in her soul – even if, as she admits, she has never found happiness. It is an amazing story: how she transformed from an ugly duckling into the swan who is now a familiar figure on the largely male-dominated world stage, and whose humour, charm, friendliness and no-nonsense talk make her such a refreshing change.

Sunday

Nicholas Farrell

Trump cannot be a fascist

The global left and their many friends in the media are insisting with increasing hysteria that Donald Trump is imposing fascism on America. Their apocalyptical narrative is as simple as it is false: President Trump has begun the transformation of the USA into a fascist state. But the feverish intensity with which this tall story is told cannot conceal its mendacity. Trump has not, as fascists do, created blackshirt hit squads to terrorise and torture opponents, nor courts to jail them without just cause. And no rational observer believes his aim is to replace political parties with a one-party cult, or democracy with dictatorship. But above all, perhaps, the story is false because, regardless of what you were taught, and are told, fascism is a far-left, not far-right, phenomenon.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

My daring escape from the Italian police

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I often feel as if I know what it was like to be a member of La Résistance in Nazi--occupied France because I have three disco-age daughters. Last week, the call-to-action stations flashed up on WhatsApp at 03.06, just as the cockerels were beginning to crow and the enemy was setting up his road blocks. ‘Papà, can you come and get me?’ It was Rita, aged 16. ‘Where are you?’ ‘Marina.’ Cristo bloody Santo! A 25-minute drive away. ‘I can walk towards you,’ suggested Rita, the little sweetie. ‘No! Not if you’re wearing a miniskirt,’ I messaged back. ‘Or hot pants.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

No, I’m not a British spy

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, nine, received the Eucharist for the first time on Sunday. He and the other 12 new communicants looked angelic in their white robes. They all had impressive wooden crosses hanging from their necks and the five girls had wreaths of tiny flowers in their jet-black hair. Once Don Mauro had finished dispensing the Body of Christ, the bells peeled as if a wedding had taken place. There followed a pleasant open-air lunch by the sea and I wondered: ‘Is it better to live in Italy or Britain?’ Certainly, society is less fractured here. The weather is more helpful to both body and soul and the food is effortlessly superior, despite all the delusional British bragging about the amazing results of fancy fusion.

Tuesday

Nicholas Farrell

How Giorgia Meloni became Donald Trump’s EU whisperer

From our US edition

Henry Kissinger once complained: “Who do I call when I want to speak to Europe?” Today the answer would be Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female Prime Minister, who has emerged as the most important leader in the European Union. No Italian leader has filled this unofficial role before: it is usually reserved for the heads of the bloc’s two largest economies, Germany and France. Yet Meloni has capitalized on the weakness of their leadership. French President Emmanuel Macron may delude himself that he is Napoleon or Jupiter, but in reality he is the deeply unpopular head of a lame-duck government. To borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, he doesn’t “have the cards.” Meanwhile, Germany’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, heads up a flimsy coalition.

Meloni

Friday

Nicholas Farrell

Is Keir Starmer ‘far right’ now?

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new ‘far right’ mission to lock up asylum seekers in distant countries yesterday suffered an embarrassing setback on live television. The former human rights supremo – who cancelled the Tory Rwanda scheme on day one in office – was in Tirana, less than one year later, to discuss setting up a similar scheme in Albania. Or so the media were led to believe in press briefings beforehand: that it would be a main item on the agenda at his bilateral meeting with Albania’s socialist Prime Minister Edi Rami. Italy’s conservative Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has already launched such a scheme in Albania.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Pope Francis, my love rival

To be honest, I felt relief when Pope Francis died. This had nothing much to do with his regular assertion, in contradiction of Catholic doctrine, that all war is unjust. Or his view that Ukraine should have ‘the courage to raise the white flag’ to stop more futile bloodshed which ironically is (more or less) Donald Trump’s view. Or his suggestion that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. Or his more-the-merrier view on illegal immigrants. No. The cause turned not on politics but on the heart. However absurdly, I had come to see the Holy Father as a love rival. My wife Carla, a devout Catholic, was besotted with him. ‘How I love him!’ she used to say.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

It’s been a tough week for the frontrunner to be pope

The 133 cardinal electors participating in the conclave entered the Sistine Chapel yesterday, singing Veni Creator Spiritus. As they conducted their first vote – which resulted in black smoke – they were no doubt unable to avoid contemplating the highly damaging stream of revelations that have plagued the frontrunner to be the next pope, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. The cardinals will be locked inside the chapel surrounded by Michelangelo’s astounding frescoes – incommunicado with the world but not with God – until two thirds of them coagulate around a single name. In the 13th century this process once took 1,006 days. But in the past 150 years the longest conclave has lasted five days. There was only one ballot yesterday but will be four on subsequent days.

Monday

Nicholas Farrell

Cardinal Becciu has sacrificed himself for the conclave

The crisis that threatened to poison the secret conclave of cardinals which elects new popes has been resolved. It looks certain that disgraced Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu – until 2018 number three in the Vatican hierarchy behind only the Secretary of State and the Holy Father himself – has fallen on his sword. Many in the Vatican and the Catholic Church will have breathed a sigh of relief. Many others will be furious.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

The day the King came to Ravenna

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,/ That she may take away all at one swoop,’ wrote John Webster in The White Devil. I find it hard to disagree. I know fortune and luck are not quite the same thing, but I don’t believe the standard rebuke of the smug and the successful to those less fortunate: ‘You make your own luck in life.’ So it was that by a strange quirk of fate, King Charles III and Queen Camilla chose Ravenna rather than somewhere more touristically famous as the only place outside Rome they would go on their state visit to Italy the other day. It was as if somehow they knew that I lived here. Or else that some higher force wanted us to meet.

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Giorgia Meloni is Europe’s most important leader

Giorgia Meloni has confounded her critics yet again as she proves herself to be the most important leader in the European Union. She has shown in the past two days that she is the vital bridge between America and Europe. As a result, Italy looks set to play a major role on the world stage which it has never done before since the founding of the Italian Republic in 1948 after the defeat of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In Washington on Thursday, where Meloni met Donald Trump for a bilateral summit, she achieved a major breakthrough when the US President accepted her invitation to come to Rome ‘to meet Europe’ about tariffs. The meeting will take place ‘in the very near future’, according to a joint press statement issued later.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Can Giorgia Meloni sweet-talk Trump on EU tariffs?

We are about to see how significant a politician Giorgia Meloni really is after she arrived in Washington yesterday evening for bilateral talks today with Donald Trump. Tariffs will be top of the agenda but they are also expected to talk about Ukraine. She then flies immediately back to Rome to meet Vice President J.D. Vance – a Catholic – on Friday, who is in Rome for Easter hoping to meet the Pope as well. Certainly, Meloni is the one leader of a major EU country Trump enjoys seeing Italy’s first female prime minister travels to Washington bearing the cross of the EU on her small but sturdy shoulders. For she is going not on behalf of Italy but on behalf, albeit unofficially, of the EU.

Friday

Nicholas Farrell

How Italian communists tried to indoctrinate King Charles

Dante's Beach, Ravenna On the final day of their state visit to Italy the King and Queen were in Ravenna to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the area in 1945 by the British Eighth Army. What they probably did not realise is that Ravenna is a left-wing stronghold in a region – the Romagna – which was the birthplace of Italian revolutionary socialism at the end of the 19th century. Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist before he invented fascism, was born elsewhere in the region. From 1945, Ravenna, like everywhere else in red Romagna, was run by the Italian communist party – the PCI – until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and is still run by their direct descendants. The PCI was the largest communist party outside the Soviet Bloc in Europe.