Dugin’s network in Italy is now looking to Vannacci

On 20 August, to mark the fourth anniversary of the death of his daughter Darya Dugina, Aleksandr Dugin published an article on Substack to thank “my Italian friends, friends of Russia, friends of my family” who had organised a festival in her honour in Gavirate. This is confirmation, from the most direct source possible, that a relationship forged almost ten years ago in a farmhouse in the Varese area is still alive and well, and continues to produce content that regularly appears on the Russian philosopher’s international channels. To understand why that relationship matters today – in a September marked by discussions about Vannacci, Futuro Nazionale and an investigation by the military prosecutor’s office – we need to go back almost fifty years.

La Corte dei Brut, in Gropello di Gavirate, is not a restaurant like any other. It has been run for years by Rainaldo Graziani together with his wife, Ines Pedretti, through the Arnia social cooperative. Rainaldo is the son of Clemente Graziani, who in the 1960s founded Ordine Nuovo with Pino Rauti, one of the key organisations behind the ‘strategy of tension’. In 2017, Rainaldo revived that legacy through the REuropa association, which holds the domains centrostudiordinenuovo.org and ordinenuovo.org, owned by the family cooperative. In 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Piazza Fontana bombing, he publicly thanked the militants of Ordine Nuovo for having passed on to him, in his own words, “the purest of ideas”.

What does Dugin have to do with it? At the end of June 2018, a few days after Graziani announced the reopening of the Ordine Nuovo Study Centre in Rome – in the presence, according to Repubblica’s account, of Darya Dugina – the Russian philosopher was hosted at the Corte dei Brut. Approximately a hundred people were seated at the table, including Maurizio Murelli, a long-standing figure at the magazine Orion and convicted of supplying the weapon that killed police officer Antonio Marino in 1973. Also present was Gianluca Savoini, at the time Matteo Salvini’s adviser on relations with Moscow and president of the Lombardy-Russia Association: the same Savoini who, the following year, would find himself at the centre of the Metropol scandal. The symbolic moment of that day: Dugin was presented with a Julleuchter, the Yule lamp used in SS rituals.

From then on, the relationship continued uninterrupted. Dugin returned to the Court in 2021 for a meeting on the ‘doctrine of the elements in Western tradition’; in 2022, for the Arte in Corte festival; and in 2023, for the first memorial dedicated to Darya. This year, the fourth, marks the ‘Daria-Aletheia’ symposium, and Dugin is already promoting the next event on 24 September, dedicated to Aletheia and Ildegarda, featuring, amongst the republished material, a contribution by Diego Fusaro.

It is worth bearing this in mind, as it puts things into perspective: in 2018, according to Domani’s account, it was precisely Graziani and Pedretti’s cooperative that Giorgia Meloni – at the time merely the leader of Fratelli d’Italia – turned to in order to deliver the invitation to Dugin for Atreju. The link between that milieu and mainstream Italian politics has never been merely hypothetical.

This brings us to the most interesting point: where are the key figures from that story today? In a public address this year, Rainaldo Graziani ruled out standing for election or taking up elected office, announcing instead that he would support, as an independent, certain figures from the sovereignist camp. In particular, he supports the candidates from Futuro Nazionale, whom he considers “more socially minded” and “less liberal”. On the same occasion, he also cited Alain de Benoist, Dugin, Costanzo Preve, Diego Fusaro and Jean Thiriart among his points of reference, and spoke in explicit terms of his esteem for Fabio Filomeni, whom he would like to see at the helm of a bloc that he described as “illiberal, populist and socialist”.

Filomeni is no ordinary figure in this story. Together with Roberto Vannacci, he was one of the founders of the ‘Il mondo al contrario’ committee in 2023, acting as his right-hand man, before the two parted ways in March 2025 over what Filomeni described as the general’s excessive alignment with the Lega and ‘neo-Atlanticist’ positions. That split gave rise to Europa Sovrana e Indipendente (ESI), which Filomeni still chairs and whose programme – comprising withdrawal from NATO, Russia’s entry into a “superpower” Europe, and an end to subordination to Washington – appears to be a carbon copy of the very programme of Vannacci’s from which he distanced himself.

Here, then, is the line that the sources allow us to draw, without stretching it: Graziani is not joining Futuro Nazionale, but is looking to its more ‘social’ candidates. He openly supports Filomeni. Filomeni hails from the original founding group of the Vannacci project and today leads an independent sovereignist movement. Meanwhile, Graziani himself remains, in parallel, one of the Italian points of reference within Dugin’s cultural network. There is no organisational chart linking these names together. There is, however, something less formal and, precisely for this reason, more difficult to define: a network of people, relationships and circles that continue to intersect in the same places.

Their paths are now crossing once again. From 25 to 27 September, in the Eden public hall in Ortona—made available by the local council led by Angelo Di Nardo, mayor and member of Fratelli d’Italia—the ‘La Cittadella’ think tank organised a three-day event entitled ‘Da Fiume al dissenso’. The programme includes a discussion on the “reinterpretation of the ideas of Jean Thiriart and Aleksandr Dugin” and a session with an even more explicit title: “Russia the enemy? No. The real enemy is to be found at home”. According to the Centre, announced guests included Rainaldo Graziani, Fabio Filomeni and lawyer Luca Tadolini. The initiative sparked protests from the ANPI and seven centre-left parties, which called for it to be halted.

It is hard to imagine a clearer snapshot: in the very same month of September in which Dugin relaunched the proceedings of the Gavirate memorial, Graziani and Filomeni took to the same stage to discuss Thiriart, the Belgian member of the ‘Friends of the Great German Reich’, and ‘Putin’s mastermind’.

A clarification is needed here. Futuro Nazionale did not begin as a platform for the radical right: it was founded on 3 February 2026, when Vannacci left the Lega following months of internal tensions. In the Chamber of Deputies, its MPs – most of whom came from the Lega, Forza Italia and Fratelli d’Italia – do not even have an independent parliamentary group: they sit in the mixed group, within a sub-group created in May 2026 thanks to a regulatory loophole. However, significant elements of the Italian radical right have converged within this emerging political grouping: on 31 March 2026, the Indipendenza! movement, led by the former mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, merged entirely into Futuro Nazionale. And Vannacci himself, it should be recalled, had received – and rejected – a proposal to stand as a candidate from Forza Nuova in 2023.

This does not make Futuro Nazionale an offshoot of the Corte dei Brut, nor does it turn Vannacci into a direct counterpart of Dugin: there are no sources to prove this, and it is worth stating this with the same clarity with which the rest is documented. However, it does describe a party which, in its still-ongoing process of consolidation, is also absorbing individuals and organisations from the most radical right, just as one of its founding members, Fabio Filomeni, maintains a relationship of mutual respect with one of the last Italian guardians of the Dugin network.

The 2018 photograph – showing Dugin, Graziani, Savoini and the SS lamp gathered round the same table – depicted worlds that at the time still seemed distinct: esoteric Duginism, historical neo-fascism, and Salvini’s pro-Russian League. Seven years on, those worlds have not become one and the same, but they continue to intersect, under different banners. La Corte dei Brut remains the physical venue for meetings with Moscow, and Graziani is still its guardian. The sovereignist sphere gravitating around Vannacci – amidst splits, borrowed parliamentary members and movements such as Indipendenza! converging upon it – has, in part, become the new political arena where some of those key figures now find themselves.

There is no need to look for a hidden hand behind the scenes, because the story is much simpler: people, places and ideas that, for thirty years, have continued to recognise one another, come together and stick together. The network never disappeared; it simply waited for the right moment to make its presence felt once more.

Graziani is not joining Fn, but is looking to its more ‘social’ candidates. He supports Filomeni, who hails from the original founding group of the Vannacci project and now leads an independent sovereignist group