For those anti-Meloni, half-baked intellectuals only, Boniface VIII was an unworthy ‘Ciociaria’ figure

Superficial knowledge is a terrible thing. Giorgia Meloni, insulted as being from Ciociaria – which she is not, according to the records – reacted with Lazio pride, boasting of the illustrious figures from the sub-region whose capital is Frosinone: Cicero, Gaius Marius, St Thomas Aquinas, Marcello Mastroianni, Nino Manfredi, Boniface VIII… The half-cultured anti-Meloni camp reacted in their own typical way: ‘What do you mean, Boniface VIII? The one Dante sent straight to Hell even before he died!’ Half-culture is a nasty thing – the ‘midcult’ analysed and rightly reviled many years ago by the American literary critic Dwight Macdonald. The half-cultured know just enough; they obviously know Dante, and thanks to distant memories and frantic typing, they track down those passages in Inferno dedicated to Pope Caetani. From this they conclude that Meloni is utterly ignorant. Boniface VIII should not have been mentioned; he was a dreadful pope, a nepotist, a tyrant, a degenerate – Dante even wrote as much! This is precisely what ‘half-culture’ is: having read just one book and believing oneself to be highly cultured.

Dante certainly lambasted Bonifacio and had his good reasons: he held him responsible for his political downfall – that is, his exile. But there are other reasons, other perspectives, and, in short, not everyone sees it that way. As it happens, I am currently reading "Dizionario dell’omo salvatico" by Domenico Giuliotti and Giovanni Papini. These two arch-conservative authors—and I mention this not for my twenty-five reader-friends, who are well aware of it, but for the 25,000 pseudo-intellectuals running riot on X, who I doubt have any real understanding of early 20th-century Florentine magazines. Dante was also an arch-conservative, as Umberto Eco and Gennaro Sangiuliano noted, in different eras. This point is worth emphasising to underscore just how varied, rich and even contradictory non-left-wing culture can be… Because Giuliotti and Papini, on the other hand, paid the highest tribute to Bonifacio – or rather, Bonifazio – from the Ciociaria region. I have pages 335 and 336 of my edition (il Cerchio, Rimini) here in front of me. The entry begins with a lengthy quotation from Léon Bloy, a staunchly Catholic French counter-revolutionary who was wildly enthusiastic about Pope Caetani: ‘Le plus haut des Papes’. The reason, they explain, is that he was the author of the papal bull ‘Unam Sanctam’, in which he firmly and courageously reaffirmed the superiority of spiritual power over temporal power. It is an ancient document that every Catholic should endorse even today, and which makes Boniface VIII no less important, no less deserving than Marcello Mastroianni and Nino Manfredi.