Giuseppe Conte, ‘woke’ culture and the Botero statuette

“The summer Italy did away with ‘woke’”, around mid-August, just before the return to work, in the hottest month of the century, would make a wonderful film in that very local genre that imitated international hits, such as "L’esorciccio" or "Le spie venute dal semifreddo"; yet, more seriously, the issue raises, as they say, a real minefield of other questions – not only ethical but also aesthetic: and perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but there’s often a statue involved.

Meanwhile, there is Giuseppe Conte’s landmark letter to "La Repubblica", in which the former Prime Minister recounted how ‘a dear friend from Boston’, whilst visiting him in Rome, spotted a small bronze sculpture of a nude woman ‘with Boterian features’ on his bookshelf and told him he ought not to display it as it was offensive to women. 

The former Prime Minister maintains that this was the first time he ‘experienced first-hand the excesses of ‘woke’ culture’. The image of Conte ‘experiencing’ the excesses of ‘woke’ culture does indeed conjure up a whole world; it somewhat resembles the young Vannacci who used to ‘touch’ Black people on the underground to see what they were made of, and then one wonders above all who on earth Conte’s friend from Boston might be – it feels like yet another film, a Hollywood one this time, featuring archaeologists and spies, Conte and the Boterian statuette, like "Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Stone". 

Renzi responds with a counter-letter to La Repubblica: “Woke” is not a toppled statue or a form of hypocritical respectability. AVS MP Elisabetta Piccolotti continues: Who has called for national holidays to be abolished, statues to be toppled, or “cancel culture” to be imported?

But even the thorniest case of ‘Italian-style woke’, one of the few instances in which this Mediterranean variant of the wider, predominantly American phenomenon has taken concrete form – it must be said – concerns a statue.

Let’s talk about Simone Lenzi’s resignation, which was recalled yesterday here in Il Foglio in an interesting piece he wrote. It was 2024, and the former Councillor for Culture in Livorno found himself in hot water for criticising a work at the Venice Biennale by a certain Jade Guanaro Kuriki Olivo, depicting a woman with male genitalia. In one of his posts, he claimed, amongst other things, that: ‘At the Venice Biennale, they are keen to let us know that the quintessential woman has a cock’.

At present, it is not known what has become of Conte’s “Boterian statue” (perhaps it has been placed in a room or junior suite at the Plaza, the hotel owned by his wife’s family), nor of that quintessential one featuring Lenzi’s penis; yet it all fits together: Boston and Livorno, Livorno like Boston – cities rich in history (and the sea), different yet similar. And then there’s Florence, which has no access to the sea, yet in 2016, Renzi – then mayor – had a Jeff Koons statue covered up because it did not sit well with the visiting ruling sheikh of the Emirates (it depicted a man, a reinterpretation of the Barberini Faun, and therefore featured a penis – not even a particularly quintessential one – but it was disliked all the same, just to illustrate the differing sensibilities).

Back then, there was still vague talk of ‘political correctness’ (even though these phenomena have been around in America for thirty years); ‘cancel culture’ was still a long way off – a term that has long since gone out of fashion here, partly because it’s difficult to pronounce (it just doesn’t roll off the tongue like ‘woke’ does).

What memories. It was in Boston that one of the first statues of Christopher Columbus was beheaded at the height of the 2020 protests over the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, and the Black Lives Matter movement (Conte’s Bostonian friend will surely have taken part in those demonstrations; in any case, we would very much like to meet Conte’s Bostonian friends, who knows what sort of discussions they’d have – on neo-colonialism, transfeminism, in English, all for free, in a booming voice. How does Conte pronounce ‘Boston’? Are we talking about the ‘Sunday Lady’, or the ‘Sunday statue’?). 

And what about the fake Modigliani statues found in a canal in Livorno many years ago? It was one of the first cases of a ‘fake’, in the analogue sense. But statues of Columbus, as a colonialist, have been destroyed, desecrated and moved everywhere – and above all in every lake – in recent years, not just in Boston. And of course Trump, who was what he was (quote), but who has a certain instinct for this sort of thing, immediately snapped up one of these decommissioned colossal statues, which had previously stood in a square in Baltimore before being thrown into the Inner Harbour (just like in the Livorno canal), and in early 2026, the Magone announced he wanted it right next to the White House, in a place of honour, amongst the thousand gilded trinkets, triumphal arches and ballrooms of what now seems like the ‘Vittoriale’ of a very ‘woke’ old bachelor in Palm Springs.

But the statues have played a central role in the whole debate on pol.corr/canc.cult./woke. It’s all a bit of a mishmash, everything lumped together: Italy like America, Livorno like Boston; yet the Italians, who always love to take the blame for everything, and despite never having had black slaves, for some reason haven’t tried playing the decolonial card themselves (can you see the colour of our skin? As that famous American entertainer said: the novelty is that Italians consider themselves white). But when it comes to statues, we’ve been chasing Boston’s lead, all the way from Livorno. Aboard the three caravels: the Alexandria, the Ocasio and the Cortez. 

And on come the debates. And down come the statues. Perhaps because a statue is pure rhetoric, as well as street furniture – two things increasingly entrusted to increasingly incompetent managers. Few individuals genuinely care about statues – certainly not the ordinary citizen – but they are merely a flashpoint for identity. Generally hideous, created by local sculptors or failed artists who would like to be Botero or Jeff Koons or other global-calibre Teomondi Scrofali, they dot our cities, springing up overnight with relentless fury. Take the statue of Indro Montanelli in the Porta Venezia gardens in Milan (with old Indro bent over his Olivetti typewriter, wearing a long coat, all in gleaming bronze – looking less like Indro and more like Mastro Lindo from the old adverts. But it also bears a passing resemblance to the statue of the mother of Fantozzi’s galactic editor-in-chief, whom the staff are required to pay homage to every morning). 

At one point, we were around the time of the final episode of "Pol. Corr.", or the first season of "Cancel Cult"; in short, the statue of Montanelli in Milan became the centre of a great deal of controversy. In 2019, it had already been daubed with pink paint by ‘Non Una di Meno’. In June 2020, following the death of George Floyd and in the midst of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, the Sentinelli (whatever happened to the Sentinelli?) formally asked Mayor Sala to remove it; shortly afterwards, Lume and Rete Studenti Milano covered it in red paint, writing ‘racist’ and ‘rapist’ on it, and called for its demolition. Sala decided it should remain. Finally, in October 2020, a statue dedicated to Thomas Sankara, created by the Senegalese sculptor Mor Talla Seck as part of the “Decolonise the City” initiative, was illegally placed near Montanelli. The local police removed it.  

Will there be a warehouse containing all the statues that have been removed, on a global scale – a huge hangar like the one Berlusconi had in Arcore, filled with the paintings he used to buy on teleshopping programmes (now that it’s been razed to the ground, an Eurospin is going up in its place)? Once again, it remains unclear whether we are still in the season finale of "Pol.Corr" or in the new episodes of "woke" (seriously, is there no one who could compile a timeline of this blessed "woke" movement? Even a small handbook? Is there no app? It would be useful). In short, not even the entire debate on which monuments to remove was spared – and, while we were at it, the entire issue of Fascist architecture.

Then nothing came of it, as with everything else, whilst in America ‘Woke1’ was being implemented and we are now pressing ahead towards ‘2’ and ‘3’; yet ‘cancel culture’, with its aim of erasing every trace of the sculptural and architectural past, it is clear that this could work in countries more adept with languages but also with more flexible town planning regulations, where decision-making is streamlined and at times brutal – where things are built, demolished, torn down and rebuilt. Here, cities are above all a layering of eras and potholes, appeals to the Regional Administrative Court, oversights and notices of completion that have been out of date for a decade. One need only walk around a bit – especially in Rome – to find manhole covers, bridges, gates and portals still bearing their fine "fascio di combattimento" emblems in high and low relief; elsewhere, perhaps, they have been only slightly gnawed away, as on the floors of Milan’s Central Station.

Then, every now and then, there are misunderstandings. Ten years ago, at a school in Garbatella, a statue that had always been highly revered – as it was believed to depict Cesare Battisti (the irredentist patriot of the First World War, not the communist terrorist who fled to South America, nor the Milanese chef) – was found to actually portray the party official Michele Bianchi, secretary of the Fascist Party. There was much discussion, people were extremely outraged, but then nothing more was heard of it and no further action was taken. Rome is not Boston (nor is it Livorno: we’ve seen that for ourselves, but never mind).