La Lega a Roma? Stavorta me do foco da solo!
(The League in Rome? This Time I'll Set Myself on Fire!)
On December 8, 2018, Matteo Salvini hosted the first Roman rally for his far-right political party, La Lega (The League), in the city's expansive Piazza del Popolo.
Founded by Umberto Bossi in 1989 as Lega Nord (Northern League, LN), the party was stitched together out of a collection of six northern regional political parties – including Liga Veneta (Venetian League), Lega Lombarda (Lombard League), and Lega Emiliano-Romagnola (Emilia-Romagna League) – which shared a xenophobic worldview, the objective of realizing northern Italian separatism, and Euroscepticism. During the LN's first twenty years of existence, the party's platform advocated for the secession of Italy's northern regions from Rome and the subsequent establishment of a new, sovereign country called "Padania." After failing to gain significant traction among northern Italian voters, however, the LN's leadership eventually passed from Bossi to Salvini, who rebranded the party as simply "The League."
Despite the party's name change, as well as its subsequent push into Italy's southern regions (a considerable irony, given the party's previously mentioned northern chauvinism towards the country's deep South), Salvini's League has maintained a number of policy continuities with Bossi's LN, above all xenophobia towards non-Italian immigrants.
Although the League has intentionally rebranded itself as a legitimate populist party with national aspirations, it should be pointed out, it has, from time to time, partnered with various organizations in Italy whose ideological background is much more openly neo-fascist. Between 2014 and 2019, for instance, Lega briefly forged a loose working partnership with CPI, whose members too have been extremely vocal about their anti-immigration, "Italians First" perspectives (Piselli 2019). Although ascending to the position of Minister of the Interior in a coalition government with the now waning Movimento 5 Stelle (5 Star Movement) between 2018 and the following year, Salvini has since forged a working partnership with Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) led government.
During the weeks leading up to Salvini's Roman rally in December 2018, a series of posters – including this one – appeared on the billboards and alleyways of central Rome, lambasting the League's cynically-motivated rebranding campaign (see also Fig. 1). At the top of the poster, viewers are shown a photograph of the Monument to Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition in 1600 for his scientific writings on cosmology, along with a crossed-out party logo in the upper left-hand corner. "La Lega a Roma?" (The League in Rome?), the humorous caption rhetorically inquires, adding: "Stavorta me do foco da solo!" (This time I'll set myself on fire!). In the poster's closing captions, viewers are informed that Rome will "resiste" (resist) the League and "non si fa prendere in giro!" (won't let itself be fooled!), which is followed by the hashtag #RomaNonFaLaStupida (Rome, don't be stupid).
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