ABSTRACT
On the night of June 16, 1980, Furio Jesi, Italian scholar, critic, poet, novelist, actor and political activist, died in his home, suffocated by an accidental gas leak from the water heater. 1 He had turned thirty-nine only a month before, but his curriculum vitae was already long enough for several people twice his age: he had written nearly twenty monographs on subjects including Egyptology, mythology, German literature, and Hebrew mysticism, as well as newspaper articles, novels, translations, poetry, and a spate of unpublished manuscripts. In 1979, typically, he had produced two books, Materiali mitologici (Mythological Materials: Myth and Anthropology in Central European Culture) and Cultura di destra (Right-wing Culture), a study focused on the twentieth century, with special emphasis on Italy. Republished in 2011 with the encouragement of the Wu Ming writer’s cooperative, Cultura di destra has lost none of its originality. And though Furio Jesi may have died when Silvio Berlusconi was no more than an aspiring tycoon in the Milanese provinces, many of his observations about the connection between middle-class culture, pulp culture and right-wing culture still apply three decades later, with Berlusconi himself as a prime example. 2
