Bannon in Italy

I had just flown back to Italy the night before from London, where I’d been covering President Trump’s state visit. My metropolitan head took time to adjust to the southern Lazio mountains and the semi-depopulated villages of an area of outstanding natural beauty, but one with highly limited economic prospects and few jobs for the locals.

The nearest village, Collepardo, is typical of Italy’s depressed rural heartland.

Officially, its population estimate is 961, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the year-round number is lower. Like many villages in Lazio, a region that stretches north of Rome almost to the Umbrian border and south down toward Naples, the decline in commercial agriculture has taken its toll.

The 2008 financial crash didn’t help. Some of Lazio’s villages and towns were attempting to remake themselves as a fledgling rural-based tourism industry, but the economic crash put that into a tailspin, further knocking local confidence and prompting more of the young to flee elsewhere for work.

It’s what is known as “Empty Italy,” where locals have become fatalistic about their prospects and mistrustful of a government they say neglects them and has failed to follow up on economic development plans.

It all may be postcard-perfect, with a slow pace of life, pastures of sunflowers and poppies, abundant vines, rows of gnarled olive trees, and medieval stone towns on hilltops. But there’s desperation here, advertised in the “for sale” signs in village after village.

I stop off in a bar opposite the mayor’s office for an espresso and to ask some locals how they feel about Bannon’s populist academy.

My visit has come just days after Italy’s culture ministry, which oversees the 800-year-old Charterhouse, as it is a listed national monument, said it is revoking the 20-year lease it gave Bannon and Harnwell a handful of months ago.

There was a competitive tender process, but the ministry now says there have been “violations of various contractual obligations,” mostly to do with the restoration of the monastery, something Harnwell denies. He plans to fight the revocation, which came after a series of anti-Bannon protests outside the monastery, and a hue and cry in metropolitan newspapers, which bewailed the handing over of “state patrimony” to the pair.

But locals and anti-Bannon activists don’t seem to agree.

Most of the villagers I talk with tell me that while they don’t share Bannon’s politics, there are more important things to take into account. They want someone to look after the monastery for the foreseeable future, and they want jobs. They suspect if Bannon gets the project off the ground, that will mean employment opportunities for them.

One older man, a pensioner called Renzi, tells me the monastery has been struggling for years, and the ministry hasn’t taken care of it. The Cistercians, who took the monastery over in 1947 from the Carthusians, have struggled for years, and back in 2015, there were five monks left. Now there is one, the elderly prior who ignores his superiors’ order to leave and is staying on, seemingly to irk Harnwell.

“What will the state do if it takes it back?” Renzi asks. “Italy is full of moments that are collapsing because the government doesn’t have the money to look after them. You know, stonework at the palace at Caserta keeps crashing down,” he added.

Of course, there is an irony in all of this. Bannon emphasizes the importance of culture over economics when it comes to politics, but the locals of Collepardo and surrounding villages seem to embrace James Carville more: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.