Monza, and the Atmosphere Abroad

Le Monde has published a dispatch from Monza under the heading of a series on the European far right, describing an "atmosphere of uninhibited racism" in a city it calls one of the calmest in Italy. The paper attributes the shift to the governing coalition's identitarian rhetoric and to a party to its right that, in its telling, harps on crime and ethnic themes. This is the fourth instalment of a European survey, not a passing remark, and it places an Italian city in a continental pattern.

Readers abroad will take the piece as confirmation of a story they already half-know: that Italy is the laboratory in which Europe's harder politics are tested first. That story has been told for a century, and it has been wrong before. But a newspaper of Le Monde's standing does not file such a dispatch from a place it considers ordinary. The discomfort it describes is not a foreign invention; it is a report of something said aloud.

What the outside cannot supply is proportion. Monza is not Italy, and a series with a thesis selects its evidence. The same country that produces ugly scenes in a Lombard piazza also produces, in the same weeks, a Milan fashion week covered by the Guardian as a study in audacious women, a Dolomites valley holding to a language older than the nation, and a Rome Colosseum lit pink for a cancer campaign. None of that cancels the dispatch. It does suggest that the frame is narrower than the country.

We do not ask foreign correspondents to be gentler. We ask our readers to hold two facts at once: that the world's account of Italy is often unflattering, and that it is often earned. The remedy for a bad report is not indignation at the reporter. It is the ordinary work of making the report obsolete.