As President Donald Trump inaugurated his personal chairmanship of Washington, D.C.'s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by attending a performance of Les Misérables, he might look to Italy for ways to further his administration's mission to bring political balance to the performing arts.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whom Trump has praised as a "fantastic leader and person" has had that goal from the beginning of her premiership, in 2022.
"I want to free Italian culture from an intolerant system of power in which you couldn't work if you didn't declare yourself of a certain political camp," Meloni said in a May 2023 speech in Catania, Sicily.
"We were told that the left had a cultural hegemony, but it wasn't cultural hegemony, it was a hegemony of power."
Meloni correctly realized that institutional power in the arts is vital to the conservative cause, echoing many on the American right who follow the late Andrew Breitbart's dictum that "politics is downstream from culture" and that ignoring this relationship led directly to the loss of most cultural institutions to the dogmatic and intolerant left.
Meloni's former culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, promoted a nationalistic "new Italian imagination" shared by his successor Alessandro Giuli, who took over the ministry last year after Sangiuliano resigned over a personal ethics scandal.
Accordingly, Meloni's government has actively appointed individuals with conservative sensibilities to lead some of Italy's most important cultural organizations, including the national public broadcaster RAI, the Venice Biennale art festival, the Torino Book Fair, Rome's Experimental Cinematography Center, and the MAXXI Foundation of contemporary art.
It has also changed laws to allow broader government input into the personnel and management of arts institutions that the public funds, a measure that allows the democratically expressed views of the Italian people to be represented in the institutions that shape national cultural life.
The results are impressive.
A short visit to Italy earlier this month started with the premiere performance of Rome Opera's production of the composer Giacchino Rossini's The Italian Girl in Algiers, an opera from 1813 about Europeans enslaved by North African Muslims.
While some countries might try to twist the plot to blame the Europeans for their predicament or deliver some asinine contemporary political comment on the issue of migration — if they don't avoid the work altogether for its supposed "Orientalist" motifs — Maurizio Scapparo's production presents it exactly for what it is, a rollicking comedy drawn from the timeless Battle of the Sexes colorfully staged in the exact time and place for which it was intended.
The only thing resembling a scandal was the bass Paolo Bordogna's loss of voice a few lines into a crucial aria, though his replacement Adolfo Corrado quickly took the stage and joined the ensemble to give an uproarious and musically entertaining performance.
A short walk away at the Palazzo Barberini, those lucky enough to score tickets could see Europe's most impressive and sought-after art exhibition of 2025, a display of 24 of the roughly 80 known works by Italy's famed Baroque painter Caravaggio, who took Rome by storm in the 1590s, later fled the Eternal City after committing a murder, and died on his way back to accept absolution from the Pope.
The paintings on display include two portraits of a Barberini family ancestor that reside in private collections and have not been seen by the general public for nearly a century, as well as the stunning Ecce Homo, a portrait of the suffering Jesus Christ that was only authenticated as a Caravaggio in 2021.
While some art historians look for covert sexuality or LGBTQ themes in Caravaggio's work, the exhibition's superb commentary and catalog are models of learned, empirical interpretive analysis with no trace of gratuitously projecting 21st century woke standards 400 years into the past.
The show is totally sold out.
After a pleasant ride to Milan by train — which arrived five minutes early — that city's main theater, the La Scala opera house, hosted its premiere of a new production of Richard Wagner's Siegfried, the third installment of the composer's Ring of the Nibelung saga, a tale of the creation and destruction of the world. Full cycles will follow in March 2026.
This production, by the British director Sir David McVicar, eschewed trendy concepts recently seen elsewhere, which have presented Wagner's epic as a searing indictment of capitalism, a feminist liberation screed, an environmentalist warning, and other politically correct nonsense.
McVicar's production skews dark, but the traditional elements of a splendidly human story are all in place.
Add artists of star caliber like the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt in the title role and Michael Volle as the chief Norse god Wotan, and a splendid orchestral performance under the baton of Simone Young, and one could almost understand why the radical left would stage an obnoxious demonstration outside, where protestors carrying Palestinian flags pledged solidarity with "all those who struggle" and audibly blamed the well-dressed crowd attending the performance for their supposed "complicity" in the world's problems.
Like the Caravaggio exhibition in Rome, Siegfried's premiere also sold out, leading one to believe Italy's exceptional cultural leadership has found only solutions.
Let us hope the Trump administration follows through on its worthy promises to do the same for the American people.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. Read Paul du Quenoy's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.