The far-right political faction in Italy has proposed turning a former Fascist party headquarters into a modern art museum.
The Lega party won 18 percent of the vote in last month’s general election by campaigning on a platform that championed anti-immigrant policies, but three pages of its manifesto detail how the party would support cultural development, calling it “the industry that can guarantee us primacy compared with the rest of the world.” The Art Newspaper reports that Lega’s manifesto also includes thoughts about the state of cultural affairs in the country and proposes that Italy’s non-state museums be consolidated, and that the value added tax should be lowered to allow for a more robust art trade. Among the most shocking of the group’s proposals is the plan to make a museum out of a building in Como, Lombardy, which was built in the 1930s as a Casa del Fascio, one of around 5,000 Fascist party headquarters that were mostly constructed during the Mussolini era.