The Geography of the Soul: Identity and Fidelity

The Rape of Europa (c.1676) by Luca Giordano, State Hermitage Museum

It’s strange what lingers in the mind. At a recent exhibition—The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy—I found myself thinking again of a line I once came across, or thought I did, long ago: “Mussolini is proof that a Prussian can be born south of the Alps,” or perhaps it was “Mussolini is the Prussian of the south.” Yet when I tried to trace it, I came up empty. Convinced it was in Emil Ludwig’s Talks with Mussolini (1933), I found nothing. Then, thinking it might appear in Ezra Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), I searched again—with the same result. Even the web yielded no answer.

Still, the idea had struck me so powerfully that I carried it for years, even applying it to myself. I was a European born on this side of the Atlantic. To me, “European” was never merely a biological or geographical designation but a spiritual and cultural one. I felt a deeper kinship with the old continent—its civilization rooted in Greece and Rome and later crowned by Christianity—than with Americanism and its descent into secularism, materialism, and Enlightenment rationalism. Yet, sadly, Europa today has become virtually indistinguishable from the American decadence I once longed to escape.

I have often wondered whether identity is something one inherits or something one remembers. Blood and soil may determine the coordinates of our birth, but the soul’s homeland is another matter. From childhood, I felt an unease that could not be explained by circumstance alone—a sense that I had awakened in the wrong time and place, like a traveler who opens his eyes on a foreign shore and recognizes nothing familiar except the stars.

In America today, to call oneself “European” is an act of nostalgia, if not defiance. It invites suspicion—an accusation of elitism, an affection for ghosts. Yet I could never quite renounce that lineage of mind and spirit: the music of Scarlatti, the marble of Sanmartino, the geometry of Castel del Monte, and the metaphysics of Aquinas and Vico. These were not museum pieces to me but living presences, the pulse of a civilization that once believed the world had meaning.

To be European in exile—in my case, Duosiciliano, Southern Italian—is to live in translation: to think in one language, metaphorically, while speaking in another; to feel one’s own values gradually lose their native ground. What others mistook for arrogance was, in truth, homesickness—a longing for a world where beauty, hierarchy, and faith still formed a coherent order.

Over time, that estrangement became less a wound than a vocation. To live between worlds is to see both more clearly. The American air, for all its vulgarity, sharpens one’s understanding of what Europe once was; the European inheritance, for all its decadence, preserves the memory of what the diaspora might yet become. I began to see that identity is not merely belonging, but fidelity—to a vision, to a standard, to something that transcends the accidents of birth.

In art, I sought the remnants of that older order: the measured harmony of the Middle Ages, the luminous stillness of Byzantium, the tragic dignity of Christendom. Even in fragments, they spoke a universal language—the grammar of form, proportion, and transcendence. It was as if Europe had left behind a trail of breadcrumbs for those still willing to find their way back.

What others called reaction, I came to understand as remembrance. To affirm beauty in an age of desecration, to uphold hierarchy in a time of leveling, to revere the sacred amid the machinery of progress—these were not refusals of the present but acts of fidelity to the eternal. Identity, I realized, is not where one stands on a map, but what one refuses to forget.

And so, that half-remembered phrase—whether it was ever written or only imagined—still feels true. “A Prussian born south of the Alps” was, perhaps, only a metaphor for every soul displaced between origins and ideals. I see now that what I once took for confusion was, in truth, a kind of destiny—to be born into one civilization yet called to serve the memory of another. We inherit ruins, yes—but also the duty to remember what they once meant. If I, too, am a European born elsewhere, so be it; for identity, in the end, is not a matter of geography, but of fidelity—to the civilization one refuses to betray.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 16th, Feast of San Gerardo Maiella