May 24, 2026
May 23, 2026
New Book — Sicily: The Unidealized Archive
• Sicily: The Unidealized Archive: A guide to enduring the most dense, layered, and contradictory place in Southern Italy by Olga Angelucci
Publisher: Independently published
Pub. Date: April 29, 2026
Paperback: $39.99
Kindle $9.99
Language: English
Pages: 97
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May 22, 2026
Remembering King Ferdinando II of the Two Sicilies
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| January 12, 1810 - May 22, 1859 |
Eternal rest grant unto His Majesty, O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen
New Music — Pergolesi: L'Olimpiade
• Pergolesi: L'Olimpiade performed by Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani
Label: Arcana Records
Release Date: July 17, 2026
Audio CD: $29.99
Number of Discs: 2
Available at Amazon.com
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May 21, 2026
The Feast of the Ascension at Carditello
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| HRH Princess Beatrice of Bourbon–Two Sicilies with dignitaries and reenactors Photos courtesy of Gaetano Bonelli and 1° Reggimento Re |
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| Members of the 1° Reggimento Re |
The religious dimension of the celebration remained central. The traditional floral display, the solemn Mass celebrated by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, and the procession of Carlo Brunelli’s altarpiece reaffirmed the deeply Catholic character of the feast. Especially striking was the ancient blessing of the waters from the Carolino Aqueduct, a rite that seemed to bind together landscape, faith, and history in a distinctly Duosiciliano way.
Rather than functioning as a simple cultural event, the Feast of the Ascension at Carditello demonstrated how historical memory can still be lived publicly and spiritually. For a few hours, the Royal Site became, once again, part of a living tradition rather than a monument to a vanished world.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, May 20th, Feast of San Bernardino da Siena
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| HRH Princess Beatrice of Bourbon–Two Sicilies with Gaetano Bonelli |
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| Cav. Mirko Speranza |
New Book — Sicily’s Hidden History: Untold Stories of Conquest, Culture, and Power in the Mediterranean Island
• Sicily’s Hidden History: Untold Stories of Conquest, Culture, and Power in the Mediterranean Island by Kiko Snow
Publisher: Independently published
Pub. Date: May 28, 2026
Paperback: $12.99
Kindle $5.99
Language: English
Pages: 183
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May 20, 2026
Evola in the Light of Hispanic Traditionalism
Originally published in the double special issue of Arthos dedicated to Julius Evola in 1974, Francisco Elías de Tejada’s “Julius Evola alla luce del Tradizionalismo ispanico” (Julius Evola in the Light of Hispanic Traditionalism) offers a rigorous Carlist and Hispanic Traditionalist assessment of Evola’s thought.
Compared with From Evola to Christ, Tejada’s article is more demanding yet also more illuminating. Whereas the earlier essay presented Evola as an unlikely bridge toward Catholicism, Tejada approaches him from the standpoint of Hispanic Traditionalism—specifically Carlism—and asks a harder question: what in Evola can be accepted, and what must be rejected?
The result is a mixture of admiration and correction.
Tejada recognizes Evola’s greatness. He sees in him a rare aristocratic spirit, a man who stood above the vulgar assumptions of modernity and gave intellectual form to the revolt against the modern world. Evola’s critique of liberalism, democracy, bourgeois weakness, secularism, and the collapse of traditional order is treated with deep respect. On that level, Tejada regards him as an ally.
But he refuses to let admiration become acquiescence.
For Tejada, the central problem is that Evola seeks Tradition outside the history of Christendom. Evola looks to primordial metaphysics, Eastern doctrines, Tantra, caste, myth, and initiation. Tejada, by contrast, insists that true Tradition is not an abstract or esoteric inheritance. It is historical, concrete, Catholic, and, above all, embodied in the Spanish tradition of Carlism.
Tejada argues that Evola correctly diagnosed the disease of modernity, but misidentified the highest Western remedy. He searched the East for a heroic and aristocratic spirituality while overlooking what Tejada sees as the heroic Catholic tradition of Spain: the Reconquista, the Counter-Reformation, the Battle of Lepanto, the Carlist wars, and the militant defense of altar, throne, and inherited liberties.
This is where Tejada is at his strongest. He does not present Catholicism as soft, sentimental, or merely devotional, but as militant, virile, aristocratic, and sacrificial. Christianity, in his view, is not the religion of slaves, as Evola sometimes suggested, but the faith of knights, crusaders, missionaries, kings, martyrs, and soldiers of God.
That point speaks directly to the same spiritual tension found in From Evola to Christ. Evola awakens the hunger for transcendence, hierarchy, and sacred order. But Tejada insists that these things are not fulfilled in pagan revivalism or esoteric self-overcoming. They are fulfilled in Catholic militancy—in a faith that does not flee history, but enters it and fights.
Like From Evola to Christ, the article traces a path of spiritual development: beginning with Evola’s critique of modernity, recognizing the inadequacy of purely political answers, and discovering that the deeper answer is not abstraction, but the living Catholic tradition.
But Tejada presses the issue further. The question is not merely whether Evola can lead one toward Catholicism, but whether Evola himself must be judged by Catholic Tradition. In that sense, the article is both appreciative and corrective: Evola is honored as a formidable critic of modern decadence, but he is not allowed to become the final authority.
That distinction matters because, for someone shaped by Evola, the temptation is to remain at the level of metaphysics, symbols, and aristocratic distance. Tejada challenges that temptation, arguing that true Tradition is not solitary self-mastery, but fidelity to God, to inherited order, to one’s people, and to the battles history places before us.
This is why his contrast between the kshatriya and the hidalgo is so important. Evola is portrayed as the Western warrior who turned eastward and became a kind of isolated initiate. Tejada’s ideal is different: the Christian nobleman, the militant Catholic, the man who serves rather than merely overcomes.
Evola may help one see the emptiness of the modern world. But Tejada reminds us that seeing is not enough. One must belong, serve, and fight under a banner that is not self-created. For the Hispanic Traditionalist, that banner is Christ, the Church, and the historical inheritance of Catholic civilization.
In that sense, this article complements From Evola to Christ beautifully. The first essay explains how Evola can become a bridge to Catholicism. Tejada’s essay explains why, once one crosses that bridge, one cannot remain an Evolian in the strict sense.
For many readers, Evola was not the destination. He was the provocation—the figure who made modernity appear intolerable and transcendence necessary. But Tejada points to the next step: from the solitary metaphysics of revolt to the historical and militant faith of Catholic Tradition.
Perhaps that is the real movement: not simply from Evola to Christ, but from abstraction to incarnation, from the initiate to the knight, from solitary revolt to Catholic fidelity.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, Spring 2026, published on May 20th, the Feast of San Bernardino da Siena
May 19, 2026
An Unlikely Bridge: From Evola to Christ
The essay “Da Evola a Cristo” (From Evola to Christ), published on December 13, 2024, at Centro Studi Pino Tosca, reflects on an intellectual and spiritual trajectory that, while rarely acknowledged in public discourse, has been shared by many within the European Right. It describes a path that begins with the austere metaphysics of the Sicilian Baron, Julius Evola (1898-1974), and ends, perhaps unexpectedly, in the embrace of Catholic Christianity.
The author’s central claim is paradoxical: although Evola was one of the most articulate critics of Christianity in the twentieth century—particularly in works like Pagan Imperialism (1928)—his writings nevertheless led many readers toward the Church. Rather than turning them away, Evola functioned as an unlikely bridge.
Evola’s appeal to young right-wing intellectuals after the catastrophe of 1945 was not primarily political. His works, such as Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) and Men Among the Ruins (1953), offered a worldview rooted in transcendence, hierarchy, and the search for the Absolute. In a cultural landscape dominated by materialism and ideological politics, he reminded readers that the political realm alone could never satisfy the deeper hunger of the human spirit.
That recognition often becomes the first step in a larger search.
The essay describes this as a kind of interior Grail quest. Evola did not provide a religious destination; instead, he made it unmistakably clear that modernity had lost contact with transcendence. For many readers, once that awareness takes hold, the search cannot stop at metaphysics alone. It eventually demands a living tradition capable of embodying the transcendent in history—and for many readers, that tradition proved to be the Catholic Church.
The author points to thinkers such as Piero Vassallo and Tommaso Romano, who moved from Evolian traditionalism to Catholic faith. The transition is presented not as a rejection of Evola so much as a continuation of the path he helped set in motion.
In this sense, Evola becomes what the essay calls a pontifex, a bridge-builder.
Evola’s critique strips away the illusions of modern progress, liberal optimism, and ideological certainty. Yet once those are gone, the question becomes unavoidable: what remains?
Evola himself never answered that question in a way that could fully satisfy someone searching for a concrete spiritual home. His vision of Tradition was powerful but often abstract—more philosophical than sacramental, archetypal than historical.
At a certain point, the search for Tradition cannot remain purely theoretical. One begins to look for a tradition that actually exists as a living institution—with continuity, ritual, authority, and history.
It is here that Catholicism often appears in a new light.
The essay notes several reasons why Evola’s historical interpretations can lead readers in this direction. His revaluation of the Middle Ages, his criticism of the Renaissance, his rejection of the French Revolution, his opposition to the Risorgimento, and his defense of organic political order all converge with themes long present in Catholic historical thought. Even his critique of modern spiritual movements aligns, perhaps unintentionally, with Catholic skepticism toward pseudo-esoteric religiosity.
In this way, Evola clears the ground. Once it is cleared, some readers begin to see that the tradition most capable of sustaining the worldview he described was not pagan revivalism or abstract metaphysics, but the Catholic civilization of Europe.
The most interesting insight of the essay is the irony at the heart of Evola’s influence.
A thinker who fiercely criticized early Christianity may have helped lead a generation toward the Church—not by intention, but because his critique of modernity was so radical that it compelled a search for something older, deeper, and more enduring than the modern world itself.
In that sense, the author’s conclusion is both provocative and strangely fitting: Evola may have been, unknowingly, a “man of Providence.”
Whether one accepts that claim or not, the broader insight remains. Intellectual journeys rarely follow the paths their authors intend. For many, Evola was not the destination, but the beginning of the road.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, Spring 2026, published on May 19th, the Feast of Santa Pudenziana di Roma
May 18, 2026
Gainsborough and the Elegance of Another Age
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| Mrs. Sheridan by Thomas Gainsborough |
The exhibition explores portraiture within the world of eighteenth-century British fashion, where appearance reflected status, cultivation, and social ambition. Gainsborough understood this instinctively. Dress in his paintings is never mere decoration; it becomes part of the sitter’s identity. Yet despite the exhibition’s emphasis on fashion, I found myself equally captivated by his landscapes and backgrounds. The distant woods, fading skies, and gently receding countryside possess a poetic atmosphere that often rivals the figures themselves. Even within formal portraiture, one feels Gainsborough’s attachment to the natural world.
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| (L-R) Mary, Countess Howe; Captain Augustus John Hervey, Later, the 3rd Earl of Bristol; and The Hon. Frances Duncombe by Thomas Gainsborough |
My absolute favorite was the haunting Mrs. Sheridan (probably 1783, altered between 1785 and 1787). The portrait has an almost dreamlike quality: the pale face emerging softly from shadow, the restrained elegance, the sense of melancholy held just beneath the surface. Like several works in the exhibition, it lingered in my mind long after leaving the gallery, though with a particular intensity difficult to describe.
Afterward, we spent time wandering through the Frick’s extraordinary permanent collection, which remains one of the great treasures of Manhattan. To move from Gainsborough into rooms containing works by Johannes Vermeer, Titian, Paolo Veronese, Francisco Goya, J. M. W. Turner, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Diego Velázquez, and El Greco is a reminder of how remarkable the collection truly is. And as always, I found myself drawn back to the landscapes of Camille Corot, which remain among my favorite paintings anywhere in the city.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, May 17th, The Feasts of Santa Restituta and San Pasquale Baylon
Photo of the Week: Seated Emperor Galba in the Sala Rotonda, Vatican Museums
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| Photo by New York Scugnizzo |
May 17, 2026
Destino (2003) — Disney at Its Most Surreal and Haunting
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| Scene from Destino (2003) |
Destino feels less like a traditional animated short (it's under 7 minutes long) and more like a dream pulled from the subconscious, filled with melting landscapes, impossible transformations, tragic romance, and dark mythic imagery. Originally conceived as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí in 1945, the film brings the Spaniard’s unmistakable surrealism to life in a way that feels hypnotic and haunting.
It’s beautiful, eerie, melancholic, and unlike almost anything modern Disney has made, at least from what I’ve seen. Sharing this in case anyone else somehow missed it, too.
Watch it here on YouTube
May 16, 2026
A Day in the Windy City
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| Italy's Gifts on Harlem Avenue |
Warmly welcomed like family, we were given a tour of the new National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame by President Ron Onesti. Though still under construction, the facility is already shaping up to be a worthy tribute to some of our community’s greatest sports legends. It’s going to be amazing, and I can’t wait to see it open.
From there, we crossed the street to Piazza Italia and visited Pasta Fresh, a specialty market serving both local businesses and residents. Tony and Gino Bartucci warmly shared the history of the store and neighborhood while treating us to focaccia and espresso. Afterwards, Gino brought us to his shop, Italy’s Gifts, filled with Italian imports, novelties, and bomboniere. While often compared to New York’s legendary E. Rossi & Company, both shops offer distinct atmospheres and celebrations of Italian American culture.
The surprises continued when Gino showed us a private chapel he helped build behind an accountant’s office, complete with televised masses and a small collectibles shop attached. Naturally, I couldn’t resist leaving with a Creature from the Black Lagoon figure.
NIAF board member Robert Allegrini then brought us to the Leaning Tower of Niles, the half-scale replica of Pisa’s famous tower. Built in 1934 as part of a recreational park, the tower originally concealed a large water tank and has since become one of the Chicago area’s quirkiest and most beloved landmarks.
For lunch, instead of a formal Italian restaurant, we insisted on trying Johnnie’s Beef, one of Chicago’s iconic Italian beef spots. The delicious sandwich—thinly sliced roast beef soaked in gravy on a crusty roll and topped with hot giardiniera—was similar to the versions we grew up with in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, I was too full afterward to finally try one of Chicago’s famous hot dogs. Another reason to come back.
Before long, it was time to head to the airport and return to New York. The trip was far too short, but we left grateful for the warmth and hospitality everyone showed us in Chicago.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, May 15th, Feast Day of San Liberatore
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| (L) Gino Bartucci Sr. (R) Hand-painted amphora |
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| Galliano and Sicilian Gold guard decanters |
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| Various religious artifacts |
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| Various busts and statuettes on display |
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| Various statuettes and figural lamps on display |
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| Harlem Avenue Little Italy street signs |
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| Pasta Fresh in Piazza Italia |
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| Tony Bartucci and family at Pasta Fresh |
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| One of several large Sicilian carts at Pasta Fresh |
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| We stopped by the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans |
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| Mural outside the forthcoming National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame |
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| The Three Graces at Galleria D'Arte |
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| Caritas and an abstract, gracile female figure at Galleria D'Arte |
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| The Triumph of Venus at Galleria D'Arte |
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| Backroom chapel |
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| Images of the Blessed Virgin in the chapel |
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| (L) My gag souvenir. (R) A classic espresso machine at a forthcoming café |
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| The Leaning Tower of Niles |
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| A pair of sleeping lion monuments rest by the entrance |
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| Tympanum with Blessed Mother |
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| Historical markers |
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| The Leaning Tower of Niles |
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| The Leaning Tower of Niles |
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| A miniature tower stands beside the Leaning Tower of Niles |
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| (L) Historical marker. (R) Ground-level display bell cast in 1735 by the Pedretti foundry in Modena, originally hung in St. Giles Catholic Church in Cavezzo, Italy |
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| Historical marker |
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| Johnnie's Beef |
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| Johnnie's "wet" Italian beef sandwich, dipped in au jus |
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| O'Hare International Airport |
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