An Italian Court Says Steve Bannon’s Far-Right Group Can Fight Its Eviction From a Medieval Monastery

The same day that his former boss, Donald J. Trump, became the
third U.S. president ever to be impeached in the House of
Representatives, former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon
was handed a much more favorable outcome in a legal battle with
Italy’s Culture Ministry.

In the latest round in a months-long court battle, Bannon’s
Dignitatis Humanae Institute has won an appeal of the Ministry’s
decision to evict the Institute from Certosa di Trisulti, a
13th-century monastery on an Italian mountaintop, The Art Newspaper reports.
There, the Institute, co-founded with Benjamin Harnwell, a former
aide to a conservative British member of the European Parliament,
plans to train “modern gladiators” who will promote a right-wing
“Judeo-Christian” worldview against what Bannon terms growing
“secularist intolerance.”

After the Institute inked a 19-year lease with an annual rent of
$112,000, some locals and politicians protested, and the Ministry
moved on October 16 to revoke the lease, saying, in part, that its
conditions had not been met. For example, it said, tenants must
have a proven track record of caring for cultural landmarks. It
also asserted that Harnwell had made false statements in his
application to the Ministry. On December 5, the Ministry ordered
the DHI to vacate the premises within 10 days, but a ruling from
the administrative court of the Lazio region has ruled that the
group can contest that order.

“The DHI has strenuously maintained from the beginning that the
annulment of the lease was a totally illegitimate act driven by
Italy’s powerful left for political, not legal, considerations,”
said Harnwell in a statement quoted by TAN. Dismissively
comparing the Ministry’s case to a certain conceptual artwork that
recently went viral, he went on, “The court’s provisional ruling
indicates that it also sees the Ministry of Culture’s arguments as
little more than the legal equivalent of a banana taped to a wall.”

The Ministry plans to appeal the decision.

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Group Can Fight Its Eviction From a Medieval Monastery appeared
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