US ‘MAGA’ strategist Steve Bannon is said to be close to launching a “gladiator school for nationalists” at a monastery in Italy.
Dubbed the “school of populism”, the centre in central Italy will according to the Briton running it train a global network of activists aligned with the Trumpist movement.
The project was suspended after the Italian ministry of culture revoked the lease.
It is now back on track, according to Bannon’s representative in Italy, who expects a court to overturn the ministry’s objections next month.
“I do not see how we cannot win,” Benjamin Harnwell, a former European Parliament staffer and Bannon colleague, told Brussels Signal. The court hearing is scheduled for February 11.
Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, was a key architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served briefly as White House chief strategist before leaving the administration in August 2017. He later launched The Movement, an initiative aimed at building a transnational network of nationalist forces aligned with Trump’s MAGA movement and critical of European institutions.
A central pillar of the project was and still is the creation of a permanent training centre designed to develop leadership skills for activists from around the world, with the aim of defending the principles of the Judeo-Christian West.
A decade ago, Bannon and Harnwell identified the 800-year-old Monastery of Trisulti, in Italy’s Lazio region, as a potential site for their school. The project was to be run through the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI), a foundation established in 2008 by Harnwell and a group of Conservative Catholic Members of the European Parliament. It was regarded as one of Bannon’s main operational vehicles in Europe.
After a public tender launched by Italy’s ministry of culture in late 2016, DHI was awarded the concession to manage the monastery. The decision quickly became politically contentious, especially after 2018, when left-wing political parties accused the then Five Star Movement–Lega government of turning Italy into a hub for Trump-aligned politics.
In 2019, just months after DHI took control of the 83,000-square-metre complex, the ministry — by then back under centre-left Democratic Party leadership following the collapse of the Five Star–Lega government — initiated proceedings to revoke the concession. The ministry accused Harnwell of fraud in the tender process and claimed DHI had failed to meet contractual obligations, including rent payments and restoration works.
Harnwell rejected the accusations as politically motivated. DHI challenged the annulment in court. In 2020, the Lazio regional administrative tribunal ruled in favour of DHI on the ground that ministry of culture had failed to provide sufficient evidence of false or misleading statements to justify the revocation.
The ministry then successfully appealed to Italy’s Council of State, the highest administrative court, which in March 2021 reversed the ruling and upheld the revocation.
“I was 100 per cent innocent of all wrongdoing,” Harnwell said. “It remains a mystery to me how an administrative judge can, on appeal, suddenly determine ex nihilo that I was guilty of crimes, arguing that because I had never been charged with any crimes in a criminal court, he was therefore free to rule on my guilt over the ministry’s allegations. But given that I had never even been formally charged with anything, I didn’t have the formal opportunity to defend myself either. Is there no due process in Italy?”
Acting on behalf of Bannon, Harnwell is now seeking to regain the monastery’s management rights. He says he is prepared to take the case to the European Court of Justice if necessary.
“An administrative court does not have jurisdiction to rule on criminal matters,” he said. “Only a criminal court has the power to determine that sworn declarations made under “autocertificazione” (a form of self-declaration under Italian law, where individuals legally certify the truth of certain statements) are false, because making false statements under autocertificazione is a serious crime in Italy.
“If found guilty of this, you go to prison. Public authorities are legally obliged to accept such declarations as true. Instead, officials at the ministry of culture simply assumed this role of the criminal court — and the Council of State allowed them to get away with it. If the Italian judiciary will not correct this miscarriage of justice, we will go to Luxembourg.”
Before that step, however, Harnwell said he was optimistic that the dispute could soon turn in his favour, pointing to next month’s hearing. that day, the Lazio tribunal — the same court that issued the favourable 2020 ruling — will assess whether the ministry acted lawfully. On that day, the Lazio tribunal will assess whether the ministry acted lawfully in refusing to re-examine the annulment in light of Harnwell’s subsequent acquittal in criminal court of the same charges that had formed the basis for annulling the lease.
A ruling in Harnwell’s favour could reopen the path for the school to finally begin operating, though further appeals are possible.
The ministry of culture is currently headed by Alessandro Giuli, an Italian journalist and intellectual regarded as close to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Before taking office, Meloni appeared publicly on several occasions alongside Bannon, a relationship many analysts interpreted as an effort to position herself as a key interlocutor for Trumpism in Italy.
Since becoming prime minister, Meloni has pursued a careful balancing act amid rising tensions between the United States and leading EU powers. While cultivating strong ties with Donald Trump, she has also sought to maintain constructive relations with Brussels and Europe’s largest member states. In this context, how her government and the Ministry of Culture would respond if the court rules in favour of Bannon and Harnwell remains an open question.
