In Botticelli’s masterpiece Pallas and the Centaur (1482-83), to be seen at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, the Firenze-Athena parallel is unmistakable, with Florence depicted as the new Athens.

Pallas Athena (or Minerva), after all is the Goddess of Knowledge. Here a flowery Firenze – or Firenze Flora, to remind us of another Botticelli masterpiece, the Primavera – is shown as the quintessential emblem of civilitas.

In the painting, Pallas totally dominates the violence of the Centaur – here deprived of cunning, an attribute of the fox, as Machiavelli described. But as in all things Botticelli, the gesture of the goddess – hair-pulling the beast – is quite ambiguous. She’s not dominating it just by mere persuasion or the art of subtle rhetoric. Pallas/Minerva here is much stronger – and even ready to decapitate the Centaur with her pick.

Call it the emblem of civilizational violence.

How far have we drifted from neo-platonic heights. If a pop Botticelli with an Andy Warhol streak would remix Pallas and the Centaur today, Pallas/Minerva would forcefully represent the power of Italian civilitas – the most cultured and influential civilization-state in the history of the West. And the Centaur would be an artificial perversion, the European Union (EU).

Call it Firenze-Athena defeating Brussels.

This is what I saw – call it fragments of civilization – as part of the immense privilege of hitting the road across the Italian civilitas, in a mini-tour connected to the launch of my latest book, Il Secolo Multipolare (“The Multipolar Century”). The book, via 46........

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