Earlier this month, the gardens of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo were filled with families enjoying some unseasonably warm sun by a pop-up ice rink. Teenage couples skated hand in hand, while the watching crowds sipped mulled wine and hot chocolate to a soundtrack of Nat King Cole. At first glance, it looked like a normal Christmas market. The stands, however, revealed a different reality. Among the nativity displays and kitsch decorations were adverts for nationalist newspapers and something called “patriot radio”. On a wall near the kids’ play area, a mural depicted an unlikely cast of characters, tracing a lineage from the fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio to the late American Maga influencer Charlie Kirk.

This was the setup I witnessed at this year’s Atreju, Italy’s biggest rightwing festival, which has been running since 1998 as an annual celebration of patriotism and nationalism. During the early editions, proud neo-fascists, including black-hooded thugs from street movements such as CasaPound and Forza Nuova, made up a visible portion of the attenders. At this year’s event, however, the Celtic crosses and odal rune tattoos were tucked under well-ironed shirts. The crowd was made up of nerdy students, gen-Z influencers, civil society campaigners and passersby who had been lured off the street by the glittery lights.

Atreju is not a party conference. It’s a community fair, an old-fashioned outdoor kermesse, or fair, that is as much about myth-building as it is about politics. Fantasy fans may clock this from its name: bizarrely, Atreju (Atreyu in English) is the main character in The Neverending Story. First published, in German, in 1979, it is a work that Giorgia Meloni and her circle obsessed over while attending neo-fascist “hobbit camps” in the 1990s, gatherings where fantasy literature was used to soften the edges of hard-right propaganda. Meloni herself had a direct role in organising the first edition of Atreju, and writes........

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