On 22 April 2026 the British Medical Journal — founded in 1840, among the most authoritative medical journals in the world — published an article by David Nicholl, neurologist, and Trisha Greenhalgh, professor of primary care at the University of Oxford, in which the two specialists raise the question of an urgent clinical assessment of the mental health of the President of the United States. The two authors explicitly invoke the so-called ‘Goldwater rule’, the deontological principle that prohibits diagnosing public figures without having examined them, before proceeding to contest it: when a head of state’s decisions have life-or-death consequences for millions of people, they ask, is that prohibition still absolute? The fact that the question appears in a peer-reviewed journal is itself already a datum. The two specialists further observe that the cognitive test administered to Trump — the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic screening instrument — does not equate to a complete neuropsychological profile, and that an adequate examination would require more thorough tools such as the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination, developed specifically to distinguish early forms of cognitive deterioration. No one has administered it. No one has asked for it to be done. Meanwhile, on 19 April 2026, the same president signed an executive order to accelerate federal research into psychedelic therapies — LSD included — describing the American mental health crisis as one of the most urgent public health problems in the country. There is something involuntarily Dadaist in the fact that an executive order on mental health and an urgent medical appeal regarding the mental health of its signatory are separated by barely three days on the calendar.

There is then an episode that Zoja could not include in his analyses but which fits them with an almost literary precision. On 15 April 2026, JD Vance — Vice President of the United States, converted to Catholicism in 2019 — publicly responded to Pope Leo XIV’s statements against the war in Iran. The Pope, Vance said, did not appear to know the tradition of the just war, which has over a thousand years of history in Christian theology. The Vice President of the United States correcting the Pope on theology. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, centuries of Christian thought elaborating the moral limits of war: all of this, according to Vance, had escaped the Successor of Peter. Erasmus would have taken notes. And Pete Hegseth — former Fox News host appointed Secretary of Defence, the man operationally managing the naval blockade of Hormuz — during a religious service livestreamed from the Pentagon on 17 April 2026, recited aloud what he believed to be the verse from Ezekiel 25:17. That verse, in Hegseth’s version, does not come from the Bible. It comes from Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, where the character Jules Winnfield declaims it before shooting someone. The authentic biblical verse is a single sentence about divine vengeance; Tarantino’s version is an extended and dramatised cinematic paraphrase, written for effect on the big screen, not to be prayed at the Pentagon. Hegseth did not know this. Or perhaps he did. In either case, the world’s foremost military power is managing a war with Tarantino’s Bible.

Let us come to the bill. Who pays, how much, and why no one says it clearly.

The Strait of Hormuz is a waterway thirty-three kilometres wide at its narrowest point, between the Arabian Peninsula and the Iranian coast. Through that strait passes approximately twenty per cent of the world’s oil and seventeen per cent of the liquefied natural gas consumed on the planet. It is not a trade route among many: it is the most strategically sensitive trade route in existence, the bottleneck through which passes much of the energy that drives the global economy. Closing it even partially means striking the world economy with a precision instrument. Iran has known this for decades. Trump discovered it the moment he decided to close it himself, with the naval blockade initiated on 13 April 2026, and now finds himself in the paradoxical position of one who has blockaded a strait to pressure one country and ends up pressuring the entire global economy, allies included.

In the first twenty-four hours a Chinese tanker — the Rich Starry, flying the flag of Malawi, owned by Shanghai Xuanrun Shipping, 188 metres in length — reversed course as it approached the Strait, then resumed navigation and completed the transit. The blockade that was supposed to strangle Iran was already navigating its own exceptions. On 21 April the ceasefire expired. Trump had sworn not to extend it. He extended it, indefinitely, declaring that there was no time pressure and no deadline. On 22 April the Revolutionary Guards seized two commercial vessels at Hormuz — the Epaminondas, flying the Liberian flag, and the MSC Francesca, flying the Panamanian flag — and collected the first proceeds of the tolls imposed on vessels in transit. On 23 April Trump ordered the Navy to fire and sink any Iranian vessel that laid mines in the Strait. Brent crude surpassed 100 dollars a barrel. The Dominus Transitorius threatens to destroy the ships and the ships pass; threatens not to extend the ceasefire and extends it; threatens to fire and sink while his negotiators seek a deal. The first Islamabad round closed without agreement on any of the three open issues — nuclear programme, reopening of Hormuz, war reparations. The second round collapsed before it began: Iran walked out. Sic agitur, cum Fortuna fallit.

Others pay the price. Italy imports 57% of its diesel from refineries dependent on Gulf oil. This is not a recent vulnerability: it is the result of decades of energy choices that privileged dependence over diversification, the short term over the long, political convenience over strategy. On 22 April 2026 Eurostat validated the definitive figure: Italy’s deficit-to-GDP ratio in 2025 stands at 3.1%. One decimal point above the 3% threshold. Public debt rises to 137.1% of GDP, compared to 134.7% in 2024. Italy is the second most indebted country relative to GDP in the entire European Union, behind Greece alone. GDP growth for 2026 is revised by the government from 0.7% to 0.6%; for 2027, from 0.8% to 0.6%. Debt will rise to 138.6% in 2026, and will remain there in 2027. That decimal point above the 3% threshold has a precise and devastating consequence: Italy cannot exit the European excessive deficit procedure, and cannot activate the safeguard clause that would have allowed it to obtain approximately 12 billion additional euros for defence outside budgetary constraints. The government that wants to bring military spending to 2% of GDP — as NATO requires — cannot do so because it has breached the European ceiling by one decimal point. The circularity is perfect, and perfectly Italian.

Giorgia Meloni, commenting on the figures publicly, wrote that it is infuriating to note that Italy would have been below the 3% deficit threshold had the state’s coffers not been burdened, even in 2025, by the outlay of billions for the Superbonus — ‘the disastrous measure of the left-wing Conte II government’. The Minister of the Economy Giancarlo Giorgetti, at a press conference, explained that the Superbonus weighs 40 billion in 2026 and another 20 in 2027. He then quoted Vujadin Boškov, the legendary Serbian coach who had managed Inter and Sampdoria: ‘As Boškov used to say, a penalty is when the referee whistles. You can agree or disagree, but these are the rules of the game.’ On the possible unilateral deviation from the Stability Pact: ‘Will we go it alone? I wouldn’t rule it out.’ He added: ‘Talking with my colleagues, many of them find themselves like me acting as doctors in a field hospital: we have wounded arriving from all sides and we must treat them. We can’t just give them aspirin.’ Giorgetti also made clear that the debate about exiting the excessive deficit procedure interested him greatly up until 28 February 2026 — the date of the US-Israel attack on Iran. After that date, ‘it interests me relatively less’.

Against this backdrop, the Council of Ministers of 3 April 2026 adopted a decree-law: an extension of the fuel duty cut to 1 May and contributions to businesses for energy efficiency. Nothing structural. The country most exposed in Europe to the most serious energy crisis in twenty years responded by lowering the price of petrol at the pump.

The European Commission, on 22 April, presented the AccelerateEU plan: state aid, coordination of reserves, and — among the most discussed measures — one mandatory remote working day per week for those workers who are able to do so. The International Energy Agency had already placed remote working first in its emergency energy decalogue, above motorway speed limits. Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia, Egypt, Malaysia: all have issued decrees in this direction. Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, commented on the draft European plan on Telelombardia with these words: ‘Turn off the heating, work less, travel less and wash less. If these are the solutions to the war in Iran and to expensive bills and diesel, tell me whether the people in Brussels are normal.’ Meanwhile, Italy had already extended its fuel duty cut.

Leo Longanesi, Italian journalist and aphorist, in November 1945 had written in his diary — later published in Parliamo dell’elefante — that the Italian national flag should carry a large inscription: ‘I have a family.’ Three months had passed since the end of the war. We had been bombed, occupied, liberated, invaded again, liberated again. And yet the structural priority of the system — the deep logic governing every public and private behaviour, from the bureaucracy to politics — was still that: family first. Not in the virtuous sense of the term. In Guicciardini’s sense.

Francesco Guicciardini, Florentine historian and diplomat of the sixteenth century, had coined the word particulare to describe personal interest elevated to a system — not corruption in the vulgar sense, but something subtler and far more resilient: the structural tendency to filter every collective problem through the lens of what serves me, now, at this precise moment. In Narrare l’Italia (Bollati Boringhieri, 2024), Luigi Zoja traces the long history of Italian collective narrative: from the Renaissance onwards, a country that has told itself a story of greatness increasingly distant from the facts, developing extraordinarily sophisticated mechanisms for never having to confront this distance. It is possible to read this diagnosis through the lens of collective psychic inflation: the same structure Zoja had described in the paranoid leaders of Paranoia recurs, at a national scale, as an identity narrative that grows ever louder and ever less grounded. The energy crisis is by definition a collective problem: it requires distributed sacrifices, unpopular choices, a vision that extends beyond the electoral cycle. All things the particulare cannot do, does not want to do, and will not do until the bill arrives directly at the door. And the bill is arriving.

Ennio Flaiano had noted in his Diario notturno of 1951 this: ‘This people of saints, poets, navigators, nephews and brothers-in-law…’ The ellipsis was in the original. Flaiano left it there, suspended, because he knew the list never ends and there is no point in finishing it. The nephews and brothers-in-law are still here, seventy-five years later. They did not arrive on any particular merit. They arrived because someone knew them, and someone knew someone. They sit on boards of directors, in ministerial offices, on parliamentary committees, in editorial offices. The system holds as long as there is enough to distribute. When there is no longer — and Brent crude at over a hundred dollars a barrel is a precise signal about the direction — the system looks for an external culprit. Today the external culprit is called the Superbonus, or Trump, or Brussels, or migrants, according to the convenience of the moment and the colour of the tie of whoever is speaking.

Pier Paolo Pasolini had written this already in the Seventies, in the Corriere della Sera and in the Lutheran Letters: he spoke of anthropological mutation, of a country changing not in its declared values but in its actual behaviours. Consumerism, Pasolini argued, had done what no ideology had managed to either defend or destroy: it had eroded popular culture, the sense of belonging to a community not defined by purchasing power. In that cycle of writing, he maintained that the consumerist transformation had destroyed a real world, replacing it with an unreality in which authentic choice — between good and evil, between what one is and what one buys — was no longer possible. Fifty years on, the mutation is complete. The country Pasolini saw transforming has transformed. And now it must reckon with a crisis that demands precisely what the mutation has eroded: solidarity, collective vision, willingness to share sacrifice. The market does not produce these things. Social media do not produce them. Politics produces them, when it works. And politics, in Italy, has not worked for some time.

The subtitle of this piece speaks of young people with knives at the ready. It is not a decorative addition: it is the logical consequence of everything that precedes it. The particulare replicates itself across generations: those who grow up in a country that has not invested in their education, that has not built a labour market worth staying in, that has not created a welfare system allowing one to start a family without risking financial ruin — grow up with their own will counting for very little. When the future ceases to seem like something that can be built and begins to seem like something that happens — or does not happen — frustration seeks an outlet. Sometimes it is emigration. Sometimes it is digital withdrawal. Sometimes, in a growing number of cases that the news registers with the weary regularity of things no one wants to understand any longer, it is episodic, sudden violence, disproportionate to its apparent cause. This is not a moral judgement: it is a diagnosis. And it is part of the bill. The bill of the particulare that has looked after itself for half a century and now presents the invoice to its children.

The Italian left is not immune to this analysis. On the contrary. There is a question it cannot bring itself to ask, or does not want to: how is it possible to have been on the wrong side for so long? This is not a matter of mistaken tactical alliances or insufficient communication. It is an intellectual betrayal thirty years in the making, with precise roots. The post-Communist left, then Democratic, then Progressive, built its international identity around the conviction that democratic America was a moral point of reference. First Clinton, then Obama, then Biden: each American election became a totemic event, a confirmation that the world could move in the right direction. In Jungian terms: a colossal projection. The transference of a collective that had lost its real political subject — the concrete worker, the commuter, those who pay for fuel, those with children who carry knives — and had sought it, in compensation, in an idealised image of progressive America. Projections, as Jung knew, do not last. Sooner or later the reality of the object imposes itself on the projected image. And when that happens, the disillusionment is proportional to the preceding idealisation.

And now Washington is this: a president who depicts himself as Jesus, attacks the Pope, orders ships laying mines in Hormuz to be fired upon and sunk, attacks the Italian Prime Minister in the Corriere della Sera, signs executive orders on psychedelics while the world’s most authoritative medical journal calls for an urgent clinical assessment of his mental health, and boasts of having no deadlines while the world pays over 100 dollars a barrel. The American messiah existed only in the projection. Now that the projection has shattered, the Italian left finds itself without a language to speak about energy, labour, real geopolitics — because for thirty years it delegated these things to experts, to European institutions, to market mechanisms. And the experts, the European institutions and the market mechanisms do not vote.

The Atlantic Alliance is not an eternal bond of personal loyalty: it is a collective security agreement that makes sense as long as it serves collective security. When one of the contracting parties launches a war that destabilises global energy markets, blockades an international strait without a Security Council mandate, and then asks its allies to provide diplomatic cover — the agreement has already changed in nature. Meloni, at least, had the involuntary clarity to show it. Rome denied Washington the use of the Sigonella base for the transit of weapons to the Iranian theatre — a choice the government barely spoke of, which emerged through American sources and Trump’s reactions. Trump, on 14 April, in the Corriere della Sera: ‘I am shocked by her. I thought she had courage, I was wrong. She is no longer the same person, and Italy will not be the same country.’ There is nothing wrong with refusing to lend a military base for a war one does not share. The President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, on 14 April, receiving a delegation of journalism students at the Quirinale, observed that if the powerful of this earth were to use a little self-irony, even in small doses, the world would benefit greatly. He named no one. He had no need to.

It must be said — and said clearly, once, without ambiguity — that criticism of the Netanyahu government and of the settlers in the occupied territories has nothing to do with antisemitism. They are entirely separate planes, and confusing them is itself a political instrument: it is the mechanism Netanyahu has used for years to deflect legitimate criticism. The contribution of Judaism to Western culture is fundamental and unassailable: Christ was a Jewish rabbi from first-century Galilee. Monotheism, the concept of covenant, the centrality of Law, the tradition of commentary and doubt as method — without Judaism there is no Christianity, no Islam, no large part of modern European thought from Spinoza to Marx to Freud to Kafka. A people representing 0.2% of the world’s population that has produced a disproportionate share of modern thought — not by chance, but through a millennia-old cultural tradition centred on study, commentary, and doubt. The Netanyahu government is a contingent political choice. The settlers in the occupied territories violate international law — this is not an opinion, it is the ruling of the International Court of Justice of July 2024. The same standard for everyone. Always. On 19 April 2026, in the Maronite Christian village of Debel in southern Lebanon, an Israeli soldier beat the head of a crucifix with a hammer. The Israeli army confirmed the authenticity of the video; Netanyahu said he was shocked and saddened; Foreign Minister Sa’ar apologised to Christians. In the preceding days the Great Mosque of Bint Jbeil, one of the oldest in the region, had been destroyed. The Palestinian right to existence is international law: it is UN Resolution 181 of 1947, it is Oslo 1993, it is what the international community has recognised for nearly eighty years. Two states, two peoples, equal dignity. This is not a left-wing or right-wing position: it is what was signed.

On 13 April 2026, in Hungary, Viktor Orbán — Prime Minister since 2010, the model of European populism, the man who had changed the Constitution and controlled the media and built a system of power that seemed impervious to any opposition — lost. Péter Magyar won with 138 seats out of 199: a supermajority allowing him to amend the Constitution, the very Constitution Orbán had rewritten to entrench himself. Voter turnout was 77.8%: an absolute historical record, surpassing even the first free elections after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Hungarians went to the polls for the first time after forty years of Communism with a turnout of 65.1%. Vance had campaigned for Orbán. The Rota Fortunae makes no exceptions for the Vice President’s allies. The lesson is not that populists are destined to lose: it is that they lose when people bother to vote. The 77.8% turnout is the most eloquent answer one can give to those who maintain that nothing ever changes anyway.

The Financial Times published a poll: Pope Leo XIV — Robert Francis Prevost, American Augustinian born in Chicago, elected pontiff in April 2025, the first American pope in history — has gained 34 approval points since the beginning of his pontificate. Trump has lost 12. 54% of American Catholics disapprove of Trump. 81% of Italians have a negative view of his management of the war. 83% of Fratelli d’Italia voters describe themselves as Catholic. The pope who on 16 April in Bamenda, Cameroon, said ‘woe to those who bend religions and the very name of God to their own military, economic or political ends’ is more popular than the president who had published his own image as Jesus Christ on Orthodox Easter Sunday. History has a sense of humour. It always has had, even when no one is laughing.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian — a doctor by profession, elected in July 2024 on reformist positions, representing the moderate wing of a system that has little that is moderate about it — on 13 April 2026 commented on the Trump-Jesus image by saying that the desecration of Jesus, the prophet of peace and brotherhood, is unacceptable to any free person. The president of a Shia Islamic state defending Jesus Christ from the irreverence of the President of the United States. The world has become a text by Borges written by a drunken Erasmus. Somewhere, in the Library of Babel, there is the book in which all of this made sense. We have not yet found it.

O Fortuna, velut luna statu variabilis. The Wheel of Fortune — the one from the Carmina Burana, the one that medieval miniaturists of the twelfth century drew with kings at the top and beggars at the bottom — is turning, and asks no one’s permission. Regno, Regnabo, Sum Sine Regno, Regnavi: I reign, I shall reign, I am without a kingdom, I have reigned. The sequence is implacable. Orbán passed from Regnavi to Sum Sine Regno on a Sunday in April, with 77.8% of Hungarians deciding it was time. Trump will pass, as all Domini Transitorii pass: not because he will wish it, but because omnia transeunt.

But the void remains. And the void is Italy’s true emergency, the one that will remain when the Dominus Transitorius has passed: not Trump, not the war, not oil at over 100 dollars. The void is who should step up, who should have a project for the country when the external enemy is gone and the real questions must be answered. Zoja, in Narrare l’Italia, says something uncomfortable: until Italy looks its own history in the face with honesty — without the consolation of the stellone, without the refuge of the particulare, without the consoling lie of being a special country to which the rules are applied with indulgence — nothing changes. Not because of Trump. Not because of Meloni. Because of itself. The answer to the energy crisis is not lowering fuel duties. The answer to the demographic crisis is not making speeches about birth rates. The answer to the political crisis is not waiting for someone to arrive from America to save us. The answer is a project. A project requires the courage to reckon with the reality of what we are, not with the image of what we would like to be.

Longanesi was right about the flag. But perhaps there is an addition to be made. Below ‘I have a family’, in slightly smaller characters: ‘The bill is yours to pay.’

Sic agitur, cum Fortuna fallit.