by Amanda Minervini

Gender neutrality has recently entered the discourse on and within Italian language and culture while the war among genders is still unresolved. Teaching genderneutral/nonbinary Italian is a form of activism, and a way to teach inclusively while responding actively to changes occurring in both US and Italian culture. In this context, which shows how a portion of Italian speakers wants to move towards inclusion and modernity, the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, born and raised in Rome, elected in September 2022, chose to be addressed with the masculine title “il Presidente.” In this article I discuss the implications of this choice, while presenting an overview of a range of linguistic choices for feminine and genderneutral forms of address in the first part of my analysis. Meloni is the most important political figure of a country in deep tension between right-wing conservativism, and pushes for change, incarnated by the new secretary of the Democratic Party (PD), Elly Schlein, a Jewish-Italian born in Switzerland and holding Italian and American citizenships. As I show in the second part of the article, while Meloni embodies locality and “Roman born and bread” culture, Schlein embodies a dynamic Italy nurtured by progressist ideas, internationalism and interculturalism. They represent very well, in both political ideas and speeches, the tensions and polarities of contemporary Italian culture, once again divided between modernity and tradition, between campanilism and internationalism.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15781/j2zq-4k05