Dario Fabbri
Sotto la pelle del mondo

This is my first attempt at reviewing a book in twenty years of Debaser.
Dario Fabbri became known to the general public as a television personality, even before being recognized as a writer, thanks to his consultancy appearances on LA7’s news broadcasting about geopolitics. The imperialist obsessions of Putin and the Russian people have offered Fabbri the opportunity to display all his expertise and the remarkable eloquence that set him apart. It is precisely his ability to inform and explain that defines Fabbri’s on-screen persona: always self-assured—perhaps even excessively so—decisive and exact in every assertion, often with highly interesting insights.
I read the book caught up in this wave of media “infatuation,” hoping to see whether these same virtues would emerge in writing. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Sotto la pelle del mondo aspires to introduce us to a kind of knowledge usually inaccessible to most, explaining the dynamics that manifest in modern nations and the people who compose them.
Let’s be clear: I do not have enough expertise to judge the historical, ethnic or sociological references, which Fabbri abundantly displays, on their own merits. However, I cannot avoid expressing an opinion about the way this wealth of information is delivered to the reader.
Main flaw: the constant quest for an impactful phrase, repeated dozens of times in the same chapter, sometimes even within the same paragraph. Here, Fabbri betrays his nature as a TV and social media educator more than that of a true writer.
The showy effect comes hand in hand with a persistent and heavy use of sophisticated terms, repeated even when the prose would require a synonym to lighten things up. So prepare yourself for a barrage of words like: revanscismo, irredentismo, era volgare (who knows what would have cost him to simply write “d.C.”), and so on.
The chapter about India is emblematic of the expository confusion: I finished it with the clear feeling of knowing less than before. A potpourri of peoples, idioms, religions, religious variations, and events, all presented without providing adequate chronological reference points. Perhaps useful to those wishing to go deeper because they already know the subject. But are we sure a historian would read Fabbri? I wouldn’t know.
And now we come to the two underlying messages, the ones an attentive reader picks up on. The first, which is agreeable and omnipresent between the lines, is that the history of the decisive nations on the international chessboard has been shaped by the merging of countless ethnicities and populations, united mostly by a common spirit, almost always imperialistic.
The second, less agreeable, is the decadent and post-historical nature of the West, our very West. According to Fabbri, we no longer matter: we are inevitably getting older, we no longer represent anything, and in the future no one will follow our social and economic model (which, perhaps, isn’t even such a bad thing). The ultimate feeling is that of a divided planet, incapable of sharing common values, in the hands of peoples in ceaseless search of a leader who might redeem them and take them back to a glorious past—which in reality never existed, or of which only a vague memory remains.