Essay  /  michelerovatti.com  /  2026

The River Does Not Have Preferences

In December 2025, Xi Jinping brought Emmanuel Macron to a two-thousand-three-hundred-year-old irrigation system in Sichuan province. He was not offering a lesson in hydraulic engineering.

Michele Rovatti  ·  May 2026

The Dujiangyan irrigation system was built around 256 BC by Li Bing, governor of Shu under the Qin dynasty. It is the oldest functioning irrigation infrastructure in the world — continuously operational for over two thousand three hundred years. It works by cutting a channel through a mountain to divide the Min River into an inner channel for irrigation and an outer channel for flood control. No dam. Not blockage but division. Not opposition but redirection. The river's own force is the instrument of its management. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It still irrigates the Chengdu Plain today.

The Fear of Ideas

The controversy surrounding the Italian government’s proposed revision of secondary school philosophy guidelines is not merely academic. It reveals a deeper anxiety about culture, ideology, and the fragility of democratic legitimacy in an age of political exhaustion.

The Dream of Never (Book)

 

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Culture, Capital and the Refusal of limits

The Proportions Are Perfect for the Space — On Banksy, Westminster Council, and the End of Transgression

Addendum  /  The Bud That Never Blossomed  /  May 2026

The Proportions Are Perfect for the Space

On Banksy's Waterloo Place statue, Westminster City Council's warm welcome, and what it means when the institution congratulates the gesture that was supposed to unsettle it.

Michele Rovatti  ·  May 2026

This is an addendum to The Bud That Never Blossomed, which argued that the system no longer represses cultural threat — it absorbs it before it can mature. What follows is a case study, delivered by events ten days ago.

On the morning of 29 April 2026, Londoners walking through Waterloo Place found a new statue among the monuments to King Edward VII and the Crimean War dead. A suited man, holding a large flag. The flag blows back into his face, covering his eyes. He steps forward confidently off the edge of the plinth. He cannot see where he is going because the thing he is carrying for pride has blinded him. The base of the plinth bears a signature. Banksy had installed it overnight.

By the following morning the BBC had confirmed the attribution. Galleries went live. Commentators gathered. The piece was identified as a critique of blind patriotism — timed, the press noted, to coincide with King Charles III's state visit to Washington, where he addressed Congress in defence of NATO. The placement was observed to be pointed: Banksy's anti-establishment gesture installed among the monuments of British imperial and military history, the subversive work taking its place in the civic landscape of St James's.

 

Essay  /  michelerovatti.com  /  2026

The Ibiza Case

On how a dictatorship accidentally created the conditions for one of the twentieth century's most fertile cultural experiments, and what the growth imperative did to it next.

Michele Rovatti  ·  May 2026

Pliny the Elder recorded the name in the first century AD. The Greeks had called them the Pityussae — islands of pines — for the forests that covered them. The pine trees and the gnarled juniper, the sabina, introduced by the Phoenicians and cultivated for its extraordinarily hard wood, were the first thing anyone noticed about the place. They are still there. Some of the junipers at Cala Bassa, on the island's west coast, are a hundred years old. They are classified as cultural heritage under Spanish law and cannot be touched. The beach club sets its Balinese beds in their shade.

The trees are the right place to start, because what happened to Ibiza is the story of a place whose aura — whose specific cultural gravity — was produced by conditions that had nothing to do with commerce, and then consumed by a commerce that could not have existed without them. The aura is now eroding. The trees are still there. The question is how long the trees can outlast what is being sold in their shade.

"Sleep Well, European Partners": Russia Just Named Your Factory as a War Target

On 15 April 2026, the Russian Ministry of Defence published a list of European facilities it considers legitimate military targets. Four of them are in Italy. Not a single European government has called an emergency session.

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We are being led into war. Not with a declaration, not with a parliamentary vote, not even with an honest public debate.

On 15 April 2026, the Russian Ministry of Defence published — via its official Telegram channel — a list of European facilities it considers part of Ukraine's military infrastructure. Drone factories. Component suppliers. Real addresses. Real buildings. On EU soil.

Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia's Security Council, followed immediately on X:

"The list must be taken literally: the publication of production sites for drones and other military equipment in Europe is a register of potential legitimate targets for the Russian armed forces. Sleep well, European partners."

This is not a threat buried in a diplomatic communiqué. It is a public register of targets, published by a nuclear power, naming factories in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Denmark, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom — and Italy.

And our governments said nothing....

The Bud That Never Blossomed (Culture · Theory · Digital Age)

Culture · Theory · Digital Age

The Bud That Never Blossomed

On the end of cultural novelty, the death of the avant-garde, and what the machine inherits from a landscape it didn’t kill — but completed.

Essay  /  2026

There is a feeling circulating among those who pay attention — not panic, not nostalgia exactly, but something closer to a quiet recognition. The feeling that something in culture has run its course. That the novelties of today are the platitudes of yesterday, repackaged with a new typeface and distributed at scale. That what we call innovation is mostly recombination, and that the avant-garde, across every field simultaneously, has gone silent.

This essay is an attempt to name that feeling precisely — and to ask whether it signals an ending, an interregnum, or something structurally new and irreversible.

“The past is never dead. It is not even past.”¹ The commodity, however, makes sure it is recycled.

"Wag the Dog" 2026: The Epstein Files, Melania Trump’s Desperate Statement, and the War That Changed Everything

"The most entertaining outcome is the most likely"

The timing is, at the very least, extraordinary. For months, the Trump administration has faced mounting pressure over its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, with the Department of Justice accused of illegally withholding documents that allegedly contain sexual abuse allegations against the president. Then, in a single, staggering week, the entire news cycle was hijacked by the most dramatic event imaginable: a full-scale war with Iran. For many, the sequence no longer feels like a coincidence, but a chillingly familiar page from a dystopian screenplay.

The Epstein Scandal that Wouldn't Go Away

The Scythe Cut and the Two Roads to Beijing: How America's Partisan War Plans Are Converging into a Pincer Against China

The opening months of 2026 have exposed a profound realignment in the global order. The U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3 and the launch of Operation Epic Fury on February 28—culminating in the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and widespread strikes on Iranian nuclear, missile, and leadership targets—appear, at first glance, as separate operations aimed at regime change, counter-narcoterrorism, and nuclear prevention. Yet a growing body of strategic commentary points to an emerging, if opportunistic, grander design: a pincer movement designed to sever China's strategic lifelines and erode its network of partners.

This is not merely about Caracas or Tehran. It is increasingly about Beijing.

To grasp the architecture, recognize a longstanding pattern in U.S. foreign policy: two distinct partisan "roads" to containing China's rise, each rooted in ideology but sharing the same endpoint.

Iran Escalation: When Israeli Strategy Overrides Western Interests

As of March 3, 2026, the Middle East is once again on fire. What began as an Israeli pre-emptive operation on February 28 has rapidly become a full-scale joint U.S.-Israeli air and missile campaign against Iran — “Operation Epic Fury” in American parlance. Strikes have hammered Iranian leadership compounds in Tehran, nuclear-related sites like Natanz, missile infrastructure, and even symbolic government buildings. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Iranian retaliation has already hit Israel, Gulf states, and U.S. facilities, with oil prices spiking and global markets tumbling.

Europe's Geopolitical Predicament: Useful Idiots or Cynical Crooks in Leadership?

Europe stands at a strategic crossroads, facing economic pressures, energy insecurity, and ongoing conflicts on its borders. Its leaders champion unity and citizen welfare, yet their policies often perpetuate division and dependency. This raises a critical question: Are today's European leaders useful idiots, unknowingly serving external agendas that undermine continental interests, or cynical crooks, deliberately prioritizing elite alliances over the public good?

The Neon Nexus: Miami Vice and the Pivot from Modern Power to Postmodern Culture

We often mistake the moment a culture peaks for the beginning of its eternal reign. We confuse the final, brilliant flare of a supernova with a new, permanent sun. Such was the case with the West in the 1980s, and there is no more perfect, more beautiful, and more tragic artifact of this climax than the television show Miami Vice.

Rare Earth Export Controls: A 21st-Century Oil Embargo?

 

"This is not the right way to deal with China," a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson stated, urging the U.S. to "correct its wrong approach."

1885 Berlin to 2025 Beijing : The Gallery & The Algorithm: Did Art Just End with the Empire ?

Let’s begin with two dates, separated by a century and a half, yet bound by a single, collapsing logic.