"The only hope for a new beginning lies in the new scribes, the new monasteries, the heroic minds of Vichiana memory, the new academies, and the promising gardens, such as the one a stone's throw from barbaric, forgetful and rather dissolute Rome."
What would you say if one day you found yourself among gatherings of young people from all over the world speaking to each other in Latin and Ancient Greek, attending lessons on Plato in the original language, painting mythological scenes from the classical world, playing music on traditional instruments, discussing Homer and Virgil, reading books and taking notes, without cell phones or artificial intelligence? Probably that you were dreaming or suffering from an ex post facto hallucination, the effect of a cultural withdrawal from the classics.
I would have thought the same thing, had I not discovered with my own eyes and ears that this refuge of hope and confidence in the future really exists - just a stone's throw from Rome.
To my great surprise, I realized that there are still beneficiaries and disciples who love their teachers and are reclaiming their inheritance (contradicting my book Senza eredi [Without Heirs]). There is a place where civilization is resisting the barbarism of ignorance and oblivion.
On Saturday, October 18, 2025, I spoke at a conference on Giovanni Gentile* at Villa Falconieri, near Frascati. I was welcomed by the founder and director of the Accademia Vivarium Novum, who showed me around the villa and introduced me to its residents and their activities.
His name is Luigi Miraglia, in Latin he goes by Aloisius Miraglia, teaches Neo-Latin literature, founded his academy in 1991, and has an admirable and even endearing confidence in the possibility of saving humanistic civilization.
I had lunch in the garden at an outdoor table with about a hundred other diners,
including students, guests, and faculty members: a sumptuous buffet, accessed
first by faculty, then by the students. It was a priority, the barbarians would
say, justified not only by knowledge and age (hierarchy and seniority), but
also by the great number of young people and their great appetite. Young
people, an intern tells me, quickly clear away everything; they are not only
hungry for knowledge - as is right at twenty.
In this vast and
magnificent Borromini complex, amid frescoed halls, libraries with 153,000
volumes—some inherited, like the library of Elémire Zolla—gardens,
vegetable gardens, workshops, kitchens, and guesthouses - there are about sixty
young people: Chinese, Korean, Australian, Mexican, Uruguayan, Russian,
Bulgarian, as well as French, Belgian, Spanish, and even a few Italians (I
think there are no Americans or girls; it's a boys' – boarding school - a pity!); they attend courses and seminars,
study, create, paint, restore, play music, and sing.
They were selected from hundreds of applicants; they don’t pay a cent for room, board, or tuition but receive scholarships; they dedicate themselves to the arts and humanities and they speak to each other not in English but in Latin and Greek, to break down - says Miraglia - not only spatial barriers but also temporal ones.
The villa is state-owned, a stone's throw from Cicero's Villa Tuscolana, where he is invisibly delighted to have these neighbours speaking his language, loving and cultivating the classics, and reading the texts dear to him.
Villa Falconieri is the first centre of a
large international campus focusing on humanism. There is a second building
nearby, Villa Lucidi di Monte Porzio Catone (also ‘born-again’ thanks to
his neighbours), and other [buildings] will soon be added
The very air exudes the Classics, and one can still sense the influence of Bessarion, the famous abbot and episcopus Tusculanus (Stalin's pseudonym in the 1900s), and Federico Cesi's Society of Scholars in the nearby Villa Mondragone.
Where did this academy originate?
Its name, Vivarium, derives from the first centre of humanistic studies founded by Cassiodorus in the sixth century in Squillace, Calabria. Ancient Greco-Roman civilization was collapsing under the blows of the barbarians, leaving only ruins and beheaded vestiges. But both Benedict of Norcia and Cassiodorus saved the treasures of that civilization in different ways.
By some twist of fate, which is also another name for destiny or Providence, the night before, I had been to Subiaco and Santo Speco, (where Benedict had been before his arrival at Montecassino) and I had dined with the Prior of the Benedictine monastery (and others) after holding a conference on sacred issues.
St. Benedict was elevated
by Paul VI to be the patron saint of Europe; Cassiodorus could be considered the
secular, neo-pagan patron saint of Greek-Latin and Mediterranean civilization.
Miraglia's original plan was to establish the Academy in the South, in memory of Pythagoras' Italic school not far from where Platonopolis, conceived by Plotinus was to be built, and from other centres such as the Basilian monasteries that thrived in the South.
The Vivarium has another great example in a less distant age: the Platonic Academy of Careggi, in Florence, founded by Marsilio Ficino almost a thousand years after Cassiodorus' Vivarium.
The original idea for today's Academy was Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli's, a scholar of antiquity and co-founder - among other things - of the Institute of Philosophical Studies in Naples.
Hundreds of scholars, writers, and thinkers from all around the world have passed through the Academy or collaborated with its publications. I have in my hands a large 500-page volume written entirely in Latin, Mantinea, with texts translated into the language of the classics by Remi Brague, Edgar Morin, Remo Bodei, Salvatore Settis, and many others.
And what spirit animates this new Renaissance? Miraglia explains it in a booklet entitled E naufragio emergentes (An Emerging Shipwreck), in which he compares the current world stage i.e. the dominant techno-scientism and advancing barbarism with the classical world and its traditions. It does not recall “values,” that have commercial origins, but to virtues and a sense of duty, to an awareness of one's own limitations and mortality, combined with striving towards the eternal.
Miraglia starts with Petrarch, who gave rise to humanism and succeeded in creating a great movement for the rebirth of the classical world in his Republic of Letters. He then moves on to Benedetto Croce, who denounced the end of civilization, not because of natural exhaustion and obsolescence, but because of “the breakdown of tradition and the establishment of barbarism,” which occurs “when inferior and barbaric spirits recapture vigour and ultimately supremacy and dominion.” And from there they destroy civilization, beauty, schools, systems of thought and the noble testimonies of the past, “through ignorance and neglect or through a cheerful spirit of destruction or deliberate intent.”
More recently, the Communitarianism ** philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who recently passed away, wrote: "New dark ages are upon us...”
This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting at our borders: they have been ruling us for quite some time. And it is our obliviousness to this fact that is part of our difficulties. So, we are not “Waiting for Godot” but for another Saint Benedict.
Holy words. The only hope for a new beginning lies in the new scribes, the new monasteries, the heroic minds of Vichiana memory, the new academies, and the promising gardens, such as the one a stone's throw from barbaric, forgetful and rather dissolute Rome.
*Giovanni Gentile (30
May 1875 – 15 April 1944) was an Italian pedagogue philosopher, and politician.
** Communitarianism – not to be confused with Communism or Communalism
Source: https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/un-rifugio-miracoloso-dai-barbari-globali/
Marcello
Veneziani is an Italian journalist and writer, author of various essays on philosophy, literature,
and political culture.
