AGAINST CHRISTMAS & THE MODERN SCHOOL (A New Lie) | Massimo Rocca

Massimo Rocca—better known under his most famous pseudonym, Libero Tancredi—was among the most combative and theatrical voices in Italy’s early twentieth-century radical press. A prolific polemicist, Rocca moved freely between anarchist, syndicalist, and republican circles, all the while turning his fire on what he considered hypocrisy, sentimentalism, and the suffocating moralism of his own comrades.

His self-declared philosophy of Novatorism aimed to strip anarchism of its pieties and confront both reaction and reformism with the same merciless skepticism. The essays gathered here were first published in the Italian-American phase of his career, when Il Novatore—his short-lived but incendiary journal—was printed in New York. Both The Modern School (A New Lie) and Against Christmas were originally issued as separate pamphlets, each with a different byline, though both were in fact Rocca’s work. Writing as “Cosimo Carmas” in the main body of The Modern School, and as “Libero Tancredi” in its framing preface, Rocca used pseudonyms to stage his arguments as a dialogue of voices—one more direct and satirical, the other more overtly polemical.

In Against Christmas, the tone becomes almost Redbeardian in its anti-Christian, anti-humanitarian scorn, attacking religious tradition and the sentimentalism that masks its persistence. In The Modern School (A New Lie), Rocca turns his invective on secular progressive institutions that, in his view, merely traded one moral cage for another.

These works, read together, capture a moment in 1911’s volatile Italy and diaspora press when radical print culture was a battlefield of ideas—where prose could be as sharp as the knife it metaphorically wielded. Rocca’s essays remain striking for their refusal to flatter the reader, their delight in provocation, and their unwavering rejection of moral comfort.