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Contribution short abstract

Looking at the Italian case of la famiglia nel bosco (‘the family in the woods’), this paper explores how right-wing populism mobilises enchanted ideas of nature to defend neo-rural family models, contest state authority, and produce racialised hierarchies of belonging.

Contribution long abstract

In November 2025, an Italian juvenile court removed three children from the off-grid woodland home of a UK-Australian couple in Abruzzo, citing inadequate living conditions and lack of formal schooling. The case of la famiglia nel bosco (‘the family in the woods’) rapidly moved beyond child welfare to become a national political flashpoint. Right-wing populist actors – most prominently Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini – defended the parents’ choice to raise their children ‘in nature,’ framing the intervention as an attack on parental sovereignty and authentic ways of life. Using this case as an entry point, the paper explores how nature is mobilised within Italian right-wing populism. Rather than approaching right-wing environmental politics solely through extractivist policy or climate denialism, I look at nature as a symbolic and moral resource used to legitimise alternative family models, contest state authority, and articulate exclusionary forms of belonging. In political commentary and popular media, the woodland home is cast as a romanticised space of moral purity, self-reliance, and ‘natural’ upbringing, resonating with longer-standing far-right ecological imaginaries. While family separation demands utmost care, the populist defence of the case reveals a striking asymmetry: off-grid life is celebrated as virtuous and authentic, while other marginalised forms of dwelling – most notably Roma camps, often located in peripheral or environmentally marginal spaces – are framed as sites of neglect and social failure. Rather than disrupting political binaries, such imaginaries reorganise them, aligning neo-rural lifestyles with whiteness, family normativity, and broader anxieties about autonomy and social order.