ROME — Two commemorative stamps honouring figures associated with fascism and antisemitism have prompted accusations that the right-wing government of Giorgia Meloni is attempting to rewrite history. The latest issue commemorates 100 years since the death of Maffeo Pantaleoni, an influential economist but remembered for promoting the antisemitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The fabricated text detailing a Jewish plot to achieve world domination was first published in Imperial Russia in 1903 and was used to stoke anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. It later contributed to mounting antisemitism in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. A study by Luca Michelini, a history professor at Pisa University, found that Pantaleoni used the periodical La Vita Italiana to promote an anti-Jewish campaign that ran from 1915 to 1924 and “contributed to the political cultural, economic and social movement that brought Benito Mussolini to power”. The stamp, which costs €1.25 and bears a portrait of Pantaleoni and the title of his best known book, “The Principles of Pure Economics”, was issued at the end of October at the request of Adolfo Urso, the industry minister and a member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. A free market economist, Pantaleoni came to prominence in 1892 when he was instrumental in exposing the Banca Romana corruption scandal in parliament, providing papers that implicated leading politicians, aristocrats, journalists and the Vatican. A freemason, he was elected to parliament in 1900 but was forced to step down four years later after becoming implicated in a banking scandal himself. The Meloni government is not the first to honour him: a state-run business school in Frascati has been named after him, as well as streets in Rome, Milan, Macerata and Frascati. The Pantaleoni stamp comes five months after another philatelic controversy following the introduction of a stamp to commemorate Italo Foschi, remembered as the founder of AS Roma football club but also as an enthusiastic member of Mussolini’s blackshirts. He was even expelled from the fascist party for his excessive violence. The blackshirts were a brutal militia who attacked Mussolini’s political rivals and helped his rise to power. Force-feeding castor oil — a powerful laxative — to their enemies was a characteristic intimidatory tactic. Foschi openly welcomed the murder of the socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti, who was killed on Mussolini’s orders in 1924, and who was also commemorated with a postage stamp at around the same time as Foschi. Dario Parrini, a senator for the opposition Democratic Party, called on the government to withdraw the two controversial stamps, which critics see as a clumsy effort to whitewash the political origins of Meloni’s party, which descends from the post-war neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). “It’s the second time in less than five months that the government of Giorgia Meloni dedicates a stamp to a person who was openly and virulently antisemitic, ignoring the Philatelic Council, which is made up of experts called on to express an opinion on the historical validity of the choices,” Parrini wrote in a parliamentary question. “Let them show a minimum of decency and revoke these two stamps dedicated to overtly antisemitic individuals,” he said. Carlo Giovanardi, a former minister and member of the Philatelic Council, said he had not been consulted about the earlier issue and had been shocked by his research into Foschi’s history. “A terrible picture had emerged,” he said, as his reading showed Foschi to have been “a violent blackshirt, persecutor of Jews and accomplice of the Nazis”.