Reggio Emilia, 30 December 2025 – Not even Christmas brought peace to the controversy over the concert on 18 July Kanye West at the Rcf Arena. Multiple voices have been raised from all political parties and associations: if on the one hand the main reason for friction are some positions and controversial Nazi and anti-Semitic releases of the American rapper, on the other there is the significant economic profit.
Even the mayor Marco Massari now he intervenes on the issue. The mayor reiterates the sidereal distance between the history of the city and the pro-Nazi positions of the rapper, but points out that he has no instrument to impede the organization of a musical event.
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“The municipal administration of Reggio Emilia – we read in the mayor’s note – specifies that its role is exclusively institutional and that he has no expertise on the artistic choices that fall within the autonomy of the private managers of the structure. The mayor and the council, however, want to underline the deep distance which separates them from the declarations and behaviors attributed to the artist, which have sparked debate and concern and which, as also underlined by Anpi Reggio Emilia, do not in any way reflect the civil, democratic and constitutional values of Reggio Emilia, a Gold Medal city for the Resistance. Ours is a city that is characterized by equality and solidaritywhich has always contrasted, with projects of public administration and active citizenship, ideologies such as neo-Nazism, antisemitism and the male violence”.
The Rcf Arena in Campovolo di Reggio Emilia will host Kanye West’s concert on 18 July 2026
In any case, the Municipality will fulfill “its institutional duties, in collaboration with the Prefecture, the police forces and the organizers so that the event takes place in compliance with the lawssafety standards and the city, as has always happened up until now on the occasion of events of this magnitude”.
The mayor of Rubiera is more caustic Emanuele Cavallaro who, after visiting the Dachau concentration camp on Christmas Day, invokes a solution from heaven, with a typically popular Italian expression. “In being happy for the great public success that awaits the arena – writes Cavallaro on his Facebook page -, for the related activities and everything else, I sincerely hope that that evening it rains ‘God sends it’; if it went below zero in July, even better: because the cold helps us understand.”
A scenario hoped for after the cold, both thermal and emotional, experienced during the visit to the camp a few kilometers from Munich. “Those degrees below zero – continues Cavallaro – on Christmas morning, there, even in the sun, they get inside you. And you think about those thousands of prisonerspolitical opponents, Roma, homosexuals, priests and of course Jews, who felt it. Well, after the cold I felt, I wouldn’t feel good in conscience if I didn’t say something about the rapper who will come to do a concert in Reggio after having done a song praising Hitler. I even looked it up and, honestly, it seems more like a marketing operation. In banality and after a calm analysis, this stuff disgusts me. Giglio Mazzi, at the campovolo, to get caught while still a minor among the ranks of the Resistance, went to detach machine guns from Nazi-fascist planesrisking your skin. He told me about it. Here, eminent provocateur hero: Giglio Mazzi, the partisan Ali, yes, he had the attributes. Not you.”
