Not Paranoid Enough: Security and the Thiel Lectures in Rome

The first thing to know about Peter Thiel’s four-evening lecture series at Palazzo Taverna is that it was private. Strictly, deliberately, elaborately private—no photos, no recordings, no disclosure of content, location, or participants, and the venue itself was withheld until the last possible moment. And I won’t report on the substance of what was said in those lectures. I agreed to the Chatham House rules, as did everyone when they accepted the invitation.

Attendees were only informed that the lecture series would be at the Palazzo Orsini Taverna on the morning of the first session. Some had privately joked that the secrecy measures seemed a bit paranoid. But then we arrived to a gaggle of paparazzi, with cameras trained on the entrance. Attendees were photographed coming and going and reporters accosted us with demands for explanations. This was an ambush—photographers staking out a location they weren’t supposed to know about, to catch people attending an event whose existence they weren’t supposed to know about either. The security arrangements, it turned out, were not remotely paranoid enough.

What I will say is this: the lectures were serious, but not surprising. Thiel’s thinking on the Antichrist is well-documented. Anyone who had done a modicum of research knew roughly what to expect. However, the Italian press’s appetite for a villain (“sinister tech billionaire communes with the Antichrist in secret location”) did not survive contact with the actual content of the evenings, as anyone who attended could have (but should not have) told them. Il Giornale, one of the few outlets that bothered to do its homework, noted that what emerged bore no resemblance to the lurid reconstructions—part Palantir conspiracy, part tech-billionaire occultism—that dominated Italian coverage.

But someone in that room decided none of that mattered. Someone decided the rules they had willingly accepted were less important than being a protagonist.

Thiel delivered four private lectures at Palazzo Orsini Taverna, from Sunday, March 15, through Wednesday, March 18. Within hours of the first session, Italian media had the venue, the names, and granular details of what was being said inside. The consequences were immediate and predictable: parliamentary inquiries from the Italian opposition, protests outside government ministries, and a press cycle that reframed a serious lecture series as a sinister conclave of MAGA billionaires plotting against the pope.

None of the content required a breach of the rules to generate. Thiel’s views on AI, the Antichrist, and geopolitics are extensively documented. He has given versions of this lecture in San Francisco, London, Paris, and Tokyo. What the leaker provided wasn’t illumination. It was real-time ammunition, with the location attached.

And this matters because Rome in the third week of March 2026 was not a tranquil city.

The lectures ended on Wednesday evening, March 18. The following evening, Thursday the 19th, an explosion tore through the Casale del Sellaretto, an abandoned building in Rome’s Parco degli Acquedotti, less than ten kilometers from Palazzo Orsini Taverna. A runner discovered the rubble the following morning, Friday March 20th, and raised the alarm. Inside the rubble, investigators found the bodies of two people, identified through their tattoos as Alessandro Mercogliano and Sara Ardizzone, both prominent figures in the anarchist network associated with Alfredo Cospito. Nails, metal fragments, herbicides, and fertilizers were found in the debris, the components of a device investigators concluded was being assembled for imminent use.

Some on the Right greeted this news with undisguised glee—variations on “dummies blew themselves up, good riddance” circulated on X. This reaction is understandable. It is also a mistake.

Mercogliano had been convicted in the Scripta Manent terrorism trial, targeting the FAI-FRI anarchist network responsible for bombs and explosive packages sent to politicians, journalists, and law enforcement between 2003 and 2016, before being acquitted on appeal. Ardizzone had declared in open court: “I am anarchist. As an anarchist I am the enemy of this State as of every other State … I believe in the justness of violence by the oppressed against their chains.” These were not hapless amateurs who stumbled into a farmhouse. They were experienced militants who made a fatal technical error. The next lunatics in this network may not.

Italy’s intelligence services had already identified the anarcho-insurrectionalist movement as the country’s most concrete domestic security threat, particularly following railway sabotage attacks carried out during the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February. According to Il Giornale, on the afternoon of March 20th, the same day the bodies were identified, a suspicious package was delivered to the Ministry of Justice, just a fifteen-minute walk from Palazzo Orsini Taverna. Investigators believe it was connected to the same network. Investigators also believe the pair were working toward a show of force linked to the expiry in May of the 41-bis detention decree applied to their leader, Cospito. Interior Minister Piantedosi convened an emergency anti-terrorism committee at the Viminale. Deputy Prime Minister Tajani warned of a “climate of tension that anarchist and far-left elements want to continue to create.”

Lega responded to the explosion, saying:

The deaths of two anarchists, killed by the explosion of a bomb they were preparing with the likely intent of killing, are shocking and further confirmation of the dangerousness of certain circles.

This was Rome last week. The Thiel lectures ended on Wednesday; the bomb-makers died the following night. There is no evidence that these events are connected—but they happened in the same city, in the same climate of organized far-left rage that the media coverage of the lectures had done its level best to inflame.

The point is not that the Thiel lecture leaker or the rabid media inspired the anarchist bomb-makers. The point is that leaking the precise location and inflammatory content of a high-security private event, in real time, to a press corps with an appetite for the darkest possible framing, in a city where networks were actively building nail bombs, was reckless. Left-wing and anarchist sites had already published Thiel’s location, framing his presence in Rome as proof of a transatlantic far-right offensive: a Silicon Valley oligarch coordinating with Italy’s ruling class behind closed doors. That was the mood. The leaker fed it.

Ideas should be contested. Plenty of serious thinkers, including the Vatican’s own theologians, rightly contest Thiel’s framework rigorously and publicly. That debate was available to everyone before a single rule was broken. What wasn’t available—what required a leak and breathless real-time dispatches from inside a room attendees had agreed to keep confidential—was the raw material for a mob.

The Chatham House rules at Palazzo Orsini Taverna were not bureaucratic fussiness. They were a security protocol in a city that turned out to need one. The leaker wanted fifteen minutes as a protagonist and got them. What they demonstrated, in the process, is exactly why the next iteration of this kind of event will need even more security than this one had. Someone who was trusted to be in that room decided their moment in the spotlight was worth more than everyone else’s safety.

The Italian media’s coverage was agitation, not journalism. The ambush at the door was provocation, not reporting. And the murderous far left in Italy is not, and has never been, a joke.