The text, which is partially covered, reads "...stop the invasion". This is a poster put up by the Lega Nord, a right-wing Italian political party that has opinions on immigration that I don't really have to spell out for you. I never got a chance to take a picture of the other Lega Nord poster that had been put up in Finale Ligure for the June European Parliament elections, which features a picture of a Native American in full headdress with some accompanying text decrying the imminent threat of culture loss at the hands of an encroaching imperial power. The interesting thing is, the power in question is Rome.
From the 80s on, Lega Nord has been hard at work developing a fairly strange political narrative in which Padania, a throwback name for Northern Italy, have been repeatedly assaulted by the imperial demands of a foreign power just to the south. Considering the fact that the impetus for the 19th century unification of Italy came mostly from the North, in Milan and Torino and elsewhere, this requires some interesting logical side-steps, but the underlying argument appears to be (according to the various Italians I spoke to) that Lega Nord considers Padanians (Lombards) to be much more Germanic than their Southern counterparts. Italy already has a fairly significant North-South cultural divide that kind of mirrors American North-South stereotypes, and so I guess the Lega Nord has done good business in Veneto and Liguria tying the grievances a slice of voters have towards their taxes flowing towards developing the South by wrapping it in a cloak of quasi-Aryan pride. Of course, most Italians are quite proud of their cultural history and northern Italy is far from wanting to break away from the peninsula, but Lega Nord apparently gets something like 15% of the vote in the regions they're working in (30% in Veneto, which is pretty scary).
Like most hard-right grievance-based parties, they do their best in tough times, and so they did quite well for themselves last month. While I was there, there were also a few protests in Milan and elsewhere that, as best as I could tell, were loosely affiliated with Lega Nord and featured some dudes wearing old fascist uniforms. While I found all of this pretty funny, the Italians I talked to (all left-wing, as most prehistoric archaeologists are) weren't so amused, and intimated that because Italy has never really been a destination for immigrants until very recently, hostility towards them is very real and very exploitable politically. The Roman imperialism stuff is one (extremely weird) thing, a low-level ethnic counter-narrative that probably won't gain much more traction than it already has, but the anti-immigrant ranting is another thing with a whole lot of growth potential, as it were.
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I've got something to add here. You said that "most Italians are quite proud of their cultural history," and that's true. But I was talking to Stefano Rossi and Gabrielle (I don't actually know how to spell his name) one dessert when I think you'd gone to get gelato, and the topic of Asterix and Obelix came up. I was surprised that they had read it as kids, because I figured it wasn't much of an Italian thing given how much they beat up on the Romans. But they said that, particularly in the North, there's not a lot of felt connection between themselves and the Rome of the ancient world. In Northern Italy, after all, the Romans were the invaders - they wouldn't control it until around the second century BCE, and the ethnic make-up was much more Etruscan and Gallic then it was Roman. Plus, Roman imagery since the 30's has been associated pretty much only with Mussolini, which has apparently fueled a new interest in young generations with distancing themselves from ancient Rome. They're proud of their culture, for sure, but it's not necessarily the culture that we might think they'd be proud of.
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