es tra tto au to re CIVILTà ROMANA Rivista pluridisciplinare di studi su Roma antica e le sue interpretazioni I – 2014 Edizioni Quasar Diretore scientiico Anna Maria Liberati Comitato scientiico internazionale Joshua Arthurs • West Virginia University, Morgantown Silvana Balbi de Caro • Bolletino di Numismatica, MiBACT, Roma Marcello Barbanera • “Sapienza” Università di Roma Mihai Bărbulescu • Universitatea Babeş Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca – Accademia di Romania in Roma Juan Carlos D’Amico • Université de Caen Basse-Normandie Lucieta Di Paola Lo Castro • Università degli Studi di Messina Maurilio Felici • LUMSA, Palermo Philippe Fleury • Université de Caen Basse-Normandie Oliver Gilkes • University of East Anglia, Norwich Anna Pasqualini • Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata” Giuseppina Pisani Sartorio • Pontiicia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, Roma Isabel Rodà de Llanza • Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona – ICAC, Tarragona Friedemann Scriba • “Hermann Hesse” Oberschule, Berlin Paolo Sommella • “Sapienza” Università di Roma – Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, Roma Coordinamento editoriale: Teresa Silverio Editing: CIVILTà ROMANA. Rivista pluridisciplinare di studi su Roma antica e le sue interpretazioni Via Salaria 1495/U, B6, 00138 Roma – tel./fax 068887304 – email: rivistaciviltaromana@gmail.com his is a peer-reviewed Journal CIVILTà ROMANA Rivista pluridisciplinare di studi su Roma antica e le sue interpretazioni Diretore responsabile: Enrico Silverio Proprietario: Anna Maria Liberati Registrazione Tribunale Ordinario di Roma n. 265 del 27 novembre 2014 ISSN 2421-342X © Roma 2015 Anna Maria Liberati Edizioni Quasar di Severino Tognon s.r.l. via Ajaccio 41-43, 00198 Roma tel. 0685358444, fax 0685833591 email: info@edizioniquasar.it Finito di stampare nel mese di aprile 2015 Nessuna parte del presente volume può essere riprodota senza preventivo permesso scrito degli aventi dirito Sommario Presentazione . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editoriale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V VII Lucieta Di Paola Lo Castro, Augusto nel bimillenario della morte: storia e imitatio del primo imperatore romano nell’Antichità e in Epoca contemporanea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Anna Pasqualini, Augusto e il “Tempo” nella Mostra romana di Palazzo Massimo (17 dicembre 2014 - 2 giugno 2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Isabel Rodà de Llanza - Jordi López Vilar, Tarraco Biennal. “Augusto y las provincias occidentales. 2000 aniversario de la muerte de Augusto” (Tarragona, 26-29 de noviembre 2014) . . 45 Magí Seritjol, August. Una civilització mediterrània. La commemoració del bimil·lenari de la mort del primer emperador al festival Tarraco Viva. Tarragona maig de 2014 (con traduzione). . . . . . . . 55 Dan-Tudor Ionescu, Ara Pacis Augustae: un simbolo dell’età augustea. Considerazioni storicoreligiose tra Pax Augusta e Pax Augusti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Philippe Fleury, Le Plan de Rome de Paul Bigot. De la maquete en plâtre de Paul Bigot à la maquete virtuelle de l’Université de Caen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Friedemann Scriba, L’estetizzazione della politica nell’età di Mussolini e il caso della Mostra Augustea della Romanità. Appunti su problemi di storiograia circa fascismo e cultura . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Enrico Silverio, Il Bimillenario della nascita di Augusto tra celebrazione nazionale ed omaggio mondiale: il caso del Convegno Augusteo del 23-27 setembre 1938 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Anna Maria Liberati, La storia atraverso i rancobolli tra anniversari e ideologia nell’Italia degli anni Trenta del Novecento . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Joshua Arthurs, «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano»: he Aterlives of Mussolini’s Rome 283 Luisa Covello, Princeps e dux: protagonisti di un’epoca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Paolo Sommella - Anna Maria Liberati, Emissione di un rancobollo commemorativo del Bimillenario della morte dell’imperatore Augusto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Enrico Silverio, La Romanità incontra il Razionalismo: la Mostra della Romanità ed il Piano regolatore della città italiana dell’economia corporativa progettato da Giuseppe Pagano per l’E 42 . 321 Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano»: he Aterlives of Mussolini’s Rome For many years, Rome’s piazza Augusto Imperatore was the site of a joke, or more precisely, the irreverent wordplay so beloved by the city’s inhabitants. he massive square – carved out of a historic neighborhood by Benito Mussolini’s regime in the 1930s – surrounds the crumbling remains of the Mausoleum of Augustus, itself oten mocked by locals as il dente cariato (the roten tooth). Its perimeter is framed by a series of modern neoclassical buildings, which in turn are decorated with friezes and mosaics representing scenes from both ancient mythology and Fascist propaganda1. A large Latin inscription presides over the site, announcing Mussolini’s liberation of the Mausoleum «from the darkness of the ages» and his creation of «streets, buildings and homes beiting the ways of humanity in Year XVIII of the Fascist Revolution [i.e. 1940]»2. Now for the joke: in the days that followed Mussolini’s fall from power in July 1943, an anonymous humorist defaced the Duce’s name on the inscription, erasing the «LINI» and leaving only «MUSSO», a vernacular term for “donkey” or “jackass”3. For those who noticed it, this small act of damnatio memoriae undermined not just the solemnity of Augustus’ inal resting place, but the entire monumental showcase devised by the Fascist regime. Sometime in the late 1990s, it was the pun’s turn to be erased, when the missing «LINI» mysteriously returned to view (ig. 1)4. here is litle evidence indicating who was responsible for this act of reverse iconoclasm, but the restoration occurred against a backdrop of turbulent transition in Italy. In the decades since 1945, the Italian Republic had rested on a fundamental anti-Fascist consensus, and the far right had largely been relegated to the fringes of political life. his postwar order, frozen in place by the Cold War, was undermined with the collapse of the Soviet Union; the ensuing crisis of the early 1990s prompted the electoral resurgence of the extreme right (including the inclusion of the “post-fascist” Alleanza Nazionale in Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition) and, correspondingly, eforts 1 On the piazza Augusto Imperatore and the fate of the mausoleum, see especially A. Kallis, ‘Framing’ Romanità: he Celebrations for the Bimillenario Augusteo and the Augusteo–Ara Pacis Project, in «he Journal of Contemporary History» XLVI (2011), 4, pp. 809-831; and S. Kostof, he Emperor and the Duce: he Planning of Piazzale Augusto Imperatore in Rome, in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, eds. H. Millon - L. Nochlin, Cambridge, MA 1978, pp. 270-325. 2 he original inscription reads: «HUNC LOCUM UBI AUGUSTI MANES VOLITANT PER AUAS/POSTQUAM IMPEATORIS MAUSOLEUM EX SAECULORUM TENEBRIS/EST EXTACTUM AAEQUE PACIS DISIECTA MEMBA REFECTA/MUSSOLINI DUX VETERIBUS ANGUSTIIS DELETIS SPLENDIDIORIBUS/VIIS AEDIFICIIS AEDIBUS AD HUMANITATIS MORES APTIS/ORNANDUM CENSUIT ANNO MDCCCCXL A.F.R. XVIII». 3 Valentina Follo has recently speculated on the method of defacement, suggesting that the inscription was covered with concrete; see her dissertation he Power of Images in the Age of Mussolini, Philadelphia 2013, p. 50. 4 Like Follo, I have been unable to determine the exact date at which the inscription was restored; however, it did occur sometime between my two residencies in Rome in 1995 and 2002. 284 Joshua Arthurs Fig. 1. Restored inscription at piazza Augusto Imperatore, Rome (Photo by Author). to reassess and even valorize the Ventennio nero5. his revaluation extended to the physical remains of Fascism – monuments, architecture, iconography – which, ater decades of neglect and avoidance, have increasingly been celebrated as valuable contributions to Italy’s cultural patrimony6. he case of the vanishing (and reappearing) «LINI», small though it may seem, therefore connects to larger controversies over Italian memory politics and the legacies of the Fascist era. At the same time, it poses questions about the presence of the past in the Eternal City. For millennia, Rome’s built environment has served as a canvas upon which ruling elites – consuls and emperors, popes and prime ministers – have projected their power. he result is what is oten described as an urban palimpsest, a crowded symbolic landscape composed of layer upon layer of historical strata. Crucially, the slate is never wiped entirely clean: rather, each of the city’s successive rulers has had to confront, erase or appropriate the material legacies of his predecessor7. hus Vespasian built the Colosseum on the site of Nero’s unpopular Golden House, as a git to the Roman people; the medieval papacy used the amphitheater as a quarry for its churches, and later installed a large cross to claim it as a site of Christian martyrdom; in 1874 the new Italian state removed the cross to mark the end of Papal rule in Rome; and the Fascist regime re-installed the Christian symbol in 1926, signaling its rapprochement with the Church8. 5 he scholarship on contemporary Italian memory politics is vast; see for example G. Orsina, he Republic ater Berlusconi, in «Modern Italy» XV (2010), 1, pp. 77-92; and A. Mammone, A Daily Revision of the Past: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Memory in Contemporary Italy, in «Modern Italy» XI (2006), 2, pp. 211-226. 6 I expand on this interpretation in Il fascismo come «eredità» nell’Italia contemporanea, in Un paese normale? Saggi sull’Italia contemporanea, a cura di A. Mammone - N. Tranfaglia - G. Veltri, Milano 2011, pp. 207-230. 7 For critiques of the palimpsest metaphor, see J.H.S. McGregor, Rome rom the Ground Up, Cambridge, MA 2006; and R.J.B. Bosworth, Whispering City: Modern Rome and its Histories, New Haven 2011, pp. 1-9. 8 A. Szegedy-Maszak, A Perfect Ruin: Nineteenth-Century Views of the Colosseum in «Arion» III (1992), 2, pp. 115-134. «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» 285 As has been exhaustively detailed, Mussolini emulated his precursors in remaking Rome in his own image, envisioning the city as a monumental showcase for the glories of the «New Italy»9. His regime erected new buildings and excavated ancient structures; it carved out new roads and demolished dense medieval neighborhoods; it installed monuments, statues, and plaques, and renamed streets and squares ater its martyrs and heroes. In many respects, as with piazza Augusto Imperatore, the Fascist era continues to condition the ways in which contemporary inhabitants and visitors encounter the city. Tourists crowd via dei Fori Imperiali to gawk at the Forum Romanum and the Colosseum, usually unaware that the road was originally conceived as a parade route for the Duce’s triumphant Blackshirts; via della Conciliazione, which connects St. Peter’s Square to the Tiber, features prominently on postcards bought by visiting pilgrims. Football fans pass through the monumental Foro Italico (né Foro Mussolini) complex on their way to matches at the Olympic Stadium, and oice workers pack the neoclassical palazzi of the EUR district, originally designed to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the regime in 1942. Although, as we shall see, there have been a few recent revisions to Rome’s built environment, the Fascist era (1922-1943) deines its most recent architectonic stratum. Today, over seventy years since its demise, what should we make of Fascism’s presence in the landscape of the Italian capital? How do the traces and spaces let by the regime shape the contemporary experience of the Eternal City? Are these remnants expressions of Italy’s inability to come to terms with a troubling past or, conversely, of Rome’s ininite capacity to absorb the products of human history – what Michael Herzfeld calls its «promiscuous stratigraphy [...] tolerant of the remnants of other eras even as it incorporates new ones»?10 Are Fascism’s material remains now a permanent part of the city’s historical landscape, or do they still belong to the present, and therefore potentially alterable or removable? hese questions are too vast to be answered in a single article, but what follows is a series of relections on the aterlife of what the regime oten called, in typically Latinizing fashion, Roma Mussolinea11. I consider the ways in which postwar generations confronted (and avoided) the physical remnants of the Fascist era; debates over the preservation, removal, or adaptation of «undesirable heritage»12; and the implications of these controversies, both for Italian memory politics and for Rome’s identity as the «Eternal City». In accounting for the endurance and contested signiicance of these remains, I emphasize three central arguments. First, the survival of Fascist material culture must be historicized as the product of a halting and incomplete transition from dictatorship to democracy. Second, the regime’s interventions in Rome incorporated a wide range of historical, ideological, and aesthetic inluences; this polyvalence helps explain the resilience and lexibility of so many sites and 9 Again, the scholarship on Mussolini’s Rome is vast; see for example A. Kallis, he hird Rome, 1922-1943: he Making of the Fascist Capital, New York 2014; J. Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: he Roman Past in Fascist Italy, Ithaca 2012; P. Baxa, Roads and Ruins, Toronto 2009; B.W. Painter, Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City, New York 2005; A. Cederna, Mussolini urbanista. Lo sventramento di Roma negli anni di consenso, Roma 1981. 10 M. Herzfeld, Evicted rom Eternity: he Restructuring of Modern Rome, Chicago 2009, p. 93. 11 L. Morpurgo - G. Lugli - R. Ricci, Roma Mussolinea, Roma 1932. 12 S. Macdonald, Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg in «he International Journal of Heritage Studies» XII (2006), 1, pp. 9-28. 286 Joshua Arthurs symbols in the postwar era. hird, the reception of Roma Mussolinea must be understood in terms of competing discourses – about “remembering” or “forgeting” the Fascist era; about planning, aesthetics, and urban identity in Rome; and about the interplay between history and modernity in Italian culture. To assist in this discussion, I also draw a distinction between iconography (explicit visual or textual referents to Fascist ideology) and topography, meaning the space and places created by the regime. Iconographic remains tend to be more symbolically charged, and to “speak” more loudly; at the same time, they are more malleable and movable. Conversely, topographic remains, while originally designed as venues for political spectacle, are less immediately legible as such to contemporary audiences. hey are much more deeply inscribed in the urban fabric, and therefore much more diicult to revise or remove. he traces of Roma Mussolinea can be miniscule or vast; explicit or invisible; ephemeral or permanent. Atacking Stone and Marble: he Aterlife of Fascist Iconography While the exact circumstances of the «MUSSO-LINI» pun at piazza Augusto Imperatore remain a mystery, it was most likely executed sometime between July 25th and September 8th, 1943. On the former date, the Italian people learnt of the Duce’s dismissal ater over twenty years in power. Millions immediately took to the streets to join in exuberant celebrations and purge their communities of all traces of the fallen regime. Reports from the Roman Questura indicate numerous assaults on case del fascio (local party headquarters), government ministry buildings, and the homes of well-known gerarchi. Around ive hundred protesters invaded the Palazzo di Giustizia, home to the regime’s infamous Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, demanding the removal of portraits of Mussolini and making bonires of documents and party cards; crowds smashed plaques at the Chamber of Deputies in piazza Montecitorio, and erected an improvised sign honoring the murdered anti-Fascist Giacomo Mateoti13. Walls were covered in graiti: «he executioner has packed up and gone»; «He wanted to be Caesar, but died Vespasian» (a double insult, since not only was Vespasian a lesser emperor, but vespasiano is slang for “urinal”)14. Outbursts of popular resentment were especially virulent in working-class quarters like Testaccio, San Lorenzo, Trastevere and Garbatella; in one neighborhood on the Roman periphery, recounted Piero Calamandrei in his diary, [...] an old man of the people appeared with a plaster bust [of Mussolini] and an axe; a long line of people followed, and made a circle around him when he stopped. He placed the bust on the ground, and proceeded to the execution. With a blow of the axe, he shatered it to pieces. But then the ceremony continued: imperturbable, the executioner unbutoned his trousers, bent over the fragments, and let his salute with a towering heap15. 13 See the Questura report from 26 July 1943, in ACS, MI, A5G, II Guerra 1940-1945, b. 144, f. 214, sot. 2.64. «Il boia ha fato fagoto»; «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano.» his graiti appears in photographs from the Istituto LUCE on 26 July 1943; in the online Archivio LUCE, see A40-182/A00150919. 15 «[…] è apparso un vecchio popolano con un busto di gesso e una scure: un codazzo di gente lo seguiva, e ha fato cerchio intorno a lui quando si è fermato. Ha messo il busto in terra e ha proceduto all’esecuzione: con un colpo di scure l’ha fato in 14 «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» 287 As these examples suggest, the iconoclasts’ most frequent target was Mussolini himself. Of course, such performances of symbolic parricide are typical in moments of dramatic political transition, from the French Revolution to the fall of Saddam Hussein16. However, the abuse of the dictator’s image also reveals the extent to which ducismo – the cult of the leader – had come to dominate fascismo in Fascism’s inal years. Even as the popularity of the Fascist Party waned, Mussolini remained a transcendent igure, always praised for the regime’s successes and absolved for its failures; this faith only started to falter in the later stages of the war, once defeat was on the immediate horizon17. he Duce’s symbolic pre-eminence extended into the Roman landscape. Not only was his presence felt in every corner of the city, from wall slogans and posters to portraits in private homes and schools, but in many respects, Mussolini was also identiied as the main agent of the capital’s transformation under Fascism18. For two decades, newsreels had regularly depicted him wielding a pickax, leading the demolition of “unsanitary” quarters; Italians’ memories were seared with images of him haranguing crowds from his balcony in piazza Venezia; and, of course, there were construction projects in his honor – most notably, the Foro Mussolini athletic complex, with its imposing obelisk bearing his name. Given that Roma fascista could more properly be deemed Roma Mussolinea, it is unsurprising that representations of the Duce were subjected to such widespread abuse ater July 25th, and that his likeness is encountered more infrequently in the contemporary Roman landscape than other Fascist symbols. Of course, many other icons associated with the regime also came under assault. he fascio litorio – Fascism’s pre-eminent symbol, a bundle of rods tied around an axe – was chiseled of buildings or subjected to what has been called «military castration», breaking of the blades and reducing them to stumps (ig. 2)19. Another common target was the “Anno dell’era fascista” (Year of the Fascist Era) inscribed on most oicial buildings, plaques and monuments. Just as it had atempted to dominate space, the regime sought to colonize time by declaring 1922 as Year One of the Fascist Revolution20; erasing this designation helped consign the Fascist “parenthesis” to the past. Crowds also atempted to undo the toponymy that the regime had imposed upon the city. Via XXVIII Otobre (the date of the March on Rome in 1922) was rebaptized via XXV Luglio, signaling the beginning of yet another new era; squares and bridges honoring the “Litorio”, “Martiri Fascisti” or “Camicie Nere” were renamed for “Libertà”, or for anti-Fascist martyrs like Mateoti or Giovanni Amendola. pezzi. Ma poi la cerimonia ha continuato: imperturbabile il carneice si è sbotonato i calzoni, si è chinato su quei frammenti, e in cima vi ha lasciato, torreggiante, il suo saluto». P. Calamandrei, Diario, 1939-1945, Firenze 1982, II, p. 156. 16 Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority, ed. J. Borneman, New York 2004. 17 On the cult of the Duce, see he Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, eds. S. Gundle - C. Duggan - G. Pieri, Manchester 2013; and A.M. Imbriani, Gli italiani e il Duce. Il mito e l’immagine di Mussolini negli ultimi anni del fascismo (1938-1943), Napoli 1992. 18 E. Pooley, Mussolini and the City of Rome in he Cult of the Duce, cit., pp. 208-224; J. Arthurs, Excavating Modernity, cit.; S. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: he Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, Berkeley 1997, pp. 42-88. 19 T. Benton, From the Arengario to the Lictor’s Axe: Memories of Italian Fascism, in Material Memories, eds. M. Kwint - C. Breward - J. Aynsley, New York 1999, pp. 199-218 (216-217). 20 M. Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: he Political Culture of Interwar Italy, Ithaca 1997, pp. 141-195. 288 Joshua Arthurs Fig. 2. Damaged fasci, piazza Augusto Imperatore, Rome (Photo by Author). To this day, Rome bears many scars from this moment of iconoclastic frenzy. It is not uncommon to encounter “negative” or “ghost” presences: damaged statues, empty pedestals, or defaced texts (like the aforementioned «–LINI» at piazza Augusto Imperatore). Even more striking, however, is the seeming selectivity and incompleteness of this purge. In every quarter of the city, one still readily inds fasci, imperial eagles and she-wolves, and inscriptions celebrating the achievements of the “New Italy”. heir survival is in part due to the relative brevity of what might be termed a “window of opportunity” for damnatio memoriae. Within hours of Mussolini’s removal from power, military authorities had imposed a strict curfew; any act of revolutionary iconoclasm was seen as a prelude to an anti-national, proletarian insurgency. Soldiers were stationed at symbolically charged sites – like Mussolini’s oices in piazza Venezia – and ordered to shoot at the slightest provocation. Circumstances changed again ater September 8th, 1943, when German forces and Fascist loyalists seized the capital following Italy’s capitulation to the Allies; for the next ten months, Roman life was stiled under the weight of a brutal Nazi occupation. A new symbolic geography would emerge from this experience, centered not on famous ruins or the regime’s monumental spaces, but on sites of oppression and resistance like via Portico d’Otavia, via Tasso, via Rasella, and the Fosse Ardeatine21. he Allied liberation of Rome in June 1944 might have presented a new opportunity to purge Fascism from the built environment; even then, however, concerns over public order quelled any major outbursts of iconoclastic violence. Indeed, the Allies inadvertently helped preserve sites heavily identiied with Mussolini’s regime. Military authorities installed themselves in ministry buildings and party headquar21 Via Portico d’Otavia is the major thoroughfare of the Gheto, where Nazis rounded up over 1,200 Jews in October 1943; via Tasso was the SS Headquarters, where thousands were imprisoned and tortured. At via Rasella, partisans ambushed and killed a German patrol in March 1944; in reprisal, the Germans rounded up and murdered 335 Romans, including political prisoners, Jews, and ordinary civilians, disposing them in the caves of the Fosse Ardeatine, near the via Appia. See A. Majanlahti – A. Osti Guerrazzi, Roma occupata, 1943-1944, Milano 2010. «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» 289 ters, and the Army established a rest camp in the Foro Mussolini (hastily renamed the Foro Italico), thereby protecting its Fascist mosaics and statues from vandals and iconoclasts22. he events of 1943-44 therefore precluded a genuine moment of cathartic iconoclasm, a “ritual of closure” in which the Roman people could confront and exorcise the remnants of twenty years of dictatorship23. he military authoritarianism of the Badoglio regime, the repressive Nazi occupation, and the Allied military government all limited popular agency in the public sphere, and together constituted a kind of social and political amber in which to preserve the fossils of Fascism. Even once control devolved to Italian authorities, there appeared to be neither the will nor the ability to undertake a coordinated cleansing of the visual landscape24. In July 1944, in response to repeated appeals by local oicials, the national government proposed a new commission to oversee the removal of «monuments and works of art that celebrat[ed], through their content, the ideas and goals of Fascism»25. However, the plan was hesitant from the outset. he commission would have to «take account of the political signiicance and artistic merit of the work», assess potential «aesthetic damage», and ind a means of preserving it at another location26. Municipal authorities would have to take the lead, and any costs would be the responsibility of individual property owners27. In the absence of political and inancial support, the initiative failed to gain traction; in the atermath of the Second World War, rebuilding and recovery clearly took precedence over the destruction of politically problematic sites28. Indeed, in many instances, the Italian state simply appropriated and re-purposed buildings once occupied by Fascist organizations, ensuring that sites of political power remained as such29. By mid-1950s, the window of opportunity had closed for a comprehensive campaign of public de-Fascistization. he political exigencies of the Cold War, along with a desire for national reconciliation and reconstruction, re-enforced a pervasive efort to “move on” and forget the conlicts and injustices of the previous era. At the dawn of the “economic miracle”, Italians preferred to look forward to future prosperity instead of revisiting darker chapters of their recent history. Nevertheless, the lingering traces of the Fascist era some22 S. Bari, Il Foro Italico e la damnatio memoriae in «La Strenna dei Romanisti» LXVI (2005), 1, pp. 13-26. It is worth noting that Allied policies toward Italian Fascist iconography difered sharply from their approach to the symbols of National Socialism. In Germany, the Allied military government engaged in a systematic purging of public space, which it viewed as essential to the larger project of de-Naziication. See C.S. Goldstein, Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany, Chicago 2009; K.H. Jarausch, Ater Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995, Oxford 2008. 23 W. Schivelbusch, he Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, New York 2003, p. 13. 24 he failure to purge the visual landscape clearly paralleled the Italian government’s halting eforts at political and bureaucratic epuration; see R.P. Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943-1948, Chapel Hill 1991. 25 «[la rimozione] dei monumenti di fascisti e delle opere d’arte intese a esaltare, atraverso il loro soggeto, le idee e inalità del fascismo». MEN to MI, 4 July 1944, in ACS, PCM, 1944-1947, f. 1.7, n. 11240, sot. 2. 26 «Tale Commissione dovrà tener conto del signiicato politico e del valore artistico dell’opera, della possibilità o meno di rimuoverla o di togliere senza arrecar danno estetico troppo marcato all’assieme edilizio cui essa appartiene, suggerirà eventualmente gli accorgimenti necessari, e (tratandosi di opere di rilevante valore) le modalità per la loro conservazione [...]», ibidem. 27 PCM memo to Prefects, 1 August 1944, in ACS, PCM, 1944-1947, f. 1.7, n. 11240, sot.1. 28 T. Kirk, he Architecture of Modern Italy, New York 2005, II, pp. 143-153. 29 L. Maulsby, Drinking rom the River Lethe: Case del Fascio and the Legacy of Fascism in Postwar Italy in «Future/Anterior» XI (2014), 2, pp. 18-39. 290 Joshua Arthurs times proved impossible to ignore. In 1959, for example, a controversy erupted over the Foro Italico, which had been designated one of the main venues for the Rome Olympics of 196030. Letist parliamentary deputies protested that given the Games’ paciic and internationalist character, it was highly inappropriate to bring them to a venue illed with «apologetic memories of a past that the Italian people and the world’s democratic conscience have condemned»31. It would be an international embarrassment, they claimed, to host the world’s athletes in a monumental complex covered in fasci litori, celebrations of imperial conquest, and slogans like «Duce, we dedicate our youth to you» or «Many enemies, much honor» (igs. 3-4)32. To add insult to injury, many of these emblems and inscriptions had been restored in anticipation of the games, without any thought to their inlammatory content. Passing by the obelisk bearing the Duce’s name (ig. 5), would foreign visitors be forced to conclude that Italians still supported Mussolini? he Christian Democratic government – accused of being “philo-Fascist”, especially as it had been courting support from the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) – countered that revising the site would cost millions, and that if anything, Whoever goes to the Foro Italico and sees the aforementioned inscriptions cannot help but meditate on the risks that men run when they blithely try to inscribe dates and events in marble and bronze, for perpetuity, before these have been judged by history […]. his [Fascist] part is already part of history, and we are convinced that the judgment of history is not, and cannot, be positive, […]. We leave it to dictatorships, […], to silently fear the ghosts of the past, and to atack the stones and marbles that recall this past33. At stake in this debate, then, were contrasting conceptions of Fascist material culture and its signiicance for contemporary society. To its letist critics, the Foro Italico remained a politically and emotionally charged site in the present; its slogans and symbols explicitly championed ideals inimical to the anti-Fascist consensus at the heart of postwar Italian democracy, and their persistence demonstrated that the Christian Democrats still harbored totalitarian inclinations. To the government, on the other hand, the Foro was an artifact of “mere” history, a neutralized relic of a distant era (though, signiicantly, one still within living memory). he let’s complaints were pure political gamesmanship, and any intervention would only serve to reanimate the ghosts of the past. his last concern was seemingly vali30 R.J.B. Bosworth, Rome 1960: Making Sporting History, in «History Today» LX (2010), 8, pp. 18-24; E.M. Modrey, Architecture as a Mode of Self-Representation at the Olympic Games in Rome (1960) and Munich (1972), in «European Review of History» XV (2008), 6, pp. 691-706; V. Vidoto, Il mito di Mussolini e le memorie nazionali. Le trasformazioni del Foro Italico 1937-1960, in Roma. Architetura e cità negli anni della seconda Guerra mondiale: ati della Giornata di studio del 24 gennaio 2003, Roma 2004, pp. 112-121; M. Caporilli, Il Foro Italico e lo Stadio Olimpico. Immagini dalla storia, Roma 1990. 31 «apologetica memoria di un passato che il popolo italiano e la coscienza democratica del mondo hanno condannato». Camera dei Deputati, Ati Parlamentari, 6 October 1959, p. 10612. 32 «Duce a voi dedichiamo la nostra giovinezza», «Molti nemici, molto onore». 33 «Chiunque vada al Foro Italico e veda le iscrizioni in argomento non può non essere indoto a meditare sui rischi che corrono gli uomini quando troppo avventatamente vogliono incidere per l’eternità nei blocchi di marmo o nel bronzo date ed avvenimenti, prima che questi siano stati dimensionati nelle prospetive della storia. [...]. Quel passato è già nella storia e noi siamo convinti che il giudizio della storia su di esso non sia e non possa essere positivo, […]. Noi lasciamo alle ditature, [...], la non confessata paura dei fantasmi del passato e l’accanirsi contro le pietre e contro il marmo che quel passato ricordano», Camera dei Deputati, Ati Parlamentari, cit., pp. 16015-10616. «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» Fig. 3. Marble plaque commemorating the conquest of Ethiopia in May 1936, Foro Italico, Rome (Photo by Author). 291 Fig. 4. Mosaics at the Foro Italico, Rome (Photo by Author). Fig. 5. Mussolini obelisk at the Foro Italico, Rome (Photo by Author). dated when neo-Fascists detonated a bomb near the Palazzo dei Congressi and then staged a protest at the Foro Italico, in which they sang the regime’s anthems, burned red lags, and insisted that that «history cannot be cancelled with a paintbrush or a chisel»34. he solution, when it did arrive, was praised as «Solomonic» by the centrist «La Stampa», dismissed as a cowardly retreat by the Communist «L’Unità», and denounced by MSI deputies as «a serious ofense to history and aesthetics»35. Only two controversial inscriptions would be eliminated: one displaying the Fascist oath, and another criticizing international sanctions during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (the later clearly incompatible with the Olympic spirit). he rest would remain, since, according to the Minister of Tourism Alberto Folchi, they were deemed «historical» rather than «propagandistic», and therefore worthy of preserving for future generations. he removals were carried out at the dead of 34 «La storia non si cancella con il pennello e lo scalpello». Chiassate di missini a Roma per le scrite al Foro Italico, in «La Stampa», 11 August 1960, p. 1. See also R.J.B. Bosworth, Whispering City, cit. 35 «La salomonica decisione», Chiassate di missini, cit., «una grave ofesa alla storia e all’estetica», A. Todisco, Le scrite fasciste cominciano a sparire dai marmi e dai mosaici del Foro Italico, in «La Stampa», 10 August 1960, p. 5. 292 Joshua Arthurs night, to avoid further controversy36. At the same time, three new marble plaques were installed, commemorating the fall of the Fascist regime (ig. 6), the 1946 referendum establishing the Italian Republic, and the new constitution of 1948. While the government’s distinction between “historical” and “propagandistic” remnants of Fascism remains debatable – it is hard not to see most of the Foro’s inscriptions and mosaics as anything other than Fig. 6. Marble plaque commemorating the fall of the regime in July 1943, Foro Italico, Rome (Photo by explicit celebrations of Fascist ideology – the Author). resolution of the Olympics controversy bears all the hallmarks of accommodationism and Fig. 7. Genio dello Sport statue, EUR district, Rome (Photo by Mark Turner, 2010. Creative Commons, adaptability that, according to the anthropolFlickr.com). ogist Michael Herzfeld, reside at the core of 37 Roman civic life . In his view, social relations in the capital tend toward an avoidance of conlict and a «pragmatics of compromise»; this tendency has in turn created an urban landscape consisting of «amnestied architectural infractions»38. Such lexibility is readily apparent in adaptations of Fascist material culture elsewhere in the city. An efective illustration of this approach is the “Genio dello Sport” (Spirit of Sport) statue located outside the Palazzo degli Uici in the EUR district (ig. 7). Created by the sculptor Italo Griselli in 1939, it portrays a young man with his arm raised in the Fascist salute – hence its original name, the “Genio del Fascismo” (Spirit of Fascism). Rather than remove or destroy the statue, local authorities chose adaptation: the statue’s hands were removed and replaced with pugilists’ gloves. With this minor revision, a igure designed to incarnate the values of the regime became a symbol of athletic competition. As the Genio dello Sport suggests, Fascist-era iconography has also survived because of its polyvalence, its capacity to be interpreted in diferent ways by diferent audiences. his lexibility is rendered possible by the regime’s conscious eforts to appropriate familiar historical and aesthetic referents for its own ends. Two examples of this phenomenon are Rione Monti’s World War One memorial and the Garibaldian Ossuary on the Janiculum. he irst (ig. 8), located on the external wall of the church of Santa Maria Madonna dei Monti, 36 37 38 A. Todisco, Le scrite fasciste, cit. M. Herzfeld, Evicted rom Eternity, cit., pp. 175-179. Ibidem, p. 176. «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» 293 features a plaque listing the names of the fallen from this central Roman neighborhood. In this respect, it conforms to standard commemorative practices in the years following the Great War. At the same time, however, the memorial also bears an obvious Fascist imprint: three imperial eagles, three fasci litori (signiicantly, crowned with legionaries’ heads), and, at the top, the large face of an Italian soldier whose identity is unknown but whose clenched jaw and intense expression are clearly meant to echo a physiognomy familiar to all Italians. he second (ig. 9), inaugurated in 1941, is a large structure honoring patriots who died for the cause of Italy during the Roman Republic of 1849 and the siege of the city in 1870; the ossuary holds the remains of Gofredo Mameli, the poet who composed the lyrics of the Italian national anthem. he inscriptions – including the Garibaldian slogan «Roma or Death!» («Roma o morte») – all derive from the Risorgimento, but the presence of an eagle bearing a fascio, as well as the severe neo-classical design, clearly indicate the monument’s origins during the Fascist period. Both the Monti memorial and the Janiculum Ossuary therefore pose the diicult question: to whom do these sites belong? Are they Fascist memorials, or memorials that happen to have been built under Fascism? On the one hand, it is possible to interpret these monuments independently from the circumstances of their creation. For the residents of Monti, the memorial carries a deeply personal and communal resonance: it records the names of fathers, sons and brothers who lost their lives serving the nation. Similarly, the Garibaldian Ossuary commemorates events that occurred more than half a century prior to Mussolini’s ascent to power, and of profound importance to the nation as a whole. On the other hand, both of these sites persist in presenting a distinctly Fascist narrative of the Italian past. From the outset, Mussolini and his followers strove to monopolize the legacies of the Risorgimento and the sacriices of the Great War, presenting themselves as both the inheritors and the ultimate fulillment of the nation’s struggles39. he Monti plaque honors the dead in the name of «Italy, regenerated by the blood of its greatest sons» (a clear reference to the Fascist ideal of regeneration through war), while the Janiculum monument replaces the liberal-democratic universalism of the 1849 Roman Republic with the generic rhetoric of nationalist militarism40. In short, while one should not “read” these memorials as exclusively Fascist, one also cannot ignore the ideological currents that permeate them. A inal illustration of the complexities of Fascist iconography in Rome is the façade of the INA (Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni, National Institute of Insurance) building in piazza Sant’Andrea della Valle (ig. 10). Located next to the busy corso Vitorio Emanuele II, and on the route to the heavily touristed piazza Navona, the otherwise nondescript palazzo features a relief of the Capitoline Lupa (She-Wolf) nursing Romulus and Remus, along with a Latin inscription that reads: «Warlike valor has extended the borders of Italy, and a new beauty is bestowed upon our city»41. To most passers-by – especially, one ima39 C. Fogu, “To Make History”: Garibaldianism and the Formation of a Fascist Historic Imaginary in Making and Remaking Italy: he Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, eds. K. von Henneberg - A. Ascoli, Oxford 2001, pp. 203-240; J. Foot, Italy’s Divided Memory, New York 2009, pp. 31-53. 40 «l’Italia rigenerata dal sangue dei migliori suoi igli». 41 «ITALIAE FINES PROMOVIT BELLICA VIRTUS ET NOVUS IN NOSTA FUNDITUR URBE DECOR». 294 Joshua Arthurs Fig. 8. World War One memorial, Rione Monti, Rome (Photo by Author). Fig. 9. Garibaldian Ossuary, Janiculum, Rome (Photo by «DrMartinus», 2010. Creative Commons, Flickr.com). «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» 295 Fig. 10. INA building, piazza Sant’Andrea della Valle, Rome (Photo by Author). gines, the throngs of tourists – both the She-Wolf and the text can easily be assimilated into the historic landscape of the city, as signiiers of Rome’s classical past. Only those atuned to more recent history (not to mention capable of reading Latin) will recognize that these decorations reference not the glories of the ancient empire, but rather Fascist Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in May 1936 – a fact reinforced by another inscription indicating that the building was completed in 1937, in the «First Year of the Empire»42. Once again, this case is rife with ambiguities and multiple meanings. On one level, it suggests that the regime was successful in constructing its “myth of Rome” (romanità) and appropriating the symbols and aesthetic of classical antiquity. Interwar classicism has proved compatible with the rest of the urban landscape, and therefore today reads as “Roman” more than it does as “Fascist”. On the other, its persistence also suggests a forgeting – both deliberate and inadvertent – of a deeply troubling episode in recent Italian history. he «warlike valor» that «extended Italy’s borders» entailed the slaughter of thousands of Ethiopian civilians, the illegal use of chemical weapons, and the destabilization of international security on the eve of the Second World War. 42 On the remains of modern empire in Italy, see K. von Henneberg, Monuments, Public Space, and the Memory of Empire in Modern Italy in «History and Memory» XVI (2004), 1, pp. 37-85; H. Hyde Minor, Mapping Mussolini: Ritual and Cartography in Public Art during the Second Roman Empire, in «Imago Mundi» LI (1999), 1, pp. 147-162. 296 Joshua Arthurs Taken together, these various examples demonstrate the challenges inherent in confronting an undesirable patrimony. At one point – namely, the immediate atermath of the regime’s collapse and the conclusion of the Second World War – the removal of Fascist symbols could be justiied as a necessary measure, an act of political iconoclasm marking the changing of the guard from dictatorship to democracy. As we have seen, however, this transition was itself highly problematic and incomplete. In the absence of a comprehensive purge, Romans have had to ind other strategies of cohabiting with reminders of an uncomfortable recent past. As we have seen, these have ranged from accommodation, adaptation and forgeting to the periodic ignition of controversy. Today, seventy years ater end of World War Two, these fragile traces have seemingly become permanent ixtures in the iconographic landscape of the Eternal City. Every Balcony is History: he Legacies of Fascist Topography While Rome remains litered with fasci litori, imperial eagles, and she-wolves, Fascism’s deepest and most enduring imprint on the city is topographic and spatial. Over the course of the 1920s and 30s, the regime undertook several massive urban interventions aimed at the “isolation” of monumental sites and the concomitant guting (“sventramento”) of densely inhabited areas in the historic center. he most celebrated and succinct articulation of Roma Mussolinea came from the Duce himself, in a 1925 speech installing the new Governor of Rome: My ideas are clear, my orders are precise. I am certain they will become a concrete reality. Within ive years, Rome must appear as a marvel to all the peoples of the world: vast, ordered, and powerful, as it was during the irst empire of Augustus. Continue to liberate the trunk of the great oak from all that still constrains it. Create space around the mausoleum of Augustus, the theater of Marcellus, the Capitoline, the Pantheon. All that has grown up over the centuries of decadence must disappear. Within ive years, the dome of the Pantheon must be visible from piazza Colonna, through a great passage. Also liberate the majestic temples of Christian Rome from parasitic and profane constructions. he millennial monuments of our history must loom in necessary solitude43. his carving out of «necessary solitude» proved extremely destructive. he new via dell’Impero – the wide boulevard, inaugurated in 1932, that connected piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, by way of the Roman Forum, the Markets of Trajan, and the Imperial Fora – entailed the demolition of 138 buildings across 11 city blocks, over an area of 40,600 square meters44. he aforementioned piazza Augusto Imperatore, completed between 1934 and 43 «Le mie idee sono chiare, i miei ordini sono precisi. Sono certissimo che diventeranno una realtà concreta. Tra cinque anni Roma deve apparire meravigliosa a tute le genti del mondo: vasta, ordinata, potente, come fu ai tempi del primo impero di Augusto. Voi continuerete a liberare il tronco della grande quercia da tuto ciò che ancora l’aduggia. Farete largo atorno all’Augusteo, al teatro di Marcello, al Campidoglio, al Pantheon. Tuto ciò che vi crebbe atorno nei secoli della decadenza, deve scomparire. Entro cinque anni, da piazza Colonna, per un grande varco, deve essere visibile la mole del Pantheon. Voi libererete anche dalle costruzioni parassitarie e profane i templi maestosi della Roma cristiana. I monumenti millenarî della nostra storia devono giganteggiare nella necessaria solitudine». B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, a cura di E. e D. Susmel, Firenze 1951-1978, vol. XXII, p. 48. 44 Report from Governatore Boncompagni Ludovisi to Mussolini, 20 July 1934, in ACS, SPD, CO, b. 1128, f. 509429/2.2. «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» 297 1938, involved the destruction of 120 houses across 27,500 square meters45. Entire neighborhoods were leveled, and over 10,000 inhabitants were displaced to hastily constructed “barracks” on the periphery46. While, as we shall see, these projects were in part motivated by practical concerns over traic circulation and population density, they were also driven by the regime’s desire to dominate public space and create new venues for political spectacle and ritual47. he via dell’Impero would function as a modern via sacra, a procession route for the triumphant Blackshirts; through its juxtaposition of classical remains and modern construction, piazza Augusto Imperatore would make manifest the historic continuities linking Rome’s irst emperor to Italy’s new Duce. Following Fascism’s collapse, critics rushed to condemn this modern-day “sack of Rome”. Mussolini’s regime was accused of monumental myopia, of failing to understand the complex layering of the city’s past and its authentic character. Writing only months ater the war’s conclusion, Valerio Mariani argued that the regime had used Rome as «a laboratory», imposing «colossal scheme» on a small, modest city48. Instead of proceeding with a «deep, thoughtful understanding» of history and architecture, it had blundered ahead with a «pseudo-aesthetic» that inlicted «disastrous and incurable amputations on the living lesh of Rome»49. To Stefano Jacini, these projects «aesthetically [gave] a sense of rhetorical exaggeration, displaying a heavy oicial uniformity completely at odds with local character»50. he novelist Alberto Moravia, a native Roman, concurred that a «small Mediterranean city» had been made «macroscopic and oicial»; Fascism had treated the capital «in an entirely supericial way, as was its habit, as a spectacular and ‘historic’ backdrop for parades, rallies, processions, the dictator’s speeches, commemorations, and other similar exhibits and ceremonies»51. Such criticisms conformed to the dominant anti-Fascist narrative in the early postwar decades, which presented Fascism as theatrical, megalomaniacal, and devoid of rational thought and ideological content – a sham regime presided over by a «Sawdust Caesar». In turn, Rome’s historical landscape was oten blamed for the regime’s rhetorical excesses: […] On Rome’s marvelous stage, with the Colosseum as backdrop and the dense forest of arches, columns, and towers on the wings, all supporting actors disappear, and a lead actor is required, the most fashionable tenor. In Rome, every balcony is history, every road bears imprints of famous footsteps, every building still echoes with illustrious voices, the piazzas are too vast to allow subdued and humble speeches; one either yells and gesticulates or runs 45 ibidem. I. Insolera - F. Perego, Archeologia e cità. Storia moderna dei Fori di Roma, Roma 1983, pp. 149-161. 47 In addition to works cited above, see E. Gentile, he Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, Cambridge, MA 1996. 48 «Un mòdulo colossale […] Roma fu il campo sperimentale». V. Mariani, Come ricostruiremo le nostre cità? in «L’Indice», 4 August 1945, n.p. 49 «Ma ahimè, troppo tardi ci avvediamo di quanto avrebbe giovato una conoscenza approfondita e intelligente di quei periodi […] per evitare le sciagurate e insanabili amputazioni inferte nelle carni vive di Roma», ibidem. 50 «esteticamente danno un senso di retorica goniezza, rivelano una pesante uniformità uiciale a tuto scapito delle carateristiche locali». S. Jacini, Il regime fascista, Milano 1947, n.p. 51 «una piccola cità mediterranea […] [il regime tratò] Roma come capitale in una maniera del tuto esteriore, secondo il suo solito, cioè come uno sfondo spetacolare e ‘storico’ per parate, adunate, silate, discorsi del ditatore, commemorazioni, e altre simili esibizioni e cerimonie […] macroscopico e uiciale.» A. Moravia, Introduzione. Delusione di Roma in Contro Roma, a cura di F. Colombo, Milano 1975, pp. 7-18 (7-8). 46 298 Joshua Arthurs the risk of not even being noticed […]. he tradition of Rome is completely theatrical, made of large gestures and wide rolls of the toga52. Notwithstanding the widespread criticism of Fascist urban planning, it is notable that the postwar decades witnessed few atempts to revise the regime’s interventions in the capital. If anything, administrations continued on the trajectory established in the 1920s and 30s. he 1962 master plan for the city (Piano regolatore generale, PRG) did not depart substantially from schemes devised under Mussolini (the PRG of 1931 and the Variante Generale of 1941)53. he Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR), a new district on Rome’s southern periphery, had originally been envisioned as the site of a 1942 universal exposition celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Fascism’s rise to power. he project was abandoned because of the war, but revived in the early 1950s and completed almost entirely according to the regime’s original vision – including an austere neo-classicism whose provenance was hard to mistake (igs. 11 and 12)54. As we have already seen with the Foro Italico, the 1960 Olympic Games – considered Rome’s (and Italy’s) “re-launch” on the international stage – relied heavily on infrastructure dating from the Fascist period. he continuities between interwar and postwar approaches to Rome’s urban fabric can be atributed to a number of factors. First, planners in both periods faced nearly identical challenges: an ancient, densely packed urban core; a population boom driven by immigration from other regions of Italy (and, more recently, from other countries), and consequently a shortage of afordable housing; and the pressure to expand peripheral areas, especially toward Ostia and the coast55. Indeed, these same dilemmas had confronted city authorities at least as far back as 1870, when Rome was designated as the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy. Many Fascist-era initiatives had been anticipated in earlier decades, in some cases going back to the Napoleonic and late Papal periods. For example, a road linking piazza Venezia with the Colosseum – what would ultimately become via dell’Impero – was envisioned several times over the course of the nineteenth century, and included in the master plans of 1873, 1883 and 1909; the isolation of the mausoleum of Augustus was similarly projected as early as 1909. To an extent, then, the construction of Roma Mussolinea must be situated within the longue durée of the capital’s urban modernization. While the spaces created by the regime certainly had a propagandistic function, they were also meant to respond to the exigencies of what was becoming a major European metropolis. his modernizing impulse – what 52 G. Mosca, La gloriosa palla, Milano 1945, pp. 35-36. «Sulla meravigliosa ribalta di Roma, che ha per fondale il Colosseo e per quinte la più ita selva d’archi, di colonne e di torri che si conosca, i comprimari spariscono, occorre il primo atore, il tenore di grido. A Roma ogni balcone è storico, ogni strada reca impronte di celebri passi, ogni ediicio echeggia ancora di voci illustri, le piazze sono troppo vaste per ammetere discorsi sobri e sommessi: o si urla e si gesticola o si corre il rischio di non essere nemmeno notati [...]. La tradizione di Roma è tuta teatrale, fata di gesti larghi e di ampi avvolgimenti di toga». For more discussion of postwar anti-Romanism, see J. Arthurs, he Eternal Parasite: Anti-Romanism in Italian Politics and Culture since 1870 in «Annali d’Italianistica» XXVIII (2010), 1, pp. 117-136. 53 P. Avarello, L’urbanizzazione in Roma del Duemila, a cura di L. De Rosa, Roma 2000, pp. 159-202. 54 M. Sanfilippo, La costruzione di una capitale. Roma 1945-1991, Cinisello Balsamo 1994, pp. 77-79. 55 On long-term continuities in Roman urban planning, see I. Insolera, Roma moderna. Un secolo di storia urbanistica 18701970, Torino 1993. «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» 299 Fig. 11. Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, EUR district, Rome (Photo by Sebastian Baryli, 2011 Creative Commons, Flickr.com). Fig. 12. Bas-relief of Mussolini, Palazzo degli Uici, EUR district, Rome (Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, 2011. Creative Commons, Flickr.com). the regime oten termed boniica (reclamation or valorization) – has been increasingly identiied as evidence of “positive” or “productive” currents within Fascism. For example, many commentators (predominantly on the right, but also including voices on the let) have cited the draining and setlement of the Pontine Marshes outside Rome as one of the regime’s crowning achievements56. Similarly, architectural projects initiated by Mussolini’s regime are oten celebrated as expressions of interwar modernism. To Pier Luigi Porzio, the buildings of the EUR should not be demonized as artifacts of a totalitarian dictatorship, but rather understood as the product of «the historical development of Italian architecture between the two wars: an evocative, complex, contradictory phenomenon, perhaps dramatic in certain respects, but indisputably a relection of tendencies within European culture at that time»57. he historian Angelo D’Orsi has called for Italians «to recognize that, in the 56 A. Pennacchi, Fascio e martello. Viaggio per le cità del duce, Roma 2008. «un processo storico dell’architetura italiana fra le due guerre; fenomeno suggestivo, complesso, contraditorio, forse per molti aspeti drammatico, ma indiscutibilmente specchio di una tendenza riscontrabile nella cultura europea del momento»; P.L. Porzio, L’E 42. Ragioni di una tutela, in E 42. Utopia e scenario del regime, Catalogo della Mostra di Roma, Archivio 57 300 Joshua Arthurs years between the two wars, there was for the irst time in Italy – for beter and for worse – a political promotion of culture […] it shouldn’t be abandoned to damnatio memoriae or to the destruction that time and men inevitably tend to produce»58. he impracticality of undoing the regime’s major urban planning initiatives, as well as their reappraisal as expressions of twentieth-century modernism, have meant that many sites once identiied with Fascism have come to be seen as indispensable elements of Rome’s topography. he paradigmatic case is once again via dell’Impero, which in the early postwar period was given the more archaeological name of via dei Fori Imperiali. For decades, the street has been celebrated as the Roman equivalent to Paris’ Champs-Élisées, a long monumental boulevard through the heart of the city (ig. 13). As Vitorio Vidoto has noted, the road is now regularly used as a parade route for state funerals and national holidays of the Italian Republic, including April 25th, which marks the defeat of Nazi-Fascism and the victory of the Resistance59. It remains one of the capital’s busiest thoroughfares, both because of its appeal to tourists and its role connecting the historic center to the city’s southern quarters. Given its continued importance to the low of daily life in Rome, it is tempting to consider via dell’Impero/dei Fori Imperiali one of the regime’s most important and enduring achievements. Whether they realize it or not, contemporary visitors are experiencing the archaeological heart of the Eternal City precisely as Mussolini intended: ruins are presented in their «necessary solitude», no longer encumbered by the «parasitic and profane constructions» of later centuries. It has only been comparatively recently that Roman authorities have atempted to revise the layout imposed by Fascism on the city’s historical core. Since the 1970s, environmentalists and preservationists have become increasingly aware of the negative efects of car exhaust on the Colosseum, Roman Forum, and other ancient monuments along via dei Fori Imperiali. Several proposals have been advanced over the years to turn the road into a pedestrian zone, but the logistical obstacles to implementation have proved impossible to overcome. In the buildup to the Holy Jubilee in 2000, the city government began excavating portions of the imperial fora that had been paved during the original construction; in 2013, the road was closed to private vehicles60. Similar revisions have been made to piazza Augusto Imperatore, which even during Fascist period was seen by many as an eyesore. In 2006, the city inaugurated the new Ara Pacis museum, designed by the American architect Richard Meier; the project was one of several (also including the MAXXI museum designed by Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano’s Parco della Musica) that enlisted globally renowned architects to bring modern design to the Eternal City. Even prior to its completion, Meier’s plan was met with stern resistance, both from architectural traditionalists – who objected Centrale dello Stato, aprile-maggio 1987, II, Urbanistica, architetura, arte e decorazione, a cura di M. Calvesi - E. Guidoni - S. Lux, Roma 1987, pp. 197-199 (199). 58 «riconoscere che, negli anni tra le due guerre, c’è stata - nel bene e nel male - per la prima volta in Italia una politica della cultura [...] non è da abbandonare alla damnatio memoriae o alla distruzione che l’accoppiata tempo/uomini tende inevitabilmente a produrre». A. D’Orsi, Cità nuove rendite vecchie, in «La Stampa», 23 September 2008, p. 10. 59 V. Vidoto, I luoghi del fascismo a Roma, in «Dimensioni e Problemi della Ricerca Storica» II (2005), pp. 39-51 (46). 60 P. Singley, Fascism under Erasure: A Proposal for the Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome, in «Log» VIII (2006), 1, pp. 143-151. «Voleva essere Cesare, morì Vespasiano» 301 Fig. 13. Via dei Fori Imperiali, Rome (Photo by Francesco Federico, 2008. Creative Commons, Flickr.com). to a modernist imposition in the historic center – and from elements of the extreme right, who (as with the Foro Italico in 1960) protested the «erasure» of recent history. In 2008, the city’s new mayor – Gianni Alemanno, a member of rightist Alleanza Nazionale, with a background in neo-Fascist organizations – pledged to dismantle what he deemed a «monstrosity»61. Although this threat was never carried out (and Alemanno eventually lost his seat), the episode once again demonstrates the periodic tendency for controversies to lare up over the physical traces of the Ventennio. Yet, as the recent changes to via dei Fori Imperiali and piazza Augusto Imperatore suggest, any disruption to the regime’s original vision of Roma Mussolinea will not likely be the result of political iconoclasm. Instead, it will be because of more contemporary forces like ecological imperatives, the demands of the tourist industry, and the changing nature of the global economy62. Rome’s “promiscuous stratigraphy” does not stay still: the remnants of the Fascist era will not always be the most recent layer of the city’s history, and like the monuments of emperors and popes, it too will eventually become just another part of the urban palimpsest. 61 F. Frischia, An e l’Ara Pacis senza pace: Alemanno, visita con Sgarbi, in «Il Corriere della Sera», 20 May 2006, p. 5; Alemanno, sicurezza e sviluppo “E via la teca dell’Ara Pacis”, in «la Repubblica», 30 April 2008. 62 On the prospects for new construction in Rome, see S. Brandolini, Rome: New Architecture, Milano 2008. 302 Joshua Arthurs Conclusion he present contribution has surveyed many manifestations of Roma Mussolinea, and attempted to account for the persistence and continued resonance of Fascist material culture in contemporary Italy. At various points, I have ofered diferent ways of understanding this phenomenon. Fascism’s presence in the built environment has variously been presented as symptomatic of a larger failure to “come to terms with the past” and confront the ghosts of the Ventennio; as evidence of Rome’s ininite capacity to absorb, appropriate, and accommodate the products of human history; as an expression of the polyvalence of political iconography; and an artifact of larger processes of urban modernization and transformation. While some of these explanations may seem at odds with one another, I argue that taken together, they demonstrate the complex, controversial, and even contradictory politics of urban space and iconography in the Eternal City. he fate of Roma Mussolinea will never be setled, and will continue to evolve just as Rome itself will be re-imagined and remade by future generations. Joshua Arthurs Associate Professor of History West Virginia University