Fascist Italy

In PBSR 88 (2020)
Ephemeral architecture was the antithesis of the permanent buildings typical of the 'Fascism of stone', and yet many architects took advantage of this paradox to create an imaginary Rome. A widespread use of ephemeral structures was made around 1938, during the Mostra Augustea della Romanità and Hitler's state visit to Italy, in order to support a political programme that marked the totalitarian turn in the Fascist regime after the foundation of the empire and aimed at strengthening the alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Relying on methodologies of particular relevance to Roman art history and on various sources unknown to date, this paper investigates the relationships between ephemeral architecture and romanità. The case study is a monumental tribune built in via dei Trionfi that inevitably suffered a damnatio memoriae: a combination of classicizing and futuristic decorations, it looked back at ancient Rome and, at the same time, highlighted the Fascist regime's aspirations for might and modernity.

(research article) The first British cultural institute on foreign soil was founded in Florence in 1917. However, it was the creation of the British Council in London in 1935 that marked the beginning of the strengthening of the British cultural presence abroad. The aim of this drive was to promote knowledge of British culture and civic and political life overseas, to defend national prestige and, given the escalating expansionist policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, to encourage the preservation of dialogue between the major European powers, underpinned by democratic principles. Bridging a gap in research into the relationship between Italy and Great Britain in the interwar period, this article reconstructs the case study of British cultural diplomacy in Florence between 1922 and Mussolini's declaration of war, analysing how British culture was used in politics and propaganda and investigating the relationship of the management of both the British Institute of Florence and the British Council with Fascism. In doing so, it offers original insight into British history and the country's cultural institutions in Fascist Italy, and into the wider field of Anglo-Italian political and cultural relations during the period of dictatorship in Italy.

This paper analyzes some of the longest shadows that the Spanish Civil War casted
on the international arena in reference to Francoist Spain between 1939 and 1953. First
of all, it studies the importance in the survival of Franco’s regime of what in the text are
called non-interventions of great powers at two crucial moments in the history of the
regime: the Spanish Civil War itself and the period between 1945 and 1947–1948. The
first non-intervention ended up favouring Franco’s victory and harming the Republic.
The second implied the imposition of sanctions against Spain, but it never proposed a
proactive action in order to put an end to the dictatorship as a corollary of the victory
against the Axis. This paper also looks at the continuation until 1944 of the close relations
that Francoist Spain held with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the years
1936–1939, being one of its most important manifestations —but not the only one—
its attempt to participate in World War II alongside the Axis.

Edited by Helen Roche, Cambridge University and Kyriakos Demetriou, University of Cyprus

The first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships.
The memory of the past is a powerful tool to justify policy and create consensus, and, under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the legacy of classical antiquity was often evoked to promote thorough transformations of Italian and German culture, society, and even landscape. At the same time, the classical past was constantly recreated to fit the ideology of each regime.

This article explores the way in which wine came to be viewed as a quintessentially ‘Italian’ beverage among Italy's middle- and upper-class households during fascism's twenty years in power. Due to significant increases in wine consumption among the labouring classes during the years immediately following the First World War, wine, as a general category of beverage, had become closely associated within the minds of many bourgeois and wealthy consumers with the country's popular taverns and saloons, alcoholism and physical and moral ‘degeneration.’ In response, fascist Italy's typical wine growers, merchants and industrialists worked feverishly to rehabilitate the beverage's downtrodden reputation via a series of wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns during the 1920s and 1930s. By promoting the beverage's hygienic and alimentary qualities, as well as systematically intertwining the moderate consumption of the peninsula's standardised wines with the dictatorship's nationalisation and popular mobilisation programmes, this article will show, the Industrial Wine Lobby successfully re-established ‘wine's honour’ and, simultaneously, recontextualised the country's typical wines as Italy's wholesome, family-friendly, ‘national beverage’.

Between the World Wars French Jews looked upon Italy, despite it being in the hands of fascism, as the cradle of a true model for integration. However, the rise of perils elsewhere shattered all convictions and this ‘Italian moment’ gave way to the bitterest desillusion.


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Bien que timidement abordée dans certains travaux universitaires, la « love migration » ou « migration d’amour » des migrants italiens « ensablés » en Abyssinie n’a jamais été étudiée ou explorée dans sa complexe diversité en lien avec l’agir migrant. Les trois principaux songes coloniaux reposaient sur es espoirs de liberté, d’enrichissement et d’assouvissement de phantasmes exotiques. Aussi, cette colonisation hâtive et brève (1936-1941) a engendré un nombre considérable d’espoirs tant pour les engagés volontaires que pour es appelés du contingent. Cet article analyse les différents visages de cette
migration italienne qui seront abordés sous l’angle d’un projet migratoire
en rapport étroit avec les destins maritaux, affectifs ou sexuels des ensablés n Éthiopie après la perte de l’Empire d’Afrique orientale (Impero dell’Africa Orientale Italiana).

This essay is the second preliminary version of a paper that I intend to publish as an article in an architectural-historical journal or a relevant collection of papers.
This article is about the urban project of the ‘Esposizione Universale di Roma’ (also known as EUR or E42), the ‘city’ that was created to stage the World’s fair of 1942 in Rome under the fascist regime of dictator Benito Mussolini. (fig.1) Much has already been written about it, in particular about its architectural style, but I believe that I can contribute some new ideas as to its original urbanistic design. I have three new hypotheses, which are interconneted and rather speculative in character. The first is that the whole layout was oriented on Mussolini’s residence. The second is that it was also oriented on Tunis or the ancient city of Carthage. And the third is that the whole project for the universal exposition was secretly meant for the (symbolical) honouring of the ‘Duce’ and his imperial ambitions, and that under the guise of peaceful international cooperation it was in a sense a trap for the international community to implicitly contribute to these imperial ambitions.
Unfortunately, I am not able to substantiate my arguments with hard evidence, but I wil try to make them plausible by circumstantial evidence and comparison. If there is any truth in my ideas, they demonstrate that the plan for E42 was even more megalomanic than it already appeared to be and that the aspect of personality cult of the leader was even stronger than it already seemed.

This article examines film consumption within the Fascist empire of Italian East Africa (1936–1941). In dialogue with recent scholarship exploring social and cultural aspects of the Italian presence in the Horn of Africa, it draws on original archival research to investigate the stories, theories and practices underpinning the Fascist intervention. The implementation of itinerant screening by state authorities as well as the organization of distribution, censorship and consump- tion’s spaces concerning movie theatres will be interpreted within a broad critical framework, which will highlight the impact of the Fascist intervention in the field of colonial culture compared with previous or coeval experiences and projects of film consumption in Africa. Analysis reveals the difficulties in arranging a racially segregated cinematic experience and the related imperfect level of Fascistization of the imperial society, in part because the Fascist empire was short-lived and, especially in Ethiopia, it was constantly threatened by local resistance. However, the article argues that the substantial failure of the Fascistization of film consumption primarily stems from the unsuccessful rela- tionship that Fascism established with pre-existing theatre owners. It also reveals how the transnational nature of film practices de facto inhibited their seamless adaptation to the Fascist’s imperial agenda.

L’uso politico dell’analogia storica è stato tra i principali strumenti utilizzati dal regime fascista per fabbricare e alimentare il consenso: attraverso una propaganda capillare, realizzata con la collaborazione del mondo della cultura e ricorrendo a tutti i mezzi di comunicazione dell’epoca, la storia, durante il Ventennio, contribuì a confermare la necessità della nascita del fascismo. La figura di Mussolini venne in questo modo innestata in una rappresentazione unitaria dell’intera vicenda italiana, di cui egli portava a compimento, perfezionandole, le tendenze più profonde.
Il volume intende restituire la complessità di un fenomeno non solo culturale ma anche politico e identitario, le cui tracce sono giunte talvolta fino a noi.
https://edizioni.sns.it/prodotto/il-fascismo-e-la-storia/

Under Italian Fascism, film directors used East African marketplaces as backdrops to construct racist depictions of blackness.  Borrowing the then-new term for illicit commerce, they called these spaces "black markets." 

This article investigates East African marketplace films to trace the developmental arc and varieties of Italian Fascist racism in empire.  Totalling over 70 in number, these bantam adventures in souks and bazaars were among the most popular formats for 1930s newsreels purporting to document daily life in the colonies. The short documentary-style films were produced by LUCE, the cinematic arm for state-run propagandistic projects. Like many of the films produced by this larger cinematic body, marketplace newsreels cast Italian technology in starring roles. Tractors and sewing machines frame Italian as modernizing heroes. By focusing on visual and acoustic examples, the article examines the markets of propaganda through a sensory focus. Ultimately, this approach intertwines two modes of inquiry: the history of East African architecture and urbanism, and Fascist Italian empire film.

Balázs Juhász shows how two governments, those of Italy and Hungary, ended up collaborating to develop modern control of their citizens and avoid potential risks to national security in the interwar period. The collaboration was initially all about containing the Bolshevik threat against the two governments, but, as illustrated by a document dated 1939, they widely surpassed the goals that were originally set. The chapter examines the threats, methods and collaborations that ultimately determined the pre-World War II situation.

The first motorized crossing of the Sahara Desert from the Italian Royal Geographical Society in 1937. Focusing on the breakdowns, mishaps, and miscommunications involved in this crossing, Mariani uses the figure of interruption to explore the attempt at, and resistance to, making the desert into a colonized, traversed space. From this exploration, Mariani expands the definition of miscommunication from the fields of media and communication studies and offers a way to conceptualize this phenomenon in several types of transmission, whether this involves physical travel or the transmission of information

A biography of intellectual emigration and exile from Fascist Italy, with photos, maps and timeline of movements, emigrated family members, reference and support networks http://intellettualinfuga.fupress.com/en//scheda/giuseppe-josipmedshiboshski/1487,
in the bilingual website "Intellectuals Displaced from Fascist Italy. Migrants, Exiles and Refugees Fleeing for Political and Racial Reasons" http://intellettualinfuga.fupress.com/en.
A Russian Jew, a political exile for suspected anti-tsarist activities, he was among those who had been in Italy for twenty years when the race laws were published, which obliged foreign Jews to leave Italian territories if they had arrived after 1919. When, however, he was removed from the doctors' professional register, he waged a legal battle to continue to treat his patients. And he lost it, of course, even stung by the complaints of certain colleagues who felt damaged, they said, by «competition» from a Jew, who moreover had no Italian citizenship.
A cultured man, he taught Russian language and literature at the University of Florence. He did so free of charge, for over ten years, for the benefit of the young people of the country where he had chosen to live with his family.

This article surveys the existing literature on the occupation policy Italy conducted in Southeastern Europe during the Second World War. The whole subject was largely neglected by scholars of contemporary Italian history up to the 1990s, but in the last twenty years a consistent flow of studies has begun to appear. The reasons for the previous disregard of the topic and, now, the growing interest in it are investigated in the first part of this article. The second part focuses on work done in recent years. It evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of this new literature, and maps out a series of a blank spots that should be addressed by future research.

In Rommel’s Rear: War Crimes, Colonial Mass Violence and the Persecution of
Jews in North Africa, 1940-1943 – Conventional wisdom holds that the Desert
War was an honorably fought and dispassionate war with no Gestapo, persecuted
civilians, or ruined homes. No doubt the fighting in North Africa was marked by
acts of generosity and humanity towards the enemy. However, this is only one
side of the coin. As I will show on the basis of new archival findings in seven
countries and a critical reassessment of the existing literature, in the shadow of
El Alamein, both sides committed serious atrocities against enemy soldiers and
civilians. While it is certainly true that the level of violence was lower than in
Eastern Europe, the North African Campaign was anything but a war without
hate. There were numerous intentional crimes and infringements of the rules of
conduct, including the ill- treatment and murder of captured enemy soldiers; the
plunder of the indigenous population; the rape of local women; as well as the
exploitation, murder, and mass detainment in concentration camps of Arabs,
Berbers, and Jews, which was often motivated by racial and anti-Semitic hatred.
Thus, the Desert War has to be recontextualized and put into the larger historical
frameworks that shaped WWII and, more broadly, the first half of the 20th
century. Conceptually, I reconnect the North African Campaign to the overarching
policies and prevailing ideologies of both the Axis and Allied regimes and
their societies. In particular, I show that much of the war violence that we see in
North Africa resulted from two major factors: the colonial context in which the
fighting took place, and the simple yet too often ignored fact that on the Axis side
the war was waged by fascist regimes that shared the violent vision of creating
racially pure societies. Thus, the Desert War has to be seen for what it actually
was: an integral part of the World War II experience which itself was inextricably
linked to the Axis powers’ imperial drive for “living space” and their murderous
biopolitics.

This article describes the preparation and execution of mass rallies in Italy’s province of Istria, which had marked the beginning and the end of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (October 1935 – May 1936). The events were organized throughout Italy, where millions of Italians assembled in public spaces in order to listen to the speeches of Benito Mussolini. On October 2nd 1935, the regime organized a “General Assembly of the Forces of the Regime” during which the beginning of the war had been announced, while on May 5th and May 9th 1936 the victory and proclamation of the Empire was celebrated. Based on the presentation of these events via the writings of the official regime, the regime-affiliated press and confidential documents, the paper discusses the main organizational and ideological features
of the mass rallies, with an emphasis on the manner in which the Fascist authorities prepared them and the way they were presented in the press. Modern historiography regards the Ethiopian War and the assemblies that accompanied it to be the pinnacle of the consensus given by the Italian people to the Fascist regime.

The vast majority of the force employed by the Italians to crush local resistance in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was composed of Libyans, Eritreans and Ethiopians. The article examines why the Italians came to rely so heavily on colonial soldiers. It highlights two key predicaments the Italians faced: how to contend with the social, economic and political repercussions that military recruitment for the counter-insurgency created in East Africa; and the extent to which they could depend on forces raised in Libya itself. Finally, the article offers an initial assessment of how the counter-insurgency exacerbated tensions between Libyans and East Africans.

In 1935 the Third International established that far from being a revolutionary movement, fascism was in fact the final stage of the imperialism of monopoly capital. Ever since, generations of Marxist historians have argued that fascism - and particularly the two regimes in Italy and Germany - was the product, either directly or indirectly, of capitalist interests. The major industrialists of Italy and Germany in particular have been indicted for their support of fascism in its earliest, pre-regime form.
This paper will present a critical analysis of the relationship between industrialists and the early fascist movements during their formative, pre-regime years in Italy and Germany. The paper challenges the Marxist argument that postulates fascism as the final stage of capitalism and 'Big Business' as the paymasters of fascism. A comparative analysis of the variety, manner and timing of financial support by industrialists in both Italy and Germany will underscore the weakness of the Marxist case, as will a brief examination of fascist ideology and its relationship to capitalism.

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.