Fascist Italy

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 contribution focuses on the archival resources and special collections available in music libraries and archives (in and outside Italy), which are of interest for the study of Fascist persecution against Jewish musicians, composers, singers, and music critics, both Italian and foreigners.

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.

"""""During Mussolini’s fascist regime, the Atlante internazionale del Touring Club Italiano – produced in Milan (1927-1938) and widely recognised far beyond the borders of Italy – included among its plates two maps of European ethnic groups. The makers of the TCI’s atlas passed on to us a specific approach to determine the kind of collective that ought to be considered an ethnic group.
The enigmatic second reprint of the fifth edition (1938) was inexplicably not accompanied by the symbolic features required by the fascist authorities, but, after World War II started, the new version of the “Europa etnografica” map – on a 1:12.000.000 scale – clearly showed the changes that occurred in the political context.
Link:
http://www.j-reading.org/index.php/geography/article/view/57/50"""""

L’autore tratta i legami tra l’invasione italiana dell’Etiopia nel 1935 – 1936 e la regione Venezia Giulia attraverso gli articoli pubblicati sull’Istra, foglio zagabrese degli emigranti giuliani di nazionalità croata e slovena nel Regno di Jugoslavia. Nel contributo sono esaminati i riflessi della guerra nella Venezia Giulia e la loro influenza sulla vita quotidiana dei Croati e degli Sloveni di questa regione. Il giornale riportava notizie riguardo la chiamata alle armi per la guerra d’Etiopia, la partenza dei lavoratori alla volta dell’Africa orientale, il diffuso fenomeno delle diserzioni dei soldati di nazionalità croata e slovena dall’esercito italiano e la repressione di stato che per le necessità della censura bellica colpiva le popolazioni slave locali. L’Istra riferiva anche dei casi di morte di soldati sloveni e croati dell’esercito italiano in Africa e pubblicava le rare lettere non censurate dal fronte. Gli scritti antifascisti e antibellici dell’Istra avevano come scopo di omogeneizzare e risvegliare politicamente le coscienze dei propri lettori, gli emigranti nel Regno di Jugoslavia.

Mediterranean Empires of the Interwar Period:
Geopolitics, Biopolitics, Chronopolitics
International workshop of the DFG-Network “The Modern Mediterranean: Dynamics of a World Region, 1800-2000”, organised by Patrick Bernhard, Manuel Borutta and Fernando Esposito in cooperation with the German Historical Institute Rome and the Ecole Française de Rome, March 18- 21.2019.

This interdisciplinary contribution explores the reality of the air war in the port cities of Liguria that were most heavily bombed between 1940 and 1945: Savona, Genoa and La Spezia, and their surrounding provinces. Bordering with France and full of industries, shipyards, naval bases and crowded ports, Liguria became an important military objective and was subject to massive damage. Despite the rhetorical declarations of the General Direction of Fine Arts about the efficacy of the protection of works of art, and despite the regime’s propaganda, the war declaration and the following air raids took both local authorities and superintendents completely by surprise. This article examines the experience of bombing in Liguria during three major phases: first, 1940-1942, when the British raids concentrated on the industrial areas of
Genoa, Savona and Vado Ligure; second, from the autumn of 1942 to the Italian surrender of September 1943, when “area bombing” extended the aggression to civilian morale and provoked
vast damage to the monuments of the city centre of Genoa in particular; and finally, between the autumn of 1943 and the summer of 1944, when the raids targeted marshalling yards, railway lines and bridges in order to obstruct German supplies, which resulted in continuous attacks for the smaller towns along the coast.

Keywords:WorldWar II, Liguria, AirWar, Bombing

Questo contributo interdisciplinare esplora la realtà della guerra aerea nelle città portuali della Liguria più pesantemente investite dai bombardamenti tra il 1940 e il 1945: Savona, Genova
e La Spezia e le loro provincie. Confinante con la Francia e ricca di industrie, cantieri marittimi, basi navali e porti affollati, la Liguria divenne un importante obiettivo bellico e subì danni ingenti. Malgrado le dichiarazioni retoriche della Direzione generale delle arti circa l’efficacia dei provvedimenti di tutela delle opere d’arte, e malgrado la noncuranza con cui la radio di regime ignorava gli eventi, la dichiarazione di guerra e i bombardamenti che seguirono colsero le autorità locali e le soprintendenze totalmente impotenti. Questo articolo esamina l’esperienza dei bombardamenti in Liguria durante tre diverse fasi: quella delle incursioni britanniche sull’Italia settentrionale nel 1940-42 (con obiettivo le aree industriali di Genova, Savona e Vado Ligure); quella dei bombardamenti “a tappeto” (dall’ottobre 1942 fino all’armistizio del settembre 1943), che estesero l’attacco al “morale” delle popolazioni civili e procurarono danni enormi al patrimonio edilizio e monumentale soprattutto del centro storico di Genova; e
quella delle incursioni, tra l’autunno del 1943 e l’estate del 1944, sui nodi ferroviari, ferrovie e ponti per impedire i rifornimenti tedeschi, che si abbatterono sulle città minori e sui paesi
lungo la costa. L’articolo esamina i sistemi protettivi attuati dal regime per proteggere civili e monumenti, le conseguenze delle incursioni e le reazioni della popolazione civile.

Parole chiave: Seconda Guerra Mondiale, Liguria, guerra aerea, bombardamenti

Articolo con un breve studio incentrato sulla scuola elementare rurale di Ruscio (Monteleone di Spoleto - PG) negli anni ’30 del XX secolo. Lo scritto è nato in affiancamento della pubblicazione di una foto della famiglia De Angelis che presenta una parte di insegna lignea con l’emblema dell’Ente scuole dei contadini, ideato da Duilio Cambellotti. Il testo è stato pubblicato su "La barrozza", notiziario quadrimestrale dell'Associazione Pro Ruscio, anno XXV, n. 1, Cesvol Editore, Perugia, Primavera 2016.

Bartók’s status as an antifascist hero is a myth of our age. To retrace its origins represents a way to discover the values that we associate with modernist music and to understand the reasons that justify the persistence of this myth today. In this article I focus on the “acute bartókitis” that affected Italian culture in the aftermath of the Second World War: a far reaching artistic movement that, perhaps for the first time, prioritised the political and moral values of Bartók’s music and elected his figure as a symbol of the anti-fascist resistance and the reconstruction of the Italian nation.
Although less studied in comparison with other contexts of reception, the Italian Bartókian Wave provides a deep insight into the nature of the Bartók myth by bonding together the faith in the political power of modernist music and the hope in the cultural resistance of the people against tyranny.

In the political and social doctrine “The Ideology of Twentieth Century” the fascist leader Benito Mussolini expresses his view about the aims of the Fascist government with impressive but indirect way: “The Fascist State express the will to exercise power and command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical. An imperial nation, that is to say, a nation which directly or indirectly is the leader of others can exist without the need of
conquering a single mile of territory…” (Griffin, 1998, p. 256). It is very difficult to define clearly what were the exact aims of the Mussolini’s fascist government, and it is difficult to speak about all these aims in one paper, but based on the Mussolini’s thought where we examine in the sources and historical facts we should argue that the substantial aims of the Fascist government were to establish common imperialistic thought which would ensure the militaristic, popularly supported, centralized, and internationally recognized Hegemon State. In order to fulfill these objectives, the Fascist state implemented complex internal and external strategy which we will examine below.

The article announces the rediscovery of a series of objects that were part of Mussolini’s own collection of propaganda art, seized by the Italian authorities after WW2. They were originally held in Mussolini's hilltop retreat near his hometown of Predappio, the small fortress of the Rocca delle Caminate, and in the nearby Villa Carpena located on the outskirts of the city of Forlì. They were found in the storage room of the Archivio di Stato of Forlì and the author was able to identify them on the basis of unpublished documents from the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome.

During the Second World War, the Vichy government published many of the same antisemitic laws in Tunisia as it did in the metropole. But in Tunisia, the ‘Jewish Question’ also became a question of maintaining control over the French Empire. Vichy racial legislation aimed at the Protectorate’s multinational Jewish population did not only reflect the state’s antisemitic policies; rather, these laws were inextricably bound up in France’s colonial rivalry with Italy. In a colony where French political and economic hegemony had been only tenuously secured in the preceding decades through strategic naturalization, Vichy racial laws presented French authorities with a radically new avenue to consolidate power in the Protectorate; however, they also threatened to upend Tunisia’s economy and provoke Italian intervention. This article explores how the frequently-delayed and often partial application of Vichy anti-Jewish laws in Tunisia resulted from the difficulties of reconciling the aims of economic aryanization with the exigencies of protecting French rule against the pretensions of Fascist Italy.

For a copy of the paper, click the link above or visit http://jch.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/11/0022009414542537.abstract

Tripartite Naval relations have been analysed mainly from the Japanese and German perspectives. At least from 1937, Fascist Italy developed strategic expectations of naval cooperation with Japan that continued up to 1942. I discussed these topics in my paper "The Italian Navy and Japan: strategy and hopes (1937-1942)" at the annual conference of the Second World War Research Group (London 22-23 June 2017). Here is the Conference presentation related to my paper.

More info at https://www.swwresearch.com/events

Conference program at https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/077726_bc5fb78c9b6a4b21bf0add0a62b1d2d8.pdf

In 1934, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime firmly intervened in the delicate issues stemming from the crisis of Italian cinema and the shaping of a national film culture. Among the major interventions, the regime centralized all the cine-clubs, film associations, and amateur cinema organizations within the Fascist University Groups (Guf). Their objective was to reform amateur film practice towards what we might call a committed, rationalized, and top-down driven avant-garde. This book will examine how amateur filmmaking practices were transformed into an instrument that served the totalitarian state, as well as how a semantic shift from the notion of “amateur” to “experimental” cinema took place in relation to the actual mechanisms of cinematic distribution, exhibition, and production of short films. The book reconstruct the first wave of cine-clubs in Italy (1926-1934) and the institutionalization of the so called Italian "Experimental cinema" with the foundation of the Cineguf film clubs between 1934 and 1943. The research presented in this book brought to light 100 short films over a filmography of more than 500 short films, fictional and documentary, that bear testimony of a crucial cultural and aesthetic phenomenon on the way to Neorealism.

Questo libro è dedicato a una pratica cinematografica giovanile che emerge e si definisce nel corso di poco più di un decennio, in Italia durante il fascismo: il cosiddetto “cinema sperimentale”. Questa prende forma e si articola all’interno delle strutture dei Gruppi Universitari Fascisti, dando vita a una delle più originali formule associazionistiche della storia del cinema italiano: i Cineguf. Tuttavia questa non sarà semplicemente, né esclusivamente, una storia del cinema sperimentale italiano “dai cine-club al Neorealismo”; piuttosto una proposta metodologica, teorica e critica, che prenderà le mosse dagli oggetti sopravvissuti di tale esperienza: ovverossia i film sperimentali.
Riportato alla luce dopo molti anni, il cinema sperimentale dei Cineguf si rivela una produzione ineludibile, nonché un passaggio cruciale e complesso per la comprensione della stagione successiva del Neorealismo.

The shaping of the film culture in Italy and the institutionalisation of 16mm and educational cinema during fascism. The paper moves from an archive based research to provide a detailed picture of the first cine-club era in Italy (from 1926 to 1934) and insists on the crucial role of 16mm standardization in the blooming period of the film culture in Italy. Secondly, the paper explores the nuances of the notions of film culture and cultural film in the italian discoursive sphere during the interwar period.

Using previously unpublished material from the LUCE archive and the State Archives in Rome, this
article examines how film-making became part and parcel of the process of ‘taming’ nature in the Pontine
Marshes under Mussolini’s regime. Fascist authorities perceived the undisciplined and unproductive
nature of the ‘death inducing swamps’ as something that had to be extinguished from the face of Italy, to
make way for an ideal fascist nature that would nurture ideal fascist subjects. We argue that the success
of transforming the swamps owed as much to the extensive investment of labour power, capital, and
technology, as it did to the careful staging of every step of the project through cinematographic
representations. Although planning and land reclamation institutions were responsible for the material
production of the reclaimed land, the LUCE institute was instrumental in actively turning this new land
into the ideal fascist landscape. In so doing, the paper offers a new reading on landscape and nationalism
explored through an analysis of the production of landscape in Italy under Mussolini.

in Francisco Javier Rodríguez Barberán, ed., Una Arquitectura para la Meurte. Actas del 1 Encuentro Internacional sobre los Cementerios Contemporaneos. Sevilla 4/7 junio 1991 (Seville: Consejeria de Obras Publicas y Transportes. Junta de Analucia, 1993). Bilingual texts, 177-189, 594-600. 

A modified version of this essay later was published as “The Space of Absence” (Chapter 7) in my book Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy (University of Chicago Press, 1994, paperback 1996).

One must remember how large a role Catholicism played in Italian history, and this role was still quite present in the early twentieth century; this was very well understood by fascist movement, and thus collaboration with the church was sought, both to solve the ‘Roman Question’ that left the sovereignty of the Vatican uncertain as well as to support the movement in general. There were issues that could not be overcome in both ventures, however the dual power of the fascist regime and the Catholic church certainly made an impression upon the Italian people; religion was certainly not the most important contributor to the fascist movement, but the support of the church was necessary to further the cause. It is important when discussing the connections between fascism and religion to discuss the numerous ways in which religion was represented and implemented within the fascist regime, so this essay will be separated into three different sections: political religion, the ‘Roman Question’, and clerical fascism.

Questo contributo intende analizzare l'attività mitopoietica a sostegno del processo di auto-rappresentazione religiosa del fascismo da parte di Mario Appelius, autore ben noto e famoso negli anni del regime, attraverso lo studio di un suo romanzo intitolato "Il cimitero degli elefanti".

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This paper aims to analyze the mythopoeic activity produced in order to legitimate the religious self-representation of fascism by Mario Appelius, fascist author well known and famous during the fascist regime, through the analysis of him novel titled "Il cimitero degli elefanti" (The cemetery of the elephants).

The paper discusses how Fascist Italy conveyed its ideological messages through the propaganda films exported to Bucharest in the interwar period and, especially, in the 1930s. Mussolini’s dictatorship was in search of consent and praise both home and abroad and exporting movies that depicted favourable aspects of the regime was one of the means it used for this purpose. Il Duce strongly believed in the cinema’s power to bolster pride and raise popular support for its actions from the Italian diaspora and international elites, and Romania was one of the many destinations where the films were enthusiastically received. 
Keywords: Fascist Italy, Fascist propaganda, Interwar Romania, Fascist Cinema, Italians in Romania

The main purpose of this study is to discuss several Romanian collective visits to Fascist Italy and assess their efficacy as instruments of the latter's foreign propaganda efforts towards Bucharest. In this sense, I selected three such trips as case studies, each of them being representative of a different type of Romanian public that showed interest in exploring the Fascist experiment taking place in interwar Italy. The case study concerns a students' visit from 1929; a journalists' trip made in 1933; and a trip made by 1500 Fascist enthusiasts from the Romanian Comitati d'Azione per l'Universalità di Roma/Action Committees for the Universality of Rome in 1938. The study argues that while these visits were planned and advertised in Bucharest and regarded mostly as Romanian initiatives of foreign propaganda directed at Italy or as an initiative aimed at the cultural rapprochement between the two countries; they were in fact encouraged and attentively monitored by Rome. Essentially, these trips constituted ideological pilgrimages at the service of Fascist Italy. Moreover, at a closer look, they were indicative of the widespread favorable image of Mussolini's dictatorship among large segments of the Romanian society and establishment.

Drawing upon Ciano’s notes about the German Department of Propaganda, this paper reconstructs his role as Italian Minister of Propaganda. This work focuses on the analogies with the German Department and the Ciano’s role in the management of Propaganda in Italy. Ciano praised in particular the unconditional control that Goebbels had reached on the radio broadcasts and film production and he would have wanted to reach the same result. Attached is also the transcription of the complete text of Ciano's notes never published to date
Keywords Galeazzo Ciano; Propaganda; Fascism

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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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.

As a preliminary contribution to the little-studied history of anthropology during the Fascist period, this study attempts to interpret a microcosmic situation -- the abrogation in 1937 of the charters of both the Roman and the Florentine Societies of Anthropology, and the subsequent transformations of leadership and activities of those societies. The results illuminate the history of anthropology, and the differences that had developed between schools of thought represented at those two Societies. They also illuminate the hlstory of Fascism, whose effects on anthropology, and uses of anthropology, seem more closely related to expediencies of the moment and changes in individual Ministers of Education than to any continuous, coherent philosophical mission. [From: "Antropologia Contemporanea" / Italian Journal of Anthropology, v. 11 pp. 45-58 (1988).]