Fascist Italy

Superati «novant’anni d’impazienza» e dopo un lungo periodo votato all’autocommento e all’esplorazione delle proprie intenzioni, Raffaele La Capria ha raccolto le sue opere in due Meridiani curati da Silvio Perrella. La Capria ne ha celebrato l’uscita nella prolusione inaugurale di Salerno Letteratura, poi confluita nel breve autoritratto narrativo "Introduzione a me stesso" (2014). In questa sede, l’autore è tornato su alcuni punti essenziali della sua riflessione sulla scrittura, come la relazione, reciproca e ineludibile, fra tradizione e contemporaneità. All’epilogo del «romanzo involontario» di una vita, La Capria guarda retrospettivamente alla propria esperienza come ad un’autentica educazione intellettuale. Perciò, muovendo da un’intervista inedita del 2015, riportata integralmente in appendice, la tesi ha l’obiettivo di ricostruire l’apprendistato letterario di La Capria dai primi anni Trenta, quando l’autore ancora frequentava il ginnasio, fino all’inizio dei Sessanta, quando ottenne il premio che ne avrebbe assicurato il successo. Il percorso, che riesamina l’intera bibliografia lacapriana nella sua varietà e nella sua stratificazione, si articola in una serie di fasi interdipendenti: la partecipazione indiretta alle iniziative dei GUF (intorno alle riviste «IX maggio» e «Pattuglia»); l’incursione nel giornalismo e l’impegno culturale nell’immediato dopoguerra (sulle pagine di «Latitudine» e di «SUD»); l’attività di traduttore dal francese e dall’inglese (da André Gide a T.S. Eliot); l’impiego alla RAI come autore e conduttore radiofonico (con trasmissioni dedicate a Orwell, Stevenson, Saroyan e Faulkner); la collaborazione con «Il Gatto Selvatico», la rivista dell’ENI voluta da Enrico Mattei e diretta da Attilio Bertolucci; e le vicende editoriali dei suoi primi due romanzi, “Un giorno d’impazienza” (1952) e “Ferito a morte” (1961), fino alla conquista dello Strega. La rilettura dell’opera di uno scrittore semi-autobiografico come La Capria, attraverso il costante riscontro di fonti giornalistiche, testimonianze epistolari e documenti d’archivio che avvalorano e occasionalmente smentiscono la sua versione dei fatti, diventa allora un’occasione per immergersi nella sua mitografia personale e avventurarsi in territori finora poco esplorati: come la ricostruzione del suo profilo culturale, a partire dal milieu in cui La Capria vive e opera, o l’incidenza delle letture e delle esperienze giovanili sulla sua prassi letteraria.

Rarely, if ever, in the twentieth century has a historian been so present in the life of his people as has Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940) in his half-century career in modern Romania, from around 1890 until 1940. He was both feared and praised for his writings and speeches, at the same time in parliament, in the academia and in the press in such measure that, as one Italian diplomat noted in 1929, he seemed „the maximum judge of cultural issues in this countryˮ.  It was no coincidence that it was an Italian representative who remarked that, since Italy (and consequently, Fascist Italy) was for Iorga his most important foreign arena and the Romanian historian was, in return, one of the most common intellectuals discussed by the Italian diplomatic correspondence.
Nicolae Iorga is considered Romania’s major historian of all times and one of its greatest minds, as well as one of the most influential public intellectuals of modern Romania. His heritage is of very great proportions (around 1200 books and 25 000 articles), which led to an extensive scientific literature documenting it. Only to give a sense of the outputs, in a six-year period (2004-2010) there were 381 texts discussing Iorga.  Probably, it is the broadest literature on any Romanian historian. And yet one can still find grey areas in his intellectual biography. Such a case is addressed in this essay, which aims to provide an overall view of Iorga’s understanding of Italian Fascism, as well as some possible explanations for his actions and beliefs, being in part a summary of the findings of our doctoral thesis on this very topic.  What we herein argue is that Iorga, already voluntarily committed before the First World War to promote close cultural ties with Italy, changed course in the interwar period in order to accommodate Mussolini’s regime, and thus embarked on a journey which led him to a political and ultimately ideological commitment. The narrative Iorga constructed about Italian Fascism essentially promoted a categorically favorable image of Il Duce and his dictatorship’s accomplishments.

Curatela della sezione La forma e la scrittura: omaggio ai calligrafici all'interno del 31° Premio Internazionale alla Migliore Sceneggiatura Cinematografica Sergio Amidei 2012.

Tenendo fede alla vocazione storiografica del Premio Amidei, anche quest’anno si riconsidera un periodo legato al tema della scrittura e della relazione tra forme visive e trame dell’immaginario. Registi come Charini, Lattuada, Poggioli, Soldati, protagonisti del cosiddetto calligrafismo italiano, saranno al centro della sezione.

All'interno della sezione anche un evento speciale: la prima proiezione e visione pubblica dei materiali di Sogno d'amore (1943) ultimo e mai terminato film di Poggioli, presente in brani unici nell'archivio film della Cineteca del Friuli.

As one of only a few uninterrupted practices between the ancient and modern Mediterranean worlds, viti-viniculture is commonly identified, by both contemporary winegrowers and consumers alike, as one of Italy's "living heritages." Showing up frequently in Greek and Roman literature, as motifs in medieval earthenware and architecture, and in the purportedly timeless practices of a tradition-oriented Italian countryside, grape vine cultivation and winemaking appear, to many, as a static agro-cultural continuity between the Italy of the Caesars and the Italy we know and love today. This slippage between the wines of antiquity and those of modern industrial-scale producers is, of course, systematically exploited by many contemporary winemakers. Any casual glance at a modern Italian wine label illuminates the highly selective histories, heritages, and traditions many producers and merchants purposefully highlight in marketing their wines to prospective and unsuspecting consumers. Invariably, none of these histories include the Ventennio nero during which, my monograph-in-progress demonstrates, so much of the industrial and commercial foundations of Italian winemaking, as well as the socio-cultural framework for "Italian" identity, were firmly established.

During the interwar years, Italy's Industrial Wine Lobby (IWL)—a small but influential group of pro-fascist luxury winegrowers, merchants, and industrialists, mostly from the country's prosperous North—worked feverishly to rehabilitate the beverage's downtrodden public image, specifically among the peninsula's wayward salaried and privileged classes. Stemming from a combination of decreasing wholesale prices for common wines and rising wages for the country's factory laborers during the opening decades of the twentieth century, the popular classes had gradually become, in the anxious words of one contemporary, "the great mass of drinkers in Italy." The immediate post-World War I years, however, only accelerated these worrisome developments. Wine's various roles in the country's cost-of-living riots in the summer of 1919 and, shortly thereafter, the violent clashes between labor union leaders, rank-and-file workers, and Benito Mussolini's squadristi in Italy's popular wine taverns and saloons during the subsequent years, merely served in reinforcing the beverage's associations with physical and moral degeneration among the laboring masses. In response to these commercial challenges, Fascist Italy's pro-wine lobbyists launched a series of wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns which were designed to inform domestic consumers about the myriad benefits of moderate wine consumption and, equally as significant, recontextualize the peninsula's typical wines as the country's hygienic, family-friendly "national beverages."

In making these claims, my research engages with a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarly debates regarding the various contributions made by the fascist regime's nationalization and mass mobilization campaigns within the construction of a shared sense of italianità during the interwar decades. Between 1922 and 1945, the Duce's regime mobilized the Italian masses towards the formation of what many Blackshirts frequently referred to as a "new order." Intended to forestall purportedly degenerative social, cultural, and economic trends among the body politic, Fascism's project of national regeneration was designed to stimulate a widespread feeling of collective belonging among the peninsula's regionally fragmented populations and facilitate the regime's inter-related campaigns of political, commercial, and colonial expansionism. While significantly expanding our understanding of Fascism's impacts upon Italians' mentalités and collective practices, however, the majority of scholarly research on Italian Fascism has largely overlooked the inconspicuous but nonetheless influential roles played by intermediating agents, groups, and organizations, such as the IWL, within the shaping of the foundations of a distinctly Italian national consciousness during the 1920s and 1930s. By analyzing the varying ways in which the IWL, in partnership with Mussolini's dictatorship, sought to rebrand the peninsula's typical wines as the country's "millennial" beverages, therefore, this study intends to significantly expand upon our understanding of the complex dynamics of political agency and culture-shaping power in Fascist Italy.

This article aims to dissect the nature of exemplarity in Italian Fascism. The social and political structures that emerged in Fascist Italy were highly reliant on a sense of morality, largely because of the degree of violence inherent in those structures. Under Fascism, morality was founded on concrete examples rather than on abstract principles. Exemplars were idealized sources of moral strength, and figures with the capacity to inspire or persuade. In particular, the fallen soldier and those who died for the nation constituted a major category of Fascist exemplars. Thus, soldiers who fell in the First World War were awarded exemplary status in order to encourage behaviors favorable to the regime. With the goal to demonstrate the importance awarded to exemplars, this paper focuses on a group of ossuaries, or bone depositaries, that were built under Mussolini’s dictatorship, and within which the regime reburied the remains of soldiers who fell in the First World War. The main purpo...

Diplomacy has played a key role in conflicts since ancient times. Over time, the role of diplomatic agents has changed, to take on, gradually, greater importance especially in wartime. This article focuses on the activities of the Italian foreign service in World War II and on the role of diplomats during the civil war that followed the fall of Fascism and the subsequent armistice with the Allies. In this dramatic context, some diplomats confirmed their loyalty to the king, while others joined the new-born Italian Social Republic (R.S.I.), a puppet state ruled by Mussolini under the protection of Nazi Germany. Somewhere, two Italian diplomatic representations coexisted shortly. A page in the history of diplomacy, unknown to wide audience, that this contribution aims to bring to light. The article strives to draw conclusions on the implications and consequences of this ‘diplomatic civil war’ on post-war Italian foreign policy.

Биануална научна конференција Јад Вашема, Светског центра за сећање на Холокауст, услед пандемије корона вируса одржана је почетком децембра 2021. године преко Зум (Zoom) платформе. Сем научника, излагача током трајања конференције, заинтересовани појединци, након пријаве, могли су да прате излагања, да постављају питања путем текстаулних порука или да коментаришу. Ова научна конференција, по много чему специфична, разматрала је и тумачила најновија научна сазнања о концентрационим логорима који нису били под управом нацистичке Немачке, већ њених савезника.  Музејски саветници и кустоси Музеја жртава геноцида пратили су рад конференције –три сесије, посебно – због њеног значаја за Републику Србију, Републику Српску и српски народ који је претрпео злочин геноцида током Другог светског рата у Независној Држави Хрватској (НДХ), сателиту par excellence нацистичке Немачке.

This is the second post in Notches online symposium on "Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality," Rachel Hope Cleves‘s new history of intergenerational sex as revealed by the sexual activities of the once well-known British writer Norman Douglas (1868–1952).

Nell'immaginario storiografico la nascita del "vero" fascismo è collocata nel 1920-1921 e numerosi studi considerano il movimento del 1919 come un confuso e informe magma di sinistra. Nell'Italia del centenario della nascita dei Fasci italiani di combattimento, i mass-media hanno utilizzato questa interpretazione per parlare di estremismi, populismi e governi instabili.
In questo quadro, il volume scava e identifica - quasi con metodo archeologico - i pluridecennali sedimenti discorsivi  che si sono stratificati sul fascismo diciannovista, e torna a scriverne la storia. Il libro ricostruisce le pratiche e l'ideologia del primo fascismo svelandoci tutti i limiti del mito politico diciannovista.

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/scheda/calabresi-renata/349,
in the bilingual website "Intellectuals Displaced from Fascist Italy. Migrants, Exiles and Refugees Fleeing for Political and Racial Reasons" http://intellettualinfuga.fupress.com/en.
Tra le migliaia di displaced scholars assistiti dell’Emergency Committee di New York è l’unica italiana per la quale fu disposto un finanziamento. Ancor prima delle leggi antiebraiche, aveva incontrato difficoltà nella carriera universitaria, in quanto studiosa di psicologia sperimentale, donna e antifascista, legata al professor Salvemini e alla famiglia dei Rosselli. Salpò per gli Stati Uniti da sola, sul Conte di Savoia, due mesi dopo suo fratello cardiologo. Dopo mille ostacoli e lavori, senza ancora essersi sistemata, nel 1947 venne in Italia e ripartì con un volo TWA. A New York diventò un’affermata psicologa clinica.

[Open access article ( download at the link)]
The essay analyzes the applicability of the notion of charismatic leader to Italian fascism through a reconstruction of the role played by Mussolini in the Italian regime and a comparison with the characteristics of HItler's leadership. To this end, in particular, the essay analyzes the routinization of charisma carried out by the regime's apparatus. In summary, the essay argues that Fascism presents a charismatic dimension that can be identified in the charismatic function of personality, in the charismatic link between leader and followers and citizens and in the realization of the promise of salvation. At the same time the failure of this promise manifested with the war showed the limits of charisma by configuring Mussolini in Weberian terms as a false prophet.

This chapter focuses on propaganda strategies in inter-war Britain developed by the Fascist regime with professors and lecturers in university Italian Studies departments. In so doing, it elaborates the role played by Italian Studies academic staff in both diffusing Italian culture in British universities and emphasising Fascist Italy and Mussolini’s policies.
Since the 1990s scholars of Fascism have tended to accord preeminence to Mussolini’s search for approval and related propaganda policies, analyzing the strategies addressed to foreigners and his efforts to gain control over emigrant Italians politically organized in Fasci. The London Fascio encompassed mainly uneducated Italians and, although the policies centred on it have been explored, the activity of intellectual elites living in Britain has remained unexplored. Investigating this area has led to the identification of a new avenue for gaining a deeper understanding of propaganda work in the UK, and for exploring the ‘duality’ and aims of Fascist inter-war strategies.

Masterclass e seminario sul cinema dei calligrafici tenutasi il giorno 24 luglio 2012 all'interno del 31° Premio Internazionale Sergio Amidei alla Migliore Sceneggiatura, in collaborazione con Palazzo del Cinema, Università di Udine e Mediateca Provinciale di Gorizia.
All'interno presentazione dei materiali inediti di Sogno d'amore (1943) film non terminato di Poggioli e presente in copia unica nell'archivio film della Cineteca del Friuli.

The Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942 brought about the invasion of the so-called French “Free Zone” by Axis forces. While German forces occupied the majority of the zone, the Italian Royal Army occupied the area up to the river Rhône. This paper focuses on policing within the city of Nice, which had long been a target of Italian irredentists. Specifically, it will focus on the idea of sovereignty within the city, using the police as a case point. While policing duties were left to the French, the Italians intervened when they felt it was necessary. This could range from investigating resistance activity to preventing the deportation of Jews.  Moreover, the presence of OVRA – the Italian secret police – in the region allowed the Italians to operate outside French legal frameworks. This paper will therefore question who really retained sovereignty within Nice and attempt to place this within Franco-Italian relations.

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/gutagluckmann-medshiboshski/1412,
in the bilingual website "Intellectuals Displaced from Fascist Italy. Migrants, Exiles and Refugees Fleeing for Political and Racial Reasons" http://intellettualinfuga.fupress.com/en.
Escaping to France from tsarist Russia to rejoin her husband, a political exile, she settled with him in Italy from 1913. Guta had three small children, but she did not intend to put her university degree and her ambitions away in a drawer. She repeated her medical degree, and in 1922 opened her own surgery, next to her husband's. In the whole province of Florence there were just two women enrolled in the Doctors‘ Association; she was the third and the most determined, given the opposition she had to face. In 1939 the Fascist Union deprived her and all Jewish professionals — but first of all foreigners — of their license to work. Yet «Aryan» patients continued to want to be treated by the «Russian doctor», who was instead denounced by her colleagues and convicted of practising unlawfully.

This article analyses how, in the last half-century, scholars have differed over the nature of Italian foreign policy under the fascist regime. It examines the debate between orthodox and revisionist historians over Mussolini's foreign policy in general, and also over three specific areas of Italian policy in the interwar years: Franco-Italian relations, Italian participation in the Spanish Civil War, and the alliance with Nazi Germany. The author concludes that much of the debate has arisen because of conceptual befuddlement; writers have been primarily concerned with questions of coherence and continuity, and not with understanding Italian foreign relations. Historians have also disagreed over whether Mussolini had a ‘programme’, but a closer look shows that many of them were engaging in a semantic debate, and did not differ over the nature of fascist policy.

The author aims at drawing on one man’s experience in order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics surrounding art-related claims brought forward by Italy after 1945. Indeed, among all those who were actively involved in Italy’s post-war negotiations over displaced cultural property, Florentine-born officer Rodolfo Siviero (1911-1983) happens to bear witness to more facts and causes than anyone else does.
Light is shed on Siviero’s multiple affiliations throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s: from the Fascist Party to the Italian anti-regime guerrillas and the Allied Supreme Commander. These laid the groundwork for the officer’s full involvement in US-Italian negotiations over cultural assets unlawfully and forcedly transferred between 1937 and 1945.
By combining Siviero’s memoires with official records, we reveal a crucial difference during post-war negotiations between the treatment of cultural assets proactively displaced by fascist authorities before 1943 and those seized under military occupation. The former group includes artworks such as the Vipiteno panels, the Corsini collection and Ventura’s renaissance masterpieces, while the latter, including the Waeskerlin and the Van Marle collections, as well as the Montecassino hoard, were among those hauled away by the Nazis. After the war, Italy’s peculiar position as both victor and vanquished led to a succession of concessions and recriminations among Italian delegates (led by Siviero), Allied, MFAA and German personnel. The expression “exceptional returns” was specifically coined to indicate those works that Italy was possibly not entitled to, but eventually granted by US. The fact that this occurred during Italy’s 1948 general election shows how cold-war allowed what fascist collusion had long been compromising.
Siviero’s career is thus emblematic of a political transition that, by neglecting its fascist legacy, deeply affected the fate of displaced cultural property and hindered the possibility for Italy to properly commit itself to provenance research.

Sant’Adolfo’s church (now San Giuseppe’s) built in 1937 at Aielli is one of the most important examples of twentieth-century architecture in the Abruzzo region in central Italy.
The peculiar concept of its automatic electric organ corresponds to the distinction of the building.
The organ comprises a conventional organ with echo division, a roll-operated organ player, a carillon of tubular bells, and, instead of bells, a set of four loudspeakers at the top of the steeple.
This system constituted a particular kind of sound installation that could play automatically.
The features and history of this installation are delineated from its magnificent beginning to its partial destruction and restoration, a story of vanities, mad ambitions, political delusions, and public rage.

As international relations between France and Italy soured in the 1930s, an increasing volume of irredentist literature began to appear in Italian. These books, pamphlets and articles often examined the historical, linguistic and geographical links between Italy and the Alpes-Maritimes, Savoie and Corsica. This chapter intends to examine these publications, providing an overview of their content and to what extent their message was consumed by the Italian community in the territories themselves. It will also seek to understand how the Italian government developed the themes of these publications into semi-official Italian policy during the occupation of 1940-1943. Finally, this chapter will place these publications into the wider sphere of Italo-French relations during the 1930s and 1940s, and in the relations between French and Italian communities in France.

Lezione tenuta il 6 marzo 2014 presso l'Università di Udine nell'ambito del corso "Principi di conservazione e preservazione del film" e dedicata alla figura di Francesco Pasinetti, alle sue teorie e alla sua produzione filmica arrivando alla recente uscita in dvd dei restauri dei suoi film.

The Italian occupation of France has been largely forgotten both in France and Italy, but also in Britain. This has been made possible only by an almost complete lack of commemoration, both at a national and regional level. The Second World War in France has been dominated by the German experience and occupation, reducing the Italian occupation as an almost “non-event”. The comparably gentle and non-obtrusive nature of the occupation has inevitably been one of the main reasons for this lack of commemoration, yet the regions occupied by Italy were particularly active during the period. The reasons for this lack of commemoration, therefore, are rooted in the exaggerated memory of the Resistance, the myth of that Italians were brava gente – good people, and the rapid re-establishment of Franco-Italian relations following the war. The paper also seeks to explain whether only “traumatic” events are worth commemorating, comparing the Italian and German occupations and their place in the national consciousness.