Yet all of this was only one part of the propaganda in stone that filled 1930s Rome. There was also another, which a visitor from the 1840s would have found altogether more alien. If Liberal Rome was designed to blend in with the buildings of the past, and did so reasonably well, the next stratum of the city made no such compromises. Its plain columns and hard frontages with undecorated windows had a faintly barracks-like appearance, as well they might. They had been created by a movement of Italy’s First World War veterans: Fascism.
As Fascist Rome was largely created by a single individual, Benito Mussolini, we should know a little about the man. He was brought up in a small village just outside the sleepy town of Predappio in Emilia-Romagna in north-east Italy, where his mother was a devoutly Catholic schoolteacher and his father was a sometime blacksmith and sometime drunk, womanizer and layabout, who was drawn to radical politics. Benito followed in the footsteps of his father but with far more success. Charismatic, egotistical and restlessly ambitious, he was allegedly expelled from two schools for stabbing his fellow pupils. A talent for political journalism and oratory made him a rising star in Italy’s socialist party, and he became editor of its main newspaper, Avanti, but then the First World War changed his political direction. Soon after the conflict broke out, when Italy was still neutral, he abandoned pacifism and socialism and – possibly financed by the British secret services – he urged Italians to join the Allies against Austria and Germany. After serving in the war for two years without great distinction he discerned an element in Italian society that could prove a powerful political force: embittered ex-soldiers who returned from the front to find their families struggling and their jobs gone. Mussolini urged them to seize power as a new elite: the trincerocrazia, or trenchocracy. He led them against his former socialist colleagues. As squads of ex-soldiers violently broke up left-wing demonstrations and strikes, Mussolini became the darling of Italy’s wealthy, who saw him as their best defence against Bolshevik revolution. With their help, on 28 October 1922, as Fascist squads descended on the capital in the March on Rome, he became national leader.
Benito Mussolini in a satirical cartoon published in a weekly antifascist magazine, Il Becco Giallo, which ran from 1924–26.
In his early, radical days, Mussolini had had little time for Rome, which he described as ‘a parasitic city, full of landladies, shoe shine boys, prostitutes and bureaucrats’.4 Romans returned the compliment and showed negligible interest in Fascism until it overwhelmed them. From 1922, though, as his capital and his home, Rome became one of Mussolini’s chief preoccupations. Like many an emperor and pope before him, he was determined to make it a showpiece of his thinking that would be passed on to future generations as a legacy of the Fascist era.
Naturally this transformation would involve a good deal of destruction. Mussolini was concerned to preserve Rome’s medieval, Renaissance and, most of all, classical heritage, all of which dated from times when Italy had been a major force in the world, but he had little time for the Baroque, when the country had been in decline, and he positively disdained anything from the Liberal era. In his eyes Fascism was the antithesis of Liberal rule, which he despised as disorganized, selfish, feeble, indolent, amoral and decadent. To him the nineteenth century had been the age of the individual and the twentieth century would see the triumph of collectivism and the state. If Liberals had made Rome into a propaganda weapon against the popes, Mussolini used it as a weapon against Liberalism, even in terms of people’s homes. Liberal-era Romans had lived in dark, dusty old buildings on narrow, winding streets. Fascist Romans would live beside wide, straight roads, in apartments filled with air and light, and that would help remake them as a tough, dynamic people. (Some new boulevards would also help alleviate Rome’s chronic traffic problems.)
Destruction began on 21 April 1926: Rome’s 2679th birthday. Mussolini, who was never one to miss a photo opportunity, began the process himself, appearing with the pickaxe that would become a familiar sight over the next few years. His target was the neighbourhood of Piazza Montanara just by the Theatre of Marcellus, which had been a favourite haunt of nineteenth-century tourists seeking the picturesque and which, in the 1920s, was one of the few spots where that side of Rome could still be found. It was a place where country people gathered to seek a day’s work, where salesmen traded in old coins and where scribes wrote letters in the open air for illiterate customers. The area represented everything Mussolini loathed: a backward Italy, patronized as quaint by foreign tourists, whom Fascists blamed for having turned the country into a land of servants.
Yet the liquidation of Piazza Montanara was not only undertaken to reverse past humiliations. Like all of Mussolini’s grand schemes in Rome it was intended to alleviate unemployment, and demolition work was done not by machinery but by hand to create more jobs. The demolished area also provided land for the first section of a new boulevard, the Via del Mare, which would eventually stretch all the way from the centre of Rome to the sea. As well as easing traffic jams, the road was intended to make Romans look to the oceans, inspiring them to once again become a world-conquering people. It also took them to the beach, where they could enjoy sunlight, air and healthy exercise. Finally the destruction would allow Romans to be inspired by their past. The classical Theatre of Marcellus, the Arch of Janus, several temples and the medieval church of San Giorgio al Velabro all emerged from the destruction, isolated and visible as they had not been for centuries.
Many neighbourhoods – or slums, as the Fascist authorities preferred to call them, regardless of what treasures they contained – went the way of Piazza Montanara. In 1932 work began on a second great thoroughfare, the Via dei Monti, which was to take Romans into the healthy air of the hills. Its first stretch was a wide avenue, the Via dell’Impero, which, lined with flagpoles and statues of emperors, passed across the old classical fora, slicing through a low ridge and destroying an entire neighbourhood. The Basilica of Maximus was newly revealed and the Colosseum became pleasingly visible from Mussolini’s office in the Palazzo Venezia, but churches and palaces vanished, along with housing that had contained 6,000 bedrooms.
By 1933 almost 100,000 Romans had lost their homes to the destruction yet it continued apace. In 1934 Mussolini’s interest turned to the tomb of Emperor Augustus, whom he regarded as an example to Fascist Italians. Augustus was a logical choice as he had destroyed constitutional government and replaced it with his own dictatorship. The tomb, which had been concealed for a thousand years beneath, variously, a medieval fortress, hanging gardens, a bullring, the artist’s studio where the vast equestrian statue of Vittorio Emanuele had been made and, most recently, Rome’s main concert hall, proved disappointing when it finally emerged into the light, lower in height and more ruined than was expected.
In October 1936 it was the Borgo’s turn. Mussolini appeared with his pickaxe on a rooftop above the area of narrow streets between St Peter’s and the river known as the Spina. Its demolition was to celebrate one of Fascism’s greatest coups. In 1929 the poisonous enmity between Italy’s rulers and the popes was finally brought to an end by the Lateran Treaties. The new peace was celebrated by the creation of the wide, straight Via della Conciliazione, which would make the facade of St Peter’s visible from afar. It was not a new idea. It had been proposed by French occupiers for Napoleon’s procession through the city, and before them it had been suggested by Rome’s leading architect of the Baroque era, Bernini. Even in his time the idea had had its critics and Cardinal Pallotta commented that at the end of a wide, long avenue, St Peter’s would shrink away to nothing. He was quite right and the drama of walking through a narrow lane and being suddenly confronted by the vastness of St Peter’s Square was lost. It was a pattern that was repeated across the city. The French writer André Gide observed that under Fascism Rome had become grand but it had lost its allure. Previously everything had needed to be discovered. Now it was glaringly displayed.
Not all that Mussolini did was deleterious to the ci
ty. His enthusiasm for classical Rome brought about some preservation, such as of ruined republican temples in what is now Largo Argentina, which had been about to be lost to development. Nobody missed the removal of Pius IX’s gasworks, along with a scrap iron heap and a pasta factory, which had covered the old Circus Maximus. It was thanks to Mussolini that Augustus’ Temple to Peace – the Ara Pacis – which contained some of classical Rome’s finest reliefs, was reconstructed. Visitors to Rome enjoyed being able to see the city’s ancient buildings more clearly, while some Fascist buildings had a kind of stark beauty. Yet the remaking of Rome diminished the city’s texture: its layers of the past crowded one on top of another. Rome also became more disjointed. As Mussolini demolished areas to reveal early treasures, it gained a series of soulless bald patches between its warrens of narrow streets.
Out of destruction rose the new. By the late 1930s Rome had new Fascist bridges, a new university, four new post offices and a number of new ministry buildings, which included, on Via Veneto, the Ministry of Corporations, that were to be Fascism’s answer to capitalist exploitation and Marxist class hatred. Following the conquest of Abyssinia, work began on a new Ministry of Africa next to the Circus Maximus, in front of which stood an ancient Ethiopian obelisk taken from Axum. All across Rome there were new apartment blocks up to ten floors high, where Romans were to enjoy air and sunlight. There were new schools where young Romans were taught about Italy’s victories in the First World War and Fascism’s triumphs. One, on the Aventine Hill, was named after the schoolteacher who was presented as an inspiration to all Italy: Mussolini’s mother.
There were new centres for the Fascist youth organization, the GIL. An especially lavish complex by Porta Portese in Trastevere included a cinema, on its wall emblazoned the slogan: NECESSARIO VINCERE PIV NECESSARIO COMBATTARE (You must win but above all you must fight). Here, and in their schools, young Romans gathered each Saturday afternoon in their uniforms – which looked much like those of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements, on which the GIL was modelled – to shout patriotic slogans, vow loyalty to their duce, Mussolini, and take part in calisthenics and, for the boys, military drill. More fortunate GIL members could go skiing, horseback riding and spend time at summer camps by the sea or in the mountains. And of course they could sing the anthem of the movement, the hymn of the Balilla:
Up little wolves and eagles
Like Sardinian drummers
Let your spirit beat in your breast
Full of virtue
The flag of Italy flutters
And you are part of that fluttering
Proud of eye and quick of step
Each year in May tens of thousands of GIL members from across Italy gathered at Camp Dux, a huge sports area by the Ponte Milvio where for a week they competed and learned to put selfishness behind them, and lost themselves in Fascist collectivism. The luckiest 25,000 paraded past the Colosseum in front of Mussolini himself. For adults who sought healthy exercise there was the Foro Mussolini below Monte Mario. A vast complex, it included an Olympic tennis stadium, the headquarters of Italy’s Olympic Committee and a sun therapy camp on the slope of Monte Mario. Its main arena, the Marble Stadium, was surrounded by statues of sixty-four athletes, each of which was made in and represented a different Italian city. On the edge of the complex stood a 20-metre-high obelisk made of 300 tons of Carrara marble, on which was written in bold capital letters, MUSSOLINI DUX. Yet a good part of the Foro Mussolini – like many of Mussolini’s projects – remained unfinished as the 1930s drew to an end. The new National Fascist Party headquarters, the Casa Littoria, was still under construction, while work had barely begun on a towering statue that was to stand two and a half times higher than the obelisk, which it would face. It was to represent Fascism and the head had already been completed. It bore a strong likeness to Mussolini.
Under Fascism Rome became a city of exhibitions: about Fascism, naturally. The first of these, the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, opened on the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, in October 1932, and was a kind of temple to the new Fascist religion, designed to transform all who passed through its rooms into true believers. The building it was held in, the Palazzo delle Esposizione on Via Nazionale, dated – embarrassingly – from the despised Liberal era, and its frontage was concealed behind a fake facade with four huge metallic fasces as pillars. The display inside recounted Fascism’s brief history, culminating in the dimly lit Hall of Martyrs, which contained a seven-metre-high cross and a thousand electric lights in the walls. The English hiker Roland G. Andrew, himself a keen Fascist, was impressed:
Little pennants hung there in the twilight, each bearing the word presente and the name of the man who had died to save his country from the international disease that was gnawing at her vitals. From a distance came the strains of music: the Giovanezza hymn played softly for those who had died for the Cause, but were still present, hallowed in the memory of the New Italy they had anointed with their blood.5
Some five million visitors passed through the exhibition, though some will have been motivated less by ideology than by the chance of enjoying a cheap trip to Rome. A stamp at the end of the exhibition entitled one to 70 per cent back on the cost of one’s train tickets. Even left-wing French writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who came to Italy to deride Fascism in 1932, shamelessly took the discount.
The Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, which continued for several years, marked the beginning of a Fascist obsession with displaying itself. After it was cleared of gasworks and the pasta factory, the Circus Maximus became the site of a series of Fascist showcases: on the Fascist women’s movement; on how to raise healthy Fascist children; on Italy’s national minerals; on Italy’s textile industry and on the Fascist after-work leisure organization, Dopolavoro. On 23 September 1937 – Emperor Augustus’ 2000th birthday – Mussolini opened an exhibition of Augustus and Romanness. At a militaristic and highly choreographed opening, Mussolini was presented with a live eagle. On the very same day a second Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista was opened across the city in the Museum of Modern Art. The biggest display, though, was yet to come. In the late 1930s, a few miles south of Rome, work began on a permanent and truly vast exhibition of Fascism, in an area designated E-42, for 1942, the 20th anniversary of Fascism, when it was to be opened.
As well as exhibitions, Fascists also had a strong fondness for grand public gatherings and Rome became filled with processions and demonstrations. Military parades processed through the city, and especially along the wide Via dell’ Impero between the Colosseum and Piazza Venezia. Huge crowds were summoned to Piazza Venezia to applaud Mussolini’s great campaigns: the Battle of the Births, which was to inspire Italians to increase their numbers; the Battle of the Grain, which was to increase Italy’s wheat production; the Battle of the Lira, which was to restore the currency’s value; the project to drain the Pontine marshes and cleanse the country of malaria; the invasion of Abyssinia that would create a new Italian empire, and – when the League of Nations replied by imposing sanctions on Italy – the Autarky campaign for economic self-sufficiency.
Fascism was everywhere in Rome. It was in fasces and eagles carved into buildings. It was in slogans on posters: Mussolini is always right! The Fascist does not take the elevator! Most of all it was in the face of Mussolini whose cult, by the late 1930s, was little less than a religion, in which he was presented as something between a saint, a film star and a superhero. When he appeared on cinema screens, the audience rose to their feet as one. Mussolini, who claimed he had remade himself as a kind of machine who needed almost no sleep as he watched over the Italian nation, looked down from the walls of offices, shops, hairdressers’, tobacconists’ and railway waiting rooms. He could be purchased on postcards in dozens of different poses: Mussolini the orator, Mussolini the statesman in a frock coat, Mussolini the uniformed soldier, Mussolini the yachtsman, the flyer, the horseman; fashionable Mussolini driving a sports car, fit Mussolini leaping ov
er an obstacle, rural Mussolini harvesting wheat or planting a tree in Calabria, fearless Mussolini stroking a wild beast, cultured Mussolini playing the violin, history-making Mussolini marching on Rome, or simply Fascist Mussolini doing a Roman salute. The French novelist and journalist Henri Béraud observed: ‘Wherever you go, whatever you do, his gaze follows you everywhere … Mussolini is omnipresent like a God.’6
Even Rome’s time had become Fascist. On newly built monuments there were now two dates: the familiar Christian one and also another, much shorter, marked A.F. for Anno Fascista: 1922, when Mussolini took power, was Italy’s year zero. Rome’s calendar, too, was Fascist. The city’s great holiday of Carnevale was gone. Wearing fancy dress in public was now illegal and the only trace of the old festivities was that the Corso became a little more crowded in the days before Lent. In 1930, the key holiday for Liberal, Risorgimento Italy, of 20 September – the day when Rome was conquered and the country fully unified – was quietly dropped. New civic celebrations included 23 March (when the Fascist movement was founded in Milan in 1919); 21 April (Rome’s birthday); 4 November (Italy’s First World War victory at Vittorio Veneto) and of course, in pride of place, 28 October: the anniversary of the March on Rome.
Propaganda poster featuring Benito Mussolini.
Yet the Fascists did not have it all their own way. As well as possessing Christmas and Easter, in 1925 the Church under Pius XI promoted the celebration of the Feast of Christus Rex: a new anti-socialist cult whose feast day fell on the last Sunday of October, and so clashed directly with the anniversaries of both the March on Rome and the battle of Vittorio Veneto. At Easter 1933, when the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista was in full swing, Pius XI brought crowds of his own by inaugurating an extra Holy Year, to celebrate the 1,900th anniversary of Jesus’ death. The papacy competed also through architecture, creating large new churches in Fascism’s new urban areas.
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