The word totalitarian may have been an invention of Fascist Italy yet the country was never as totalitarian as Fascists would have liked. From the start Mussolini had to share Italians with two other leaders. The king was content to take a political back seat but he had the loyalty of many in the armed forces and the police, and if peace with the Vatican made Fascism more popular with many Italians, it also meant the Catholic Church was more demanding. One of the papacy’s first requests after reconciliation was that Mussolini remove the statue of Garibaldi that was so irritatingly visible from the Vatican. Mussolini, determined to show who was in charge, refused, and instead added a new statue of Garibaldi’s wife, Anita: depicted in a heroic pose, on a galloping horse, a pistol in one hand and a baby in the other.
Mussolini saw Rome as a kind of huge machine of brick and stone, which had two functions: to glorify Fascism to the world and to help re-forge Italians as an aggressive, conquering people. How far his efforts changed Italians we will come to later. As to the impression Fascist Rome made on foreigners, there were relatively few of them to offer a judgement. In the 1930s they had a modest presence in the city, which was less cosmopolitan than it had been in most eras we have looked at. Rome had many immigrants but almost all were Italian, while most, as usual, came from provinces close to Rome. In 1931, of a million Romans only 5,000 were foreigners, of whom the largest two groupings were Americans and Germans. The Ghetto degli Inglesi was a poor shadow of its 1840s self and only a few vestiges survived. As well as the Anglican Church on nearby Via Babuino, the Piazza di Spagna still had the Union Club, an English chemist’s and Mrs Wilson’s bookshop and lending library. For most of their needs English-speaking residents in Rome now had to resort to shops run by Romans. It was also no longer the home of the city’s great hotels and in the 1930s the most luxurious of these – the Ambasciatori, the Excelsior and the Grand – were all on the Via Veneto, which had not existed in the early nineteenth century.
That Rome had lost its allure for foreign writers, poets and artists was largely the result of its success. As we have seen, after it became Italy’s capital in 1870 it became a building site filled with crowds and traffic, and it soon lost the eccentric charm of its papal days. And after the Wall Street Crash few northern Europeans or Americans could afford to idle away half a year abroad, especially in Italy, which, thanks to Mussolini’s campaign to push up the value of Italy’s currency – the Battle of the Lira – had become an expensive destination.
Even short-term tourism struggled. Aside from the question of expense, some visitors were put off by Fascist rhetoric, which railed against foreigners who sought out antiquities and art rather than coming to see the new Fascist Italy. Some radical Fascists urged that all foreigners who carried a copy of Baedeker and a Kodak camera should be turned back at the frontier. Even when, in the hungry ’30s, the government tried to encourage tourism, the regime’s preferred visitors were those who showed interest in Fascism’s revolution, which some did. Many, such as the English hiker Roland G. Andrew, came pre-converted and, like Andrew, wrote accounts of their visits to spread the word of their new faith.
Even Fascist Rome, with its construction sites and traffic jams, won praise. There was no denying that there had been improvements. The traffic might be bad but at least drivers were agreed as to which side of the road to drive on: prior to the First World War Romans drove wherever they liked. Quality Roman hotels might be expensive but they were spotless, well managed and they were required to display room prices clearly, so cheating was impossible. Tipping was now illegal (though the 1930 Baedeker guide claimed it was still expected by porters and cab drivers). The city was clean and, thanks to hundreds of new lavatories, Romans were no longer seen relieving themselves in the street. Rome was safer and, with squads of Fascist militiamen patrolling trains, trams and railway stations, one ran no risk of being robbed of one’s luggage. Prostitutes, who had been firmly removed to state-licensed brothels, no longer assailed one on the street. Most remarkable of all, Rome was, for the first time in many centuries, beggar free. Fascist hiker Roland Andrew passed a whole week in the city without being asked for money once.
Rome was also easier to reach. Italy’s roads, which had been famously bad, were transformed under Fascist rule. The same was true of the rail network, with new stations, new and faster lines, electric services and, famously, trains that ran on time. Those in a real hurry could even reach Rome by air. After the opening of a seaplane port at Ostia one could travel from London to Rome with Imperial Airways in a mere 27 hours. As the 1930 Baedeker guide explained, the luggage allowance was 100 kilograms, which may seem generous by today’s standards, but which included the weight of the passenger.
Rome in the 1930s was also healthier than it had ever been. True, the city was still rife with tuberculosis and trachoma and there were regular typhus epidemics, but the city’s worst scourge, malaria, had finally been defeated. Thanks to developers’ destruction of Rome’s great Baroque parks, with their ponds and puddles and pots full of water, the disease had disappeared from Rome by the end of the nineteenth century and, after Mussolini’s campaign to drain the Pontine marshes, all of Italy was largely, if not entirely, free of the disease by the end of the 1930s. As in most of Europe, Italians’ life expectancy, which had changed relatively little over previous centuries, soared after the 1840s, as death rates halved.
Romans were more literate than they had been even in classical times, with the majority able to read and write. And some aspects to life under Fascism were undeniably popular. Young Romans enjoyed taking part in Fascist sports events and Saturday afternoon patriotic assemblies of Fascism’s equivalent of the Scouts. For grown-ups, the dopolavoro leisure movement offered unadulterated Fascist fun. To the annoyance of more militant Fascist leaders, dopolavoro was never used to indoctrinate its members. At their local dopolavoro clubhouse Romans could play darts or cards or football, listen to the radio, enjoy a glass of wine or grappa at the refreshments bar, and perhaps watch a film, or put on an amateur theatrical production. Dopolavoro holidays included cultural bus tours, sea cruises with ballroom dancing, and jaunts to Riccione on the Adriatic, which was Italy’s answer to Blackpool or Atlantic City. Such trips may have been scorned by educated, middle-class Romans but they were immensely popular with dopolavoro members, of whom there were almost four million in 1939.
Fascism could also be cosy. For those who did not question it, and especially for those Romans who benefited the most – the city’s middle classes – the world felt reassuringly safe thanks to the regime’s rigid control of information. Mussolini, whose own career had begun in political journalism, was intensely concerned with what news reached Italians, even to the detriment of more pressing political matters. All foreign newspapers were banned, with the exception of the Vatican’s paper, L’Osservatore Romano, while even it sometimes had to be sold under the counter. Though most newspapers were not directly Fascist-controlled, all were intimidated into obedience within the first few years of the regime and their journalists were required to join the Fascist Party. The information that reached them was tightly restricted, coming from a single Fascist-controlled news agency, Agenzia Stefani. If anything untoward did slip through, a stream of censorship orders was sent out each day, detailing what could not be written.
As a result of all of these efforts, Italians who knew the world only through Italy’s news coverage existed in a state of happy reassurance. For them Italy was a land without political demonstrations or crime, where there was no corruption, no embezzlement and no train crashes. They were spared the pain of reading about the 1930s Great Depression. Little happened even outside Italy as Mussolini, wary of reducing his diplomatic options, insisted that other regimes should also be treated with respect. Even Fascism’s supposed foe, Bolshevik Russia, was not criticized until Mussolini threw in his lot with Hitler in 1936. Radio news was equally bland, as were the newsreels shown in Rome’s sixty-odd cinemas, most of which were viewed personally by Mu
ssolini before release. Typically these included a story from abroad, one or two sports items, and another that showed a member of the royal family, the Fascist Party Secretary, or most usually Mussolini himself, announcing a new campaign or inaugurating a new ship or bridge or building. A newsreel’s final story was designed to leave watchers in a good mood, and might be about a celebrity from the world of entertainment, or something amusing involving children or pets. Violence, crime, sex and women in short skirts were noticeably absent. Even Italy’s wars could go largely unreported. Though the conquest of Abyssinia was well covered, and was presented as an impressively modern operation in which Ethiopian faces were rarely seen, Italy’s extensive involvement in the Spanish Civil War was hardly mentioned.
Feature films were equally mild. Along with some patriotic romps and foreign imports, which only became subject to censorship in 1939, Romans were treated to endless romantic comedies involving wealthy, fashionable people – dubbed the white telephone set – which, to take them further from reality, were usually set in Budapest. One might have imagined Romans would have become frustrated at living in this bubble of blandness and comfort, but no. Though a large number of them had their own radios in the 1930s and could easily have listened to foreign channels, including some that broadcast in Italian, few did.
Of course, in spite of the newsreels, for many Romans life under Fascism was anything but cosy. This was especially true for those who fell short of the Fascist ideal: tough, patriotic, law-abiding, respectable in appearance, unquestioningly loyal and – preferably – male. Intellectuals and artists, who often found it hard to remain unquestioning, were regarded warily by the regime. Compared to their equivalents in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, Italy’s intelligentsia were treated fairly gently, but their world became ever more inward-looking and parochial, while some individuals suffered badly. Arturo Toscanini, one of the greatest conductors of his age, who had supported Fascism but then grew disillusioned, was beaten up by Blackshirts for refusing to play the Fascist anthem ‘Giovinezza’ before a performance.
In Rome, as in all Italy, the ones who fared least well under Fascism were the poor. For all the ideology’s boasts that it had created a harmonious society free of class hatred, the truth was rather different. The corporations system, loosely modelled on medieval guilds, claimed to have created a new third way, under which employers and employees, guided by Fascist trade unionists, worked harmoniously together for the good of the nation. In reality it was a sham under which employers were free to exploit their employees as they wanted. Fascist trade union leaders did not represent their members but bullied them like little Mussolinis. At meetings there was no room for debate and any who protested were reported to the police as subversives. The much-vaunted Fascist welfare system was no better. Though employees paid high contributions towards their healthcare, pensions and unemployment benefit, the funds they paid into were regularly raided by the state to pay for its wars and its grand projects, such as Mussolini’s remaking of Rome.
Fascism was very much a dictatorship for the affluent and respectable. Even Rome’s old aristocracy did well. During the 1920s and ’30s all but one of Rome’s governors were from the city’s nobility: the Cremonesi, the Potenziani and the Ludovisi. In 1936 the city was ruled by a member of the Colonna family. At the end of the 1930s only one-sixth of Italians made it past primary school and most of these had educated, affluent parents. In Rome the best new housing – apartments with elegant balconies and marble foyers – was theoretically available to all but it almost always ended up in the hands of Fascist officials, or wealthy Romans with Fascist connections. Poorer Romans were likely to find themselves in suburban Case Popolari, up to ten floors high. The flats they contained were mostly small and crowded, so much so that the only moment when parents had a chance to do their bit for the Battle of Births was on Fascist Saturday, when their children were away shouting slogans at their youth organization meeting. Life in the Case Popolari was simple, to say the least. Cooking was done on a coal or wood stove. In 1931 nine out of ten Rome apartments lacked their own bathroom and residents shared lavatories in the corridors outside, which usually had nothing but a hole in the concrete floor, and a hook on the wall on which were speared scraps of newspaper. Young and old made use of chamber pots at night, which were emptied into the communal loos the next day.
Romans in the 1930s may have been cleaner than Romans of the 1840s but they were not much cleaner. Many apartments lacked piped water, which had to be carried in by bucket. Most Roman men did not shave every day and when they did so it was in the evening, using warm water left over from cooking. They washed themselves in the kitchen sink with laundry soap so they smelt like their clothes. Women, most of whom did not work and – as we will see – were discouraged from doing so, washed the next morning, using water from large, cylindrical bed warmers that still had a little faint warmth. They washed standing up with the help of a curious contraption, which consisted of an iron frame with a mirror at the top and two bowls beneath: one for soapy water and another with clean water for rinsing. As electricity was exorbitantly expensive, piped hot water was an impossibility for almost everybody, and even middle-class Romans managed to bathe properly only during warmer weather.
But there was much worse than the Case Popolari. There were the borgate: Rome’s new outer suburbs. By the late 1930s a fortunate few of these, such as Tiburtina to the east of the city, had managed to evolve into fully functioning parts of the city − Tiburtina had an open air school (chilly in winter but better than nothing) as well as a gym, a Fascist Party office and even a swimming pool. But most borgate were slums that lacked drainage or roads. They were a Rome that very few visitors saw. One who did was the French writer Maurice Lachin, who in 1935 toured the borgate of Garbatella and Sette Chiese, where he found families crowded into tiny spaces, and some living in caves that had been designated as accommodation by the authorities. The borgate were Fascism’s dumping grounds. Far from the city centre, they were hard to escape. As well as unfortunates who had lost their homes to Mussolini’s demolitions, their inhabitants included all those whom the regime wanted out of the way: the unemployed, the criminal, beggars and unlicensed freelance prostitutes. And of course there were people who were opposed to Fascism who could be more easily watched in such places.
Yet the borgate were not Rome’s only slums. The city also had others that were not officially sanctioned and had grown up of their own accord, built by those who had nowhere else to go, many of them refugees from acute rural poverty. Homes consisted of shacks that the Romans called barruché, after Abyssinian huts. In 1933 there were as many as 6,000 of these in the area beyond Termini railway station. They lacked water, electricity and drainage, and life for their inhabitants would not have been much more comfortable than it had been for Rome’s earliest hut-dwelling inhabitants, 2,500 years earlier.
Life under Fascism was not always easy even for affluent Romans, especially if they happened to be female and aspirational. In some ways Roman women had enjoyed better career possibilities in the eleventh century than they did under Fascism. As early as 1920 Mussolini declared that, ‘Women are a charming pastime, when a man has time to pass … but they should never be taken seriously.’7 It was a view he kept. In the early years of Fascism Italy’s feminist groups were quickly abolished and though one women’s organization was sanctioned by the regime – Fasci Femminili – this was not intended to mobilize women but to dispense propaganda to them. In Fascism’s view a woman’s national duty was to stay at home, support the workforce (their husbands) and raise young Fascists-to-be.
The Church fully agreed, if for different reasons: Fascists wanted women to help them win the Battle of the Births while the Church saw any restraint on procreation as sinful against God. Both stood vehemently against abortion and under Fascist rule any doctors or midwives suspected of offering it were sent into internal exile on a prison island. Both shared the same ideal of womanhood, as sensible, virtuous, plain
-living, unadorned – even unsexy – and of course firmly shackled to the home. Fascism especially loathed women with short hair, and derided as neurotic all women who were fashionable, sociable or wore lipstick. Newspapers were forbidden to include photographs of women with small dogs, on the grounds that women should be devoting all their affections to baby Fascists. By contrast prolific mothers were honoured by the state. On 24 December, which was designated Mother and Child Day, mothers with seven, or ideally as many as eleven, children were presented with awards. Fathers of large families gained promotion in state jobs and they and their families enjoyed free medical care, free school meals and free tram tickets. By contrast, men who failed to marry were required to pay a special bachelor tax.
Roman women were positively discouraged from working. In 1934 Mussolini warned them that work was not only dangerous to them but could leave them sterile. As early as 1923 women were banned from being heads of middle schools, or from teaching history or philosophy. In 1939 the state took firmer action, announcing that henceforth women were barred from all management positions, and that a maximum of 10 per cent of professional workers could be female. Yet some opportunities for females continued right through the Fascist years. Roman women could join one of the city’s dozens of brothels, which Fascist leaders – nostalgic for their soldiering days – approved of, on the grounds that they toughened up Italian males and provided harmless release for husbands, who might otherwise endanger marital stability by embarking on affairs.
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