The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  It is difficult to find intellectual coherence in Italian fascism, perhaps because its own leader contradicted himself so frequently. Corporatism, government not by individuals but by bodies representing different economic groups, is sometimes claimed as the great fascist idea, one so brilliant that it was copied by, among others, Spain’s General Franco and Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar. Mussolini announced that the fascist state was corporative or it was ‘nothing’ and claimed that corporations were the ‘fascist institution par excellence’. Yet the corporate system was not organized properly until 1936, when it proved to be expensive, cumbersome and useless to the economy. The idea that industrial strife would cease because capital and labour would each be represented in government by like-minded fascists was at best naive. Fascism claimed it ran a ‘direct’ democracy rather than a representative one, but there was little democratic content to either the regime or its corporations. Corporatism was in effect a cloak for dictatorial control of the economy.

  Mussolini liked to identify things he regarded as fascist. Boxing, for example, was ‘an exquisitely fascist means of self-expression’.2 Virility was fascist, speed and sporting prowess were fascist, fecund women with swarms of children were fascist, and above all war was fascist – it was to men what maternity was to women. He was less good at clarifying fascist ideas. He liked to conflate Italy and fascism, regarding them together as forming an organic whole, which enabled one party secretary, Roberto Farinacci, to assert that ‘the anti-fascist’ could not be an Italian. Beyond that was the vague idea that fascism was a sort of faith and the nation a spiritual entity. As Farinacci again put it, fascism was ‘not a party but a religion’; it was ‘the future of the country’.3 Such nebulous thoughts make one sometimes wonder whether fascism was anything beyond ways of speaking, acting, fighting and controlling. Giovanni Gentile, who was supposed to be its philosopher, described it as mainly a ‘style’ of government, while D’Annunzio, as we know, regarded it from the beginning as simply dannunzianesimo. Even Mussolini occasionally wondered whether fascism was a strategy rather than a doctrine, a technique for acquiring and then retaining power. In such moods he thought of fascism almost as an extension of himself, mussolinismo, a personal thing that would die with him.

  In the 1930s the regime’s style became more ostentatious. There were more parades, more uniforms, more censorship, more hectoring, more speeches from the leader, more shouting, gesturing and grimacing from a balcony to vast crowds, which greeted Mussolini’s every reference to patria and gloria with roars and chants of ‘Du-ce! Du-ce! Du-ce!’. Some of this change of style can be attributed to military successes in Africa and also to the influence of Adolf Hitler, which will be discussed later, but part of it was the responsibility of another party secretary, Achille Starace. Nobody made the fascist regime look more pompous and silly than Starace, who banned hand-shaking because he deemed it effete and unhygienic and made visitors to the dictator’s office run in and out of the room at the double. When asked why he had appointed a ‘cretin’ as party secretary, Mussolini admitted that Starace was indeed ‘a cretin, but an obedient one’.4 The Duce was the type of leader perennially worried that he might be outshone by intelligent subordinates. When Italo Balbo, one of the ablest and most successful fascist ministers, became too popular with the Italian public, he was removed from the air ministry and sent off to govern Libya.

  One of Mussolini’s chief projects was to change the character of the Italian people. In an interview with an American newspaper he claimed that fascism was ‘the greatest experiment in our history in making Italians’.5 Previous attempts may have failed, but if fascism could create a new nation, surely it could create a new native? Mussolini wanted to fashion a fascist way of living, one that abhorred comfort and sloth and embraced courage, discipline and respect for authority. A favourite verb of his was plasmare (to mould or shape), which illustrated his ambition to be the new Italians’ designer, though he later substituted this for the stronger forgiare, which implied he saw himself as their blacksmith.6 When explaining to the fascists’ Grand Council why he wanted to restore the death penalty, which had been abolished in 1889, he said he wanted ‘to make Italians more virile, to habituate them to the sight of blood and to the idea of death’.7

  Certain parts of the project were carried out sensibly and to some extent successfully. The regime’s Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro created ‘after-work’ clubs which gave opportunities of sport, theatre and other recreations to people who had seldom experienced such pleasures. By the late 1930s nearly 4 million Italian adults were members of the clubs, while 7 million of their children belonged to the fascist youth organization, the Balilla, named after the boy from Genoa who had touched off the riot against the Austrians in 1746. This gave children the chance to become little fascists at the age of six, when they became figli della lupa (children of the she-wolf), and to advance through other stages to become avanguardisti (advance-guards) and finally adult party members. At summer camps in the mountains or by the seaside, they were told that they were descendants of the Romans and that Musssolini was the spiritual progeny of Caesar. Yet in spite of the brain-washing, these predominantly working-class children from northern cities were able to enjoy holidays their parents had never dreamed of.

  The fascist regime wanted Italians to become more aware of their history or at any rate of the historical periods it approved of. Little was done to remind people of their Baroque past, which was considered a decadent and effeminate age, but the Middle Ages, with their phallic towers and their Gothic town halls, were extolled. Much effort and money was thus spent on restoring the town of San Gimignano to its medieval glory; modern windows were replaced, crenellations were added, and a Baroque church was deprived of its nave because it blocked the view of the Porta San Giovanni. The ‘medieval’ embellishments still look remarkably authentic. Linking the town’s two squares is a vaulted loggia that seems to belong to the fourteenth century; in fact it was built in 1936.8 San Gimignano’s architecture looks more medieval today than it did in 1902 when E. M. Forster visited the setting of his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread.

  Garibaldi was predictably the figure from the recent past whom the fascists exalted above all others. In appropriating him as a proto-fascist, the regime was assisted by one of the great man’s grandsons, Ezio, who argued that the ‘march on Rome’ and the seizure of power had been very Garibaldian events; fascism, he claimed, was the continuation and fulfilment of his grandfather’s dream. In 1932, fifty years after Garibaldi’s death, the body of Anita, the hero’s first wife, was brought to Rome and reburied with much ceremony on the Janiculum Hill. Mussolini, who understood the propaganda value of the ‘Lion of Caprera’, dominated the celebrations. He even interfered with the design of the commemorative statue, insisting that the heroine on her galloping steed should cradle a baby as well as a gun – maternity and warfare in unison. Yet in the speech he gave at the unveiling of the statue he virtually ignored Anita and concentrated on establishing connections between his regime and the garibaldini. The blackshirts, he declared, the men who had fought and died to make the fascist revolution, were the political heirs of the redshirts and their gallant leader. If Garibaldi could now come to life and open his eyes, he would recognize the descendants of his men in the veterans of Vittorio Veneto and in the blackshirts of the fascist regime.9

  Although many fascists saw themselves as the heirs of Garibaldi, so inconveniently did many anti-fascists. While fighting on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini’s corps of so-called volunteers was defeated at the Battle of Guadalajara (1937) by an enemy force that included the Garibaldi Battalion of Italians fighting in the International Brigades. In 1945, as he was trying to escape to Switzerland, Mussolini was discovered and captured by the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade of anti-fascist partisans. And in the elections of 1948 the Italian Communist Party used Garibaldi’s face as its emblem. The old hero would have been bemused and possibly amused, but he would
surely have preferred the partisans to the blackshirts, just as he would have fought with Spain’s republicans rather than Franco’s nationalists.

  No recent allusions, however, appealed to fascism as much as the example of ancient Rome. Mussolini, who claimed the word Rome was ‘like a boom of thunder’ in his soul, saw himself as the descendant of Julius Caesar and Augustus, triumphant, omniscient and imperial; perhaps he anticipated that he too would have a month named after him. He loved the idea of romanità (‘Romanness’) and wanted Italians to inhale it so deeply that they would become more disciplined, more feared, more courageous and less Italian. The official emblem of the regime was the fascio littorio, the bundle of rods enclosing an axe that Roman lictors used to hold; another emblem was the she-wolf, who had suckled Romulus and Remus, who gave her name to child fascists and whose image from the Capitoline Museum was used at celebrations of romanità. If any commune in the country was still without a Via Roma, it was ordered to create one forthwith and to ensure that it was a principal thoroughfare and not a secondary street. In Sicily new settlements were christened Dux and Mussolinia, and old towns were given more resonantly Roman names, Girgenti making way for Agrigento and Castrogiovanni reverting to the ancient Enna; one impoverished hamlet on the island suddenly became the village of Roma. Much of this ‘Romanizing’ was self-evidently trivial and obsessive: Mussolini changed the date of Labour Day from 1 May to 21 April, the mythical date of Rome’s foundation in 753 BC, and he altered a regional boundary so that Monte Fumaiolo, source of the River Tiber, would be in the Romagna instead of Tuscany. Not all of this programme was strictly Roman, even if it pretended to be. Shortly before Hitler’s official visit in 1938, Mussolini ordered his army to adopt the goose-step style of marching, but he called it the passo romano so that he could deny he was imitating the nazis.

  Yet there had to be a serious side to a policy that set out to retrieve, instil and export classical Roman values. One important achievement of the fascist era was the excavation and restoration of ancient buildings. The Ara Pacis, the ‘altar of peace’, erected in Rome to celebrate the age of Augustus, was unburied and reassembled on the banks of the Tiber; the neighbouring mausoleum of the first emperor was also restored, its vast structure liberated from the debris of centuries and a history that included spells as a vineyard, a bullring and a concert hall. Both projects were timed, along with the ‘Augustan Exhibition of Romanness’, to coincide with the 2,000th anniversary of the emperor’s birth. To emphasize the connection between the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of Mussolini, the monuments were framed on three sides by a piazza of fascist buildings designed by the Jewish architect Vittorio Morpurgo. As with the Garibaldi celebrations, Mussolini placed himself at the centre of the enterprise and was photographed wielding a pickaxe outside the mausoleum as he commenced the demolition of the surrounding buildings. The Duce liked to remind people that he was a destroyer as well as a builder. He once planned to knock down all of Rome that had been constructed during ‘the centuries of decadence’ after Augustus, but in the end he contented himself with razing the quarter (including its churches) between the Colosseum and the Piazza Venezia to make way for an imperial thoroughfare (now the Via dei Fori Imperiali) along which his ‘legions’ could parade.

  Fascism’s architectural style was intended, like the regime itself, to be a hybrid between the classical and the modern. Some of it simply took the form of pastiche (for instance, the sports stadium in Rome once known as the Foro Mussolini) or even pillage (the Duce copied Augustus by stealing an obelisk from Africa). Yet most of it was serious, as one can still see in the outskirts of Rome at EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma), an unfinished attempt to create an ‘ideal city’ for an exhibition that was planned for 1942; its Palace of Italian Civilization, a cube of six storeys containing fifty-four arches on each side, is the first beautiful building that travellers arriving at Fiumicino see on their way into the city. Guidebooks routinely dismiss the architecture of the era as ‘bombastic’ and ‘typically fascist’, but many buildings do not merit such dismissals. The architect Marcello Piacentini designed the lumpy and inappropriate Piazza della Vittoria in Brescia, but in neighbouring Bergamo he built in an elegant, restrained and unheroic style. In Como the young Giuseppe Terragni constructed several fine buildings, including the Casa del Fascio, one of the most beautiful examples of modernist architecture in Italy. Fascist buildings are often disparaged not because they are bad buildings but because they happen to have been built by fascists.

  Italy under Mussolini is sometimes regarded as a cultural desert, its artists reduced to conformity and even servility by a police state and an oppressive censorship. This was not the case. Artists worked with a freedom unthinkable in nazi Germany or soviet Russia, and many of them were convinced fascists. Such was Pietro Mascagni, the composer of La cavalleria rusticana, and both Puccini and Toscanini were sympathizers, though the former soon died and the latter changed his mind after Mussolini came to power: later he refused to conduct the fascist anthem (‘Giovinezza’), was beaten up in consequence and took himself into exile. No composer had an opera banned apart from Gian Francesco Malipiero, one of whose works aroused the whimsical fury of the Duce. Yet it was an exception. There were enough cultured and broad-minded fascists, including the arts minister Giuseppe Bottai, to deter those burners of books and destroyers of canvases who flourished in other dictatorships. Mussolini himself found museums rather boring and sometimes wished they contained fewer paintings and more captured flags. Yet unlike Hitler or Stalin, he did not interfere with artists or force them to produce paintings of valiant soldiers and heroic proletarians. He also had a more sophisticated attitude to art than the Führer, appreciating both modernist painting and rationalist architecture. He wanted art to be – like everything else – a blend of the modern and the traditional, but he did not try to impose a ‘state art’ until near the end, under the influence of Hitler and on the eve of the Second World War, Farinacci sponsored the Cremona Prize awarded to painters who created ‘fascist art’. Even in 1939, however, Bottai established the rival Bergamo Prize, which gave awards to artists irrespective of their style or political views.10

  The regime was active in its support for theatre and cinema. After Luigi Pirandello had made his name as a playwright in Paris, Mussolini saw his potential as an adornment of the state and helped him set up a theatre company in Rome. The potentialities of cinema were even greater. What splendid propaganda messages could be made through a film about the Roman general Scipio Africanus, or through Alessandro Blasetti’s 1860, which ended with a mutual saluting scene between ancient redshirts and youthful blackshirts. The regime subsidized and promoted cinema and built Cinecittà in Rome, the largest film studios in Europe. Yet few overtly propaganda works were in fact produced, and many were not more nationalistic than those made in more democratic nations. British film-makers liked to show the valour of the British on the North-West Frontier, and American film-makers managed to depict ‘Red Indians’ as hordes of aggressive savages unreasonably objecting to the presence of a few white-skinned pioneers.

  Mussolini was not cast by nature for the role of censor. While it was absurd to claim, as he did in 1928, that the press enjoyed more freedom in Italy than in any country in the world, he initially kept the same censorship laws set in place by his liberal predecessors. The situation worsened from 1934, when publishers were forced to send in their books for vetting, and in 1940 it deteriorated further. Yet Croce was allowed to publish his anti-fascist writings throughout the dictatorship, and Cesare Pavese could have a book published in 1936 even though he had been a political prisoner the year before. Wisely, the government thought it preferable to influence writers with perks and subsidies than to ban their books. Several members of the left-wing intelligentsia after the Second World War had been avid supplicants for fascist funds, a fact they later tried very hard to conceal. Mario Alicata, a future stalinist, received money for his journal from the Ministry of Popular Culture. Al
berto Moravia, the novelist and a future MEP on the Communist Party list, was so eager for state money and assistance that he sent grovelling letters to Count Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law), whom he hailed as a role model for Italian youth, and to the Duce himself, to whom he shamelessly lauded the achievements of the regime and its ‘exemplary and extraordinary’ leader. It was difficult for Moravia to be critical of a state while he was begging it to give him $500 in order to travel to the East and write about China.11

  Fascist Italy was a braggart state, a bully state and a police state, but for all its rhetoric it was not – within its own boundaries – a very bloodthirsty state. It kept files on more than 100,000 subversives, but very few went to prison. In 1931 Italy’s 1,200 university professors were forced to swear an oath of loyalty to fascism as well as to the king, but the action did not greatly inconvenience the academics: only a dozen refused to swear and consequently lost their positions. The usual way of punishing political dissidents was confino, internal exile, a method that liberal governments had employed against malcontents in Naples and Sicily in the nineteenth century. During the fascist dictatorship a few thousand dissidents were exiled, usually to remote villages and islands in the south, where they were prevented from travelling and forced to report to the police each day. Many years later, Silvio Berlusconi scoffed at the punishment and said confino was like being sent to a holiday camp. It was of course nothing of the sort, but neither was it Dachau or the Gulag.