파시즘의 로마 이미지와 로마관, 로마성(Romanità) - 그 기원과 변천

Abstract

Since the Italian consciousness of nationhood was born, Rome had been regarded as the spiritual epicentre of the nation by many patriots and intellectuals. Rome’s symbolism of universality appealed as the incarnation of the nation’s unifying force and the nation’s pride in its glorious Roman past nourished optimism to make the country prosperous, and great again. However, there were also negative receptions of Rome among Italians. For many, Rome seemed as an obstacle to the country’s modernization: the city seriously lacked the tradition of municipal autonomy and industrial strength for centuries. In Liberal Italy, this negative perception of Rome was used as a symbol of impotence and failure by critics of the country’s inert ruling class.BRFascism’s concept of Romanità was formed under the influence of these two contradictory myths of Rome in the Risorgimento and Liberal Italy. Fascists worshiped the ancient Rome as the quintessence of Italianness and at the same time expressed their hatred of the city as an epitome of the corrupt bourgeois liberalism.BRBy analysing the Fascist historical discourse of Rome from various sources, this paper demonstrates how Fascism inherited conventional images, symbolisms and perceptions of Rome in the existing Italian cultural tradition and reorganized, transformed and distorted them to create its own interpretation of Romanità which in the end served (or expected to serve) to justify the regime’s political and ideological aims.