Bacchus among the Blackshirts: Wine Making, Consumerism and Identity in Fascist Italy, 1919–1937

Brian J Griffith

doi:10.1017/s0960777319000377

Abstract

This article explores the way in which wine came to be viewed as a quintessentially ‘Italian’ beverage among Italy's middle- and upper-class households during fascism's twenty years in power. Due to significant increases in wine consumption among the labouring classes during the years immediately following the First World War, wine, as a general category of beverage, had become closely associated within the minds of many bourgeois and wealthy consumers with the country's popular taverns and saloons, alcoholism and physical and moral ‘degeneration.’ In response, fascist Italy's typical wine growers, merchants and industrialists worked feverishly to rehabilitate the beverage's downtrodden reputation via a series of wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns during the 1920s and 1930s. By promoting the beverage's hygienic and alimentary qualities, as well as systematically intertwining the moderate consumption of the peninsula's standardised wines with the dictatorship's nationalisation and popular mobilisation programmes, this article will show, the Industrial Wine Lobby successfully re-established ‘wine's honour’ and, simultaneously, recontextualised the country's typical wines as Italy's wholesome, family-friendly, ‘national beverage’.

Highlights

In November 1933 an extraordinary paperback appeared on the shelves of Italy’s bookstores and newspaper kiosks
By the early 1920s, wine, as a general category of beverage, was closely intertwined within the minds of many middle- and upper-class consumers with the country’s popular taverns and saloons, alcoholism and physical and moral degeneration among the labouring masses. In responding to these challenges, the country’s pro-wine campaigners pursued a variety of ambitious and wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns, which were intended to re-establish ‘wine’s honour’ and recontextualise the peninsula’s ‘standardised’ or ‘typical’ wines as interwar Italy’s wholesome, family-friendly ‘national beverage’
In contrast to the misleading and, in some cases, outright erroneous claims made by many contemporary Italian wine growers, the roots of today’s ‘genuine’ or typical Italian wines stretch back not to antiquity or the Middle Ages but, rather, to the interwar years, during which so much of the agro-industrial and commercial foundations of modern Italian wine making, as well as Italians’ enduring relationship with ‘their country’s’ wines, were firmly established