Fascism and Romanità : Framing the Ancient Imperial City

Abstract

The relation between Italian Fascism and the myth of romanita appears at first sight deceptively uncomplicated. From its early days as a radical movement the Fascists deployed a language that borrowed heavily from, and hinted at, the Roman past. Although the relationship between the early Fascist movement and Rome was fraught with contradictions (on the one hand, admiration for the values of the ancient Roman Empire; on the other hand, profound disdain for the city’s recent state of perceived political and moral decadence — see Ch. 1), the movement that Mussolini officially founded in 1919 paid the most emphatic tribute to the Roman past in its title and official emblem. Its first name (Fasci di Combattimento) invoked the imagery of the Roman fasces — a symbol made up of a bundle of wooden rods with a protruding axe that was carried by a special group of official protectors of the magistrates in ancient Rome (lictores) as a sign of unity, sovereign authority, and military might (Consolato 2006: 189). In modern times, the symbol had been widely used by a number of radical organisations, ranging from French revolutionaries in the eighteenth century to peasant organisations in Sicily to labour groupings of the socialist left in the nineteenth century (Giardina and Vauchez 2000: 224–7). Thus, for Mussolini the use of the word and emblem of the fasces exemplified two fundamental ideological facets of the fledgling movement: on the one hand, its derivation from the political and military traditions of the Roman Empire that it subsequently claimed to incarnate; on the other hand, its physiognomy as a radical revolutionary movement charting a new political path that identified its roots in a dissident synthesis of left radicalism and hyper-nationalism (Sternhell 1994: 1–7).