Fascists and Folklorists in Italy

Abstract

IN 1938, COUNT GALEAZZO CIANO, the Italian foreign minister who was also Benito Mussolini's son-in-law, visited an exhibit of folk arts in Milan. As he entered the exhibit, Ciano saw a banner bearing a Mussolini quotation that said: I1 popolo, che non rispetta le tradizioni del passato, rinunzia a una parte di vita [People who do not respect the traditions of the past renounce a part of life].' The exhibit, one of many staged all over the country, the presence of a ranking member of the Fascist hierarchy, and the banner announcing the Duce's devotion to tradition, all dramatized the Fascist regime's interest in folklore. As a military regime with national and imperial ambitions, the Fascists required a militant people conscious and proud of being Italian, and they believed that exhibits of this kind alerting the people to their great folkloric heritage would serve this purpose. The exhibit in Milan was primarily a manipulation of folkloric work in behalf of the politics of the regime. As recent studies have demonstrated, there were similar maneuvers elsewhere in Europe in the period between the two world wars. Through almost all of its existence, the Soviet government has bent the work of folklorists to its political ideology.2 Less heavy-handed, the nationalist governments of Finland encouraged the work of folklorists who, consciously or not, favored government policy.3 The National Socialist regime in Germany was aggressive in directing folkloric research to conform to the views of the