Modernization and Intellectual history: An interpretive model for the history of unified Italy

Abstract

Abstract The starting-point for my research on modernization is Fascist ruralism. Italian historiography divides itself between those who consider ruralism merely as an aspect of Fascist propaganda, and those for whom it has a more substantial importance. I tend to side with the latter position, and find the intrinsic meaning of the myth of rural Italy in Fascist ruralism. As such, and because of this virtue, that is by being devoted to the cult of the earth, the Italian nation could regain strength, vigour and purity. In the history of the Fascist regime, the rural myth partly fulfilled the role of the blood myth in N ational Socialist Germany. The myth that the fertility of the Italian earth was ultimately capable of sustaining the entire population living on Italian soil was the ideological basis of some of the economic and cultural campaigns of Fascism. If the battaglia del grano [grain battle] - aiming at self-sufficiency in food production for the nation — was the first strong expression of Fascist ruralism, the campaign for population growth was its by-product. The values supporting these programmes were quite coherent: fertility of the earth = purity = growth = strength = virility. Even femininity became a value, albeit one linked to population growth and to traditional values (the guardian of the domestic hearth as mother and wife).