The Decline and Fall of the Fascist Empire

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers the changes in Fascist imperial romanità in the late 1930s, during the Second World War, and in the immediate aftermath of Italy’s defeat and the loss of its African colonies. The memory of ancient Rome began to be more aggressively co-opted by racist ideologies. In particular, the Punic Wars were forcefully represented as a clash between the Aryan Roman empire and the ‘Semitic’ Carthage. This chapter takes a number of articles from the racist journal La Difesa della Razza as case studies, and looks at how Italy represented itself as a new Roman empire in exhibitions planned for the 1940s. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the conflict was seen by some Fascist Italian idealogues as a Fourth Punic War. The chapter concludes by looking at how proponents of empire made sense of Italy’s defeat, with reference to Rome’s empire in Africa.