Villa regina. Modello fascista d'emigrazione in Patagonia

Abstract

Transplantation of families of Italian workers in a quenched and uninhabited territory in the Upper Valley of Rio Negro (Patagonia), with the foundation in 1924 in Colonia Regina de Alvear, now Villa Regina, took place on the basis of a political decision in Italy funded with public capital because of the will of Benito Mussolini. The Duce of Fascism, in fact, intervened in order to facilitate the operation because of the urgency of his friend and confidant Ottavio Dinale, delegate of the National Fascist Party in South America. The foundation of Villa Regina, the first Italian case of artificial colonization, however, was the result of a convergence of interests between Dinale, who developed several hypotheses for the settlement of Italian immigrants abroad, and the engineer Filippo Bonoli, author of the project in the Rio Negro, and afterwards promoter of the Italian-Argentinian Company of Colonization. The author, after having outlined the theoretical framework on migration policies and practices of fascism, on the basis of a work of empirical research conducted in Italy and Argentina and the use of original sources including documentation unexplored until now by historians of Italian emigration, has reconstructed the unknown aspects of a case considered a fascist model of migration, aspects that indicate Villa Regina as the first of the so-called Cities of the Duce.