Fascist Italy Research Articles

The monarchy and the Fascist regime in Italy

ABSTRACT Controversy has long surrounded the complex relationship between King Victor Emmanuel III and the dictator Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. It is clear that the king played decisive roles in bringing Mussolini to power in 1922 and in removing him in 1943. In between, the two coexisted as Italy became a ‘dyarchy’, with two foci of power. The presence of the monarchy at once checked Fascist radicalism and persuaded many conservatives to adhere to the regime. Thanks especially to the monarchy, the innovative thrust of Fascism was channelled in certain delimited directions, toward a statist economy, for example. Still, the relationship between the crown and Mussolini was often rocky, though the king’s reluctance did not prevent alliance with Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism, and war. Tensions were largely papered over by rhetoric and myth-making, as if the elements of Fascism fit together neatly. Despite his opposition to certain particulars, Victor Emmanuel identified with the overall Fascist project to some extent, and he worried that outright opposition to the regime would jeopardize the monarchy. But as the Second World War went badly for Italy, the king finally deposed Mussolini. Nevertheless, Italy soon voted to eliminate the monarchy, discredited by its association with fascism.

Negotiating Foreign Influence in Fascist Italy: Nicola Festa on Greek Learning in Renaissance Humanism

ABSTRACT This article explores how the classical scholar Nicola Festa (1866–1940) outlined a fascisticized account of Renaissance humanism in a series of lectures later published as his Umanesimo (1935). It specifically examines Festa’s treatment of the role of Byzantine Greek scholars in Italian humanism. Fascism’s preoccupation with romanità and italianità implied a cultural anxiety over indebtedness to cultures regarded as foreign, un-Roman, and un-Italian. Greek language and culture posed a specific challenge as they had traditionally been regarded as both foreign and familiar to Italy’s national culture. This paper analyzes Festa’s response to this friction in his discussion of the Greek presence in Italian humanism, demonstrating how he dissociated the ‘Romans’ of Byzantium from the ‘true’ Italian representatives of humanism. The case study sheds some light on the understudied ways in which non-Italian influences could be negotiated in fascisticized accounts of Italian culture.

Losing an Empire: Fascist Italy’s Defeat in the Horn of Africa 1940–1941 and its Memory

Abstract This article analyses the campaign in Italian East Africa from an Italian point of view. It starts by setting out the grim strategic situation the commander in chief, the Duke of Aosta, was facing at the outbreak of hostilities. It then proceeds to cover the three phases of the campaign: the period from June 1940 until the end of the year, the second phase between January and May 1941, including the fall of Keren and Addis Ababa, and the third and final period until November 1941. This contribution will highlight the problems the Italian military struggled with, its shortcomings, but also its dogged defence, e.g. at the battle of Keren. The second part of this article looks at how the memory of the campaign was formed after the Second World War and how it related to more general aspects of Italian colonial history.

From Funnies to Adventures: Translation, Censorship, and Adaptation of American Comics in Fascist Italy

ABSTRACT: The development of modern Italian comics is intertwined with American culture. American funnies started to be published in Italian children's magazines at the beginning of the twentieth century and were adapted to the Italian tradition that saw comics as a means of education. It was only in the 1930s that comics became a form of entertainment, thanks to the publication of American adventure comics and Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse , which revolutionized the Italian comics landscape. However, the popularity of fumetti was challenged by the Fascist regime's restrictions and censorship, which specifically targeted American comics from 1938 and led to their forced disappearance in 1941. Despite the Fascist effort of creating a purely Italian popular culture—and comics—the success of American comics outlived the Fascist regime. This paper outlines the phases of modernization of Italian comics, paying particular attention to the impact of American comics and how they contributed to shape Italian comics in the Fascist era.

The Impact of the Ethiopian War on Italian Immigrants in Scotland

While Fascist Italy was fighting its colonial war in Ethiopia in 1935–6, a ‘parallel war’ was fought by Italian fascist branches abroad to retain the allegiance of the Italian immigrant communities and win their support. Drawing extensively on original Italian archival documents and the contemporary press, this article analyses how the invasion of Ethiopia affected the small Italian diaspora in Scotland. The propaganda used by Fascist Italy to justify the war and counteract British diplomatic hostility, as well as the central role of Italian fascists in Scotland, contributed to consolidating the national identity of a large number of Italian immigrants and links with their country of origin. This article will also explore how the Abyssinian war paved the way for the portrayal of the members of local fascist branches (and those who were not) as ‘enemies within’ by the British government and many sectors of the host society.

The coloniality of Italian fascist architecture

This article traces the modern history of the Piazza di Porta Capena in Rome. It begins with the design of a modernist building for the square by the architects Ridolfi and Cafiero in 1938 created to celebrate the empire of fascist Italy. The building was intended to host the Ministry of the Colonies and to be flanked by an ancient stele looted from Aksum in Ethiopia. With the shift to a new world order after 1945, the building was completed to serve as the headquarters of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. As part of Italy's belated commitment to reparations for colonial crimes, the stele was dismantled and reinstalled in Aksum in 2008. The void thus created in the piazza was filled by a new monument, this time a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attack in New York in 2001. Through the lens of the ‘coloniality of architecture', this article explores the changing aesthetics of the square, uncovering a history of shared rationalities between Italian fascist colonialism and its afterlife, as forms of government of ‘others'. By investigating the pìazza’s architectural configurations, it assists the re-orientation of narratives around the history of Italian fascist architecture.

The fascist Green Revolution

Societal Impact StatementThe Green Revolution is commonly understood as the dramatic increase in food production in Mexico and India between the 1940s and 1970s due to the spread of new agricultural technologies, especially high‐yielding seed varieties. Beyond this conventional understanding, however, historians are now revealing the occurrence of—and connections between—various Green Revolutions across space and time. This article identifies a “fascist Green Revolution” through the history of agrarian development and scientific wheat breeding in fascist Italy (1922–1943). Through this case study, the article provides new insights into key themes of discussion around the Green Revolution such as the relationship between plant breeding, the environment, food security, and food self‐sufficiency.Summary In 1925, the fascist regime launched the “Battle of Wheat,” a plan of agrarian development aimed at achieving self‐sufficiency in wheat, Italy's main food crop. Key to this project was the replacement of traditional landraces with “elite” semi‐dwarf and early‐maturing wheat cultivars released by Italy's star plant breeder Nazareno Strampelli. Through the historical analysis of Strampelli's breeding program and of the implementation of the fascist “seed replacement” strategy, this article makes the case for viewing the Battle of Wheat as a “fascist Green Revolution.” The article draws on new methods and perspectives developed by the historiography of the Green Revolution. It is grounded on the historical analysis of fascist‐era publications and archival documents produced by Italian crop scientists and agricultural research institutions. While “elite” cultivars spread rapidly in fertile and wealthy northern Italy, they struggled to take hold in the dry and poor Italian South. The article delineates the environmental, social, and economic reasons underpinning this divergence. Focusing in particular on agrarian scientists' approaches to crop improvement in the Italian South, the article shows how this “marginal” region became a key site for the development of scientific counter‐narratives and concrete alternatives to the official fascist strategy of “seed replacement.” The article reveals the co‐existence of multiple approaches over space and time within fascist‐era agrarian science. Through this case study, it provides new elements to analyze key themes in science and agriculture historiography such as the tension between hyper‐modernization and agroecological concerns, centralized and decentralized research, imported technologies and local resources.

The Geography of Surveillance: Spatial and Temporal Patterning of Police Surveillance Following Arrest in the First Years of the Special Tribunal in Fascist Italy, 1925-1928

Between 1925 and 1928, a fundamental strategy of the Italian fascist regime was the imposition of a political court, the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State [Tribunale Speciale per la Difesa dello Stato], to control its political enemies and the entire society. One unexplored aspect of the Special Tribunal was its use of long-term surveillance to monitor people brought before the court. Suspects were monitored for long periods even when found innocent or upon release from prison. Blending geographical and historical analysis, specifically HGIS (Historical Geographical Information System), this work contributes to highlight surveillance during the fascist regime, which was less brutal than others not because it was imperfect but because it was sophisticated. Thus, the article also contributes to the understanding of the nature of the Italian fascist regime in comparison to its contemporary counterparts.

Nazareno Strampelli and the first Green Revolution

AbstractThis article describes the wheat‐breeding work of the Italian agronomist Nazareno Strampelli, who was the first agronomist to cross Japanese and western wheat varieties to develop high‐yielding semidwarf wheat. The article describes the environmental and agricultural conditions that motivated Strampelli's breeding, the evolution of his varieties, their role in addressing agricultural and food supply problems in Fascist Italy, some of Strampelli's attitudes about agricultural improvement and the Fascist regime and the influence and heritage of his varieties for later agricultural improvements.

Histories of the Channel of Sicily: Architecture, Colonization, and Migrations across the Mediterranean Shores (1932–43)

Histories of modern and Fascist Italy have usually given little space to Italian colonialism, and histories of colonialism rarely mention the Italian South. This paper considers the agrarian colonization of Libya and Sicily together, reading them as key components of Italy’s nation-building and of the Fascist population politics. After the violent reconquest of Libya (1922–32) and the appropriation of all its fertile land, the Fascist regime turned to the rich and restless social fabric of the Italian South, which became the target for a new politics of space and population control. In a complex process of multiple exchanges, the agrarian colonization of Libya (1932–39) became the model for the agrarian colonization of Sicily (1939–43). By bringing together archives that have mostly been kept separate, this paper argues for a more nuanced notion of the South and colonialism. It does so by examining the ways colonialism was theorized and practiced, first by the Italian Liberal governments (1861–22) as a response to the nation’s southern question, and second by the Fascist regime (1922–43) as part of a wider project of reclamation of land and people in Italy and abroad. In particular, the paper compares the uncanny similarities between Fascist architecture and urbanism produced at the height of Fascist rule by the Ente di Colonizzazione della Libia and the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano. The paper asks, what links the politics of land, grain, and displacement in Libya and Southern Italy?

Victoria de Grazia. The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy.

A masterful interweaving of the personal and political, The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy bathes the triumphs and tragedies of Mussolini’s Italy in rich new light. Using an impressive array of fresh primary and multifarious secondary sources, the narrative recharts the panorama of Italian fascism through the ill-fated marriage of a “perfect fascist” to an independent-minded American Jewish opera singer. As Victoria de Grazia’s second book showed definitively in 1992, this was not the fascist wifely ideal, and if a scriptwriter proposed this story in Hollywood, it might seem too contrived. Yet a cornucopia of documentary evidence was felicitously made available by the diva’s relatives, and de Grazia uses it to create an extraordinary diorama of upper-echelon life in fascist Italy. A prologue begins the book by linking fascism’s capricious moral compass—corrupted by the regime’s “preoccupation with virility”—to today’s issues of “ultra-nationalism, white male supremacy, and racial conflict” (8–9). The main body is structured chronologically in four substantial parts. These cover 1912–1923, 1924–1928, 1929–1939, and 1940–1950—an uncontroversial periodization that maps smoothly onto the career of the man whose life drives the narrative. The parts’ one-word titles—“Strive,” “Grasp,” “Overreach,” and “Fall”—portend the story line while echoing staccato fascist slogans, such as “Believe, Obey, Fight.”

The Final Countdown: Fascism, Jazz, and the Afterlife

The general question underlying this article is whether it is possible to turn a paradox into a productive principle. The article approaches this question through Adorno’s and Dainotto’s analyses of the jazz movement in fascist Italy. Jazz was marked by a specific paradox: on the one hand, it was banned due to its African American roots, and as such did not adhere to or glorify the Italian tradition; on the other hand, jazz served very well to protect the nationalist interests in the light of the nascent mass movements. Against the backdrop of these analyses, the article proposes two distinct paradigms of exception: the logic of count till all and the logic of count till none.

“Dalle due sponde: Fascisms in Italy and the USA”: Then and now

This is an introduction to the articles that form the special issue on fascism in Italy and the USA in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

Unspoken Legacies of Fascism in Italy

As Italy marked the hundredth anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome, the leader of a post-fascist party became prime minister for the first time since World War II. Yet this was not a sudden resurgence; the legacies of fascism have permeated Italian society and politics for decades, taking shifting forms—not only on the far right.

Occult Imperium: Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism, and the Anti-Modern Reaction in Fascist Italy by Christian Giudice (review)

Occult Imperium: Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism, and the Anti-Modern Reaction in Fascist Italy by Christian Giudice (review)

Trad nationalist a/effects

Trad nationalist a/effects

Is Fascism really back in Italy?

Italy was the homeland of Fascism (proper noun). From 1922 until 1943, a self-described Fascist regime ruled the country. As a result of the national election on 25 September 2022, a political party with its roots in that Fascism became the dominant partner in a far-right coalition national government. Does this signify the full-fledged return of the past for Italy's future or does it represent something else again? As Umberto Eco once claimed, Fascism was an unstable cocktail of beliefs and practices associated increasingly with the whims of one man: Benito Mussolini. From this perspective, unlike Nazism, which can be plausibly defined neatly in terms of its central obsessions with biological races and anti-semitism, Fascism has lent itself to multiple interpretations. Hence, fascism (common noun) has become a term used in a myriad of ways to describe a range of political ideologies, albeit all anchored to the singular significance of national identities at the expense of much else. I challenge Eco's claim that Fascism had no elemental ideological core and then trace the history of Fascism in Italy and how its memory lived on after the demise of the regime most intimately connected to it. I then turn to recent Italian politics and what the changed historical-geographical context of the times suggests about which elements, if any, of the original Fascism can be expected to re-emerge under the new regime. I end with the conclusion that whatever “fascism” does presently emerge in Italy will be unlike the original version. In fact, most of the core of what branded the original Fascism looks mostly irreproducible in contemporary Italy.

Jews as Non-Aryans: The Vatican's Ambivalent Embrace of Fascist Italy's Racialization of Jews

In the summer of 1938, Italy's Fascist regime announced its new ‘racial’ policy, soon to be followed by a series of draconian racial laws. The policy was based on the principle that Catholic Italians were of the Aryan race and Jewish Italians belonged to a separate race of non-Aryans. Previously the Vatican had made no such racial distinction. Yet, notwithstanding the frequent claim that the Church has never distinguished between Catholics and Jews on racial grounds, the Vatican quickly began to assimilate to the Fascist state's distinction of Jews as racially marked as non-Aryan. The opening in 2020 of the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XII (1939–58) has made available a huge trove of documents bearing on the way the pope and the Vatican secretariat of state dealt with Italy's racial laws and with the subsequent persecution of Italy's Jews during German occupation. As shown in this article, these documents make clear the Vatican's use of racial language and racial concepts as it dealt with the racial laws and the persecution of Italy's Jews from the time the racial laws were introduced in 1938 to the years of the Holocaust.

The Meites sisters and the Spanish Civil War: women's support for Republican Spain from within and without

ABSTRACT Haya and Rurh Meites left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against the nationalist rebellion headed by General Francisco Franco and assisted by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Their life trajectories illustrate international women’s participation in the Spanish fratricide and its limits. According to different estimates, around 700 women volunteered in Spain during the Civil War. They constituted a tiny fraction of the 35,000 or more international volunteers who flocked to Spain to support the Republican forces. Not a few of the women who wanted to enlist were rejected for their presumed inability to contribute to the anti-Fascist struggle. Whereas men could be drafted to the Brigades without any previous military experience, many of the women of the Brigades had been trained nurses and doctors, and their professional skills served to justify their enlistment. While the historiography of the International Brigades is remarkably rich, the history of women volunteers has not been sufficiently researched. Even less scholarly attention has been paid to the enlistment of Jewish women, despite their relative prominence. This article, with its focus on the lives of two women from Jewish Palestine, hopes to partially fill this lacuna.

Arctic science and politics in Fascist Italy. Italian polar expeditions and the International Polar Exhibition in the interwar years

ABSTRACT In 1928, the airship Italia, commanded by Umberto Nobile, crashed on the way back from the North Pole. The tragic outcome of his expedition interrupted the organization of significant Arctic explorations and generated a fracture between Mussolini’s regime and polar studies. The Fascist regime implicitly expressed its shame for its role in the whole unfortunate expedition and the subject became taboo in the entire country. Almost ten years later, in 1937, Norway invited all countries that had previously undertaken polar expeditions to participate in the first International Polar Exhibition (Internasjonal utstilling for polarforskning), planned to be held from May 1940. Considering the polemics after the 1928 Arctic expedition, the Norwegians’ eager efforts to solicit Italy’s participation in the exhibition may appear surprizing. Therefore, this work aims to better understand these dynamics, seeing the uncertainties surrounding Italy’s participation in the polar exhibition in light of Nobile’s pivotal role in the organization of Fascist Italy’s polar explorations.