Il Popolo Research Articles

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

‘Andare verso il popolo (Moving Towards the People)’: Classicism and Rural Architecture at the 1936 VI Italian Triennale

At the sixth Milan Triennale in 1936, entitled ‘Continuity-Modernity’, Giuseppe Pagano and Edoardo Persico displayed two divergent but complementary ideological and aesthetic positions: leaning toward classicism and showcasing rural examples, respectively. This article focuses on how these two approaches share similarities with the idea of populism, a concept often associated with dictatorial regimes. Populism implies a defined and strict notion of people and of national identity. This article explores the relevance of the expression ‘andare verso il popolo’, here translated as ‘moving towards the people’, a term used by Pagano in an article in Casabella of 1935 to define what a national architecture could be. It also explores how architecture can be popular without being populist. The central argument is that the phrase ‘moving towards the people’ became a politicised expression embodying two contrasting conceptions of a populism in which architectural ideas playing a defining role. The context is the architectural discourse during the controversial period of the Fascist regime and the rationalist debate in Italy between 1928 and 1936. The two main venues of the architectural debate were Casabella, which the same Pagano and Persico had been editing since 1931, and Quadrante, founded by the intellectual and literary figures Pietro Maria Bardi and Massimo Bontempelli in 1933. The two different aesthetic positions of Persico and Pagano within the 1936 Triennale would later be associated with two contrasting lines of populism: one more conservative and associated with the Fascist regime, and the other more reactionary that influenced the resistenza of the left.

‘HE SAW WHAT HE WANTED TO SEE’: REPUTATION, JEALOUSY, AND THE LAW. THE UXORICIDE OF GISELDA ZANOLO

Drawing on articles published in the Corriere della Sera, Il Popolo d'Italia and La Stampa, this study examines a case of uxoricide that occurred in 1923, focusing on the way in which the murderer and his lawyers were able to convince both the general public and the jury that the murderer's jealous nature was a mental illness, leading to him avoiding a prison sentence. The victim, the murderer's wife, was depicted as a physically attractive woman of dubious sexual reputation. Such characteristics were deemed to have triggered her husband's jealousy, thus rendering her culpable, the agent of her own homicide. In place of a picture of uxoricide in revenge for tarnished honour, the murderer portrayed himself as the powerless victim of love and jealousy. Through a close analysis of the strategy adopted by the defendant's lawyers, this article shows how centuries-old gendered stereotypes and ideas of respectability affected the law in action and permeated early twentieth-century Italian society.

La presse italienne et la persécution des Juifs d’Europe de l’Est en 1941

As of today, there has not been sufficient work done on the information that the German and Italian press provided on the extermination of the Jews during World War II. This paper analyzes the Italian press. When Italian journalists were sent to the Eastern front in 1941 at the beginning of the Jewish extermination in the East, what did they see and what did they hide? How did the Fascist press relay, or rather, conceal and change, the news regarding the tragic fate of the Jews in Eastern Europe? This paper addresses these topics through article analysis and through the examination of archival documents and unpublished memoirs. In our research, we consulted the following daily newspapers: La Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera, Il Popolo d’Italia, Il Giornale d’Italia, Il Tempo, La Tribuna and Il Tevere. The archival documents came from public archives and newspapers such as the Corriere della Sera, which published the first version of the famous Curzio Malaparte article on the Iasi pogrom that was later completely revised. At the end of the paper, a brief analysis is made of the photos that accompany certain texts.

The bride in red: morality and private relationships in the Italian revolutionary Left – the case of the Maoist group Servire il popolo

This article examines internal developments within the revolutionary Left as part of intense social conflicts in 1970s Italy. It focuses on issues related to sexuality, family and gender relations within the Maoist group Servire il popolo (To Serve the People) and shows the non-linear trajectory that the sexual practices of Italian Maoists followed from the late 1960s onwards. In particular, I argue that in lambasting the sexual openness of the New Left in Italy at the end of the 1960s, the Maoists under study chastised sexual patterns that strayed from the norm of the stable heterosexual couple. In this vein, they promoted endogamy, most prominently with the introduction of the so-called ‘Communist’ or ‘red’ wedding in 1972, which continued until the group dissolved. Despite the fact that Servire il Popolo advocated the most stringent approach to sexuality and gender within the Italian Left of the 1970s, this article demonstrates that it was not the only Italian left-wing organisation that endorsed such a moralistic attitude at the time.

Eugenio Morreale, el último fascista en España (1943-1945)

As seen in this study Eugenio Morreale wasn't a professional diplomat in the traditional way, but he was a good representative of fascism and even a convinced fascist. We don't know a lot about his life until his stay in Vienna as correspondent of the newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia , but we know many interesting things about his activities after the Spanish Civil War when he arrived at Malaga to preside the consulate in the Andalusian city. With the Italian armistice of 1943, and the defection of the ambassador in Spain from the Mussolini cause, he became the last bastion of the Italian dictator in the country. Here we examine the particular features of the last man who defended the Italian political ideology in a new project: the Italian Social Republic.

Tragedy without society: Alfieri’s Italian theater and the discourse of value

This essay explores the connections between the meditations on theater by the Italian pre‐Romantic tragedian Vittorio Alfieri and the larger European discussion about the centrality of civic society in the creation of “literary value,” a notion born in large part because of the emergence of two defining Enlightenment disciplines, aesthetics and political economy. In lamenting Italy’s lack of civil society – a view echoed in the most important Romantic foreign novel about Italy, Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (Corinne, or Italy, 1807) – Alfieri’s writings reveal the major obstacles for the creation of a tragic stage in an Italy lacking the same public sphere that was elsewhere transforming European culture. The enormous semantic pressure Alfieri exerts upon the signifier il popolo (the people) in his tragedy Bruto secondo (The Second Brutus, 1789) gives aesthetic form to his ideas about the absence of the necessary national and social components for an Italian tragic theater.

Margherita Sarfatti & Italian Cultural Nationalism

From the early 1920s when Benito Mussolini first came to power through the end of the first decade of the fascist rule, Margherita Sarfatti played a dominant role in the formulation of a new variety of Italian cultural nationalism. A cultural advisor, art critic, socialist turned fascist, and Mussolini's lover, she both directly and indirectly shaped the cultural policies of the Italian regime. As Victoria de Grazia suggests, Sarfatti "wielded immense personal power through her capacity to bring together intellectuals, artists, and the political personnel of the regime." Over time, she "manipulated the regime's burgeoning patronage networks to promote the Novecento as a 'national school,'" helped to found the review Gerarchia, largely created the public image of the Mussolini in her authorized biography Dux (1925), and "reigned, doyenne of official intellectual life."1 In their biography of Sarfatti, Philip V. Cannistraro, and Brian R. Sullivan have argued that "Margherita had brought a degree of cultural respectability to a movement that otherwise appeared to be nothing more than a gang of violent, anti-intellectual thugs."2 Nancy Harrowitz has addressed Sarfatti's complicated identity as a Jewish woman (she later converted to Catholicism) involved in a largely masculinist and later anti-Jewish regime. Sarfatti, she writes, "was to a great degree the author of fascism itself and thus also the author of those conditions which produced such profound identity shifts within herself."3 Despite her importance to this period of cultural history, however, Sarfatti's writings remain unavailable in English translation: a situation that the present dossier sets out to remedy in the form of a brief but representative sampling of her early writings on art for Mussolini's newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia. [End Page 889] Margherita Grassini Sarfatti was born in Venice in April 1880 to wealthy, unassimilated Jewish parents. Thanks to her private teachers Pietro Orsi, Pompeo Molmenti, and Antonio Fradeletto, whose careers combined investment in art with political engagement, her education included significant exposure to art and art criticism. Despite her parents' social position, she became a committed socialist early on, in 1898 marrying the socialist lawyer Cesare Sarfatti, the member of another prosperous Venetian family. The Sarfattis moved to Milan in 1902, and about this time Margherita began her career as an art critic. In 1903, she was awarded a prize for her articles on the Fifth Venice Biennale, published in Gazzetta degli Artisti (Venice) and La Patria (Rome). From 1903 to 1908, Margherita contributed art criticism to such periodicals as Avanti! (Milan), Avanti della Domenica (Florence then Rome), L'Adriatico (Ancona), Varietas (Milan), and the Gazzetta di Venezia, securing a regular post at the socialist daily Avanti! in 1908.4 These early years demonstrate the extent to which her thinking about art was from the beginning intertwined with her ideas about politics and social change. Sarfatti's influence in the art world was greatly aided by her political and amorous involvement with Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was a rising star in the socialist party, and in December 1912, he took over the editorship of Avanti! This was the period in which Sarfatti first cemented her ties to the avant-gardes, and such figures as Achille Funi, Leonardo Dudreville, Carlo Erba, and Antonio Sant'Elia became frequent guests of her salon.5 Although they still identified themselves with futurism, Sarfatti saw in them the beginnings of a calmer classicizing trend in the modern movement. In 1914, she reviewed their "New Tendencies" exhibition for Avanti!, celebrating the work of Funi and Dudreville in a review that marks a transition in her career from being a mere observer of the art world to that of advocate and promoter.6 As the political situation shifted—in Italy in general, and in the socialist party in particular—Sarfatti gained additional clout. In October 1914, Mussolini broke with the socialist party over the question of Italian neutrality in World War I: although the socialists opposed the war, he believed Italy should intervene. Sarfatti...

Mussolini's unofficial mouthpiece: Telesio Interlandi ‐ Il Tevere and the evolution of Mussolini's anti‐Semitism

The Fascist newspaper Il Tevere was founded by Mussolini in December 1924 and directed by Telesio Interlandi from the first to the last issue (it ceased publication with the fall of il Duce on 25 July 1943). It was an object of controversy between those who maintained that it was subsidized by Hitler and those who argued instead that it was the unofficial organ of the Italian dictator, just as Il Popolo d'Italia was his official organ. In this article we examine the issue using Italian and German sources, both published and unpublished, with the result that we join the majority of scholars in favor of the second hypothesis.

AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER: BENITOCC MUSSOLINI TO PAOLO BUZZI

As far as the present author has been able to ascertain, this letter, handwritten on the notepaper of Il Popolo d'Italia, has not previously been published, nor has it been mentioned by any writer on Mussolini, Futurism or Fascism, with the exception of herself. Its interest lies in the warmth with which Mussolini addresses Paolo Buzzi, who was one of the leading Italian futurists, having previously received a letter from him which is described as ‘riboccante di simpatia’.

AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER: BENITOCC MUSSOLINI TO PAOLO BUZZI

As far as the present author has been able to ascertain, this letter, handwritten on the notepaper of Il Popolo d'Italia, has not previously been published, nor has it been mentioned by any writer on Mussolini, Futurism or Fascism, with the exception of herself. Its interest lies in the warmth with which Mussolini addresses Paolo Buzzi, who was one of the leading Italian futurists, having previously received a letter from him which is described as ‘riboccante di simpatia’.