Italian Fascist Regime Research Articles

The Living Archive

Abstract This article discusses the practices of documentation and archiving related to classical performance in the Italian Fascist regime, and their implications for the study of fascist art and culture more widely. The first part discusses a number of institutions as the sites of Italian Fascism’s archiving of classical performance. The second part, drawing on the work of Eric Ketelaar and Amalia G. Sabiescu, considers how Italian Fascism made use of the historically connoted ‘cultural tools’ of ancient Greek theatre as ‘living archives’. It discusses the aesthetic means that came to characterize all classical performances as living archives and considers the use of ancient Greek and Roman sites all over the peninsula and in colonized Libya as the archival sites of the classical performances. In the conclusion, it argues that the combination of performance and archives empowered these cultural tools to become the means for the reconstruction and transmission of Fascism’s newly crafted social memory and identity of the Italian nation.

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.

White blouses in the blackshirt nation: women and uniforms in Fascist italy

ABSTRACT Uniforms were a core element of the visual spectacle of the Italian Fascist regime and a means for its supporters to publicly proclaim their political allegiance. Initially considered intrinsically masculine, part of the Fascist quest to bolster Italian virility, there was considerable hostility to the idea of women in uniform. By the mid-1930s, however, women were allowed and even encouraged to wear uniforms, albeit in different versions to those worn by men, versions that underscored their marginal position in the party. Drawing on archival and contemporary press sources, as well as memoirs, this article explores the meaning and limitations of uniform-wearing for the millions of female Italians who eventually wore them, looking at aspects like the impact on women’s role and visibility in the regime, the symbols embedded in the uniforms’ garments and insignia, and women’s and girls’ experience of wearing them.

"Man Who Won the War": Myth and Reality of Aldo Castellani's Role in Preserving the Health of Troops During the Italo-Ethiopian War 1935-1936.

The invasion of the ancient Ethiopian empire perpetrated by the Italian fascist regime in 1935-1936 deserves all the blame due to a war of aggression, a belated colonial enterprise and a bullying act of a totalitarian regime. Yet there is one aspect of that war that aroused universal admiration among contemporaries and which still deserves to be analysed today: the healthcare of troops. The Italian army, which came close to half a million men, was the largest European army that had ever fought in tropical or sub-tropical territories. Many Cassandras expected a health catastrophe, even more than a military one. But Mussolini decided to entrust Sir Aldo Castellani, the famous tropicalist doctor who had been living between Italy and England for years, with the role of Inspector General of Military and Civilian Health Services for East Africa. At the end of the seven-month victorious military campaign, the very low number of casualties recorded due to illness or injury evoked amazement and admiration. This was not just propaganda, as proved by the uncountable invitations from military and health authorities all over the world (including some of the nations that had imposed economic sanctions against Italy a few months earlier) for Castellani to reveal his secret through lectures, articles and conferences. Even US President Franklyn D. Roosevelt, who as a polio sufferer was particularly sensitive to public health issues, asked for and obtained a long private interview with Castellani, the "man who won the war".

A Root Which Never Grew

Abstract Prior to the Second World War, Malta appeared vulnerable to fascist influence due to the connections between the Italian Fascist regime and Malta’s irredentist political movement, then led by Nerik Mizzi. In part this Fascist influence was present in cultural propaganda promoting irredentist ideas such as the ‘Mare Nostrum’, which Mizzi and his conservative political party, the Partito Nazionalista, helped propagate. However, previously unseen British documents also reveal significant financial support by the Italian government to Mizzi and his political activities. Mizzi never disclosed this, including the financial support he was granted by Mussolini after having met him personally in Rome on 30 November 1936. Mizzi never openly expounded fascist views, although he consistently supported an irredentist vision of Malta and openly campaigned for Malta to fall under Italy’s jurisdiction. Meanwhile, support for domestic fascist organisations was negligible. At the onset of the War, the Imperial Government started to clamp down on the irredentists, eventually exiling Mizzi and most of his collaborators. The author argues that Mizzi’s dalliance with fascism was not just a convenient relationship for a greater cause, but also a direct acceptance of fascist politics given that making Malta part of Italy’s jurisdiction would also have meant accepting fascist rule.

The Italian Catholic Press and the Racial Laws (1938–1943)

Abstract Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the role of the Roman Catholic Church in encouraging popular acceptance of the Italian Fascist regime’s antisemitic campaign and its “racial laws” (effective from 1938 to 1943). Investigation of major Italian Catholic daily newspapers, the Fascist press, and Italian and French diplomatic archives reveals how the Church communicated its support for these racial laws by distinguishing unacceptable German racism from Church-sanctioned anti-Jewish measures.

Fascist foodways: Ricettari as propaganda for grain production and sexual reproduction

Food connects people and land, a link that the Italian Fascist regime exploited through their seizure of local culinary culture for the promotion of national demographic goals. This article traces the connections between the regime’s concurrent drives for food production and sexual reproduction. It will show the propagandistic potential of recipes, and also the limits of top-down dietary change under dictatorship. Ricettari, propagandistic recipe pamphlets, blended public politics and private practices into a heady cocktail, one that cast autarkic cookery and sexual reproduction as valuable contributions to the Fascist state. These documents establish a clear link between the regime’s demographic policy and the autarkic campaigns in favor of Italian grain production. Cooking, the professed subject of ricettari, conveyed political neutrality—it falsely marked the documents as feminine and innocuous. So too did design: small and light, these stapled leaflets could be easily rolled up and stuck in an apron pocket. Portability thus insured that these documents could cross the threshold from the public rally to the private kitchen. Once there, they could directly address women, and attempt to modify their daily habits in ways that would change the body from the inside out. At stake in the ricettari lies a broader contribution to Food Studies in terms of food and politics: this unique form of ephemera reveals that the Italian Fascist regime took a pronatalist approach to cuisine.

Literatura para infância e autoritarismo: releituras fascistas de Pinóquio

O presente artigo aborda as releituras da obra Pinóquio (1883), comumente denominadas pinocchiate, enredos breves que foram publicados na Itália após a morte de seu autor, o jornalista e escritor Carlo Lorenzini, mais conhecido por Carlo Collodi (Florença, 1846-1890). O que motivou este exame foram os questionamentos acerca do valor simbólico da literatura para infância, de seu aspecto permeável a diferentes ideologias e de sua sujeição a diversos tipos de apagamentos, especialmente ao longo do século XX quando estados autoritários encabeçaram ações capazes de questionar a própria noção de civilização ou humanidade. Governos de caráter autoritário tendem a tomar a educação escolar como canal de cooptação aos seus regimes e, por consequência, os livros de leitura escolar se transformam em vetores modelares para que tal arregimentação se efetive. As derivações da obra Pinóquio destinadas ao uso escolar cujos enredos tomaram por base ideais defendidos pelo regime fascista italiano encabeçado por Benito Mussolini (Forlì 1883 – Mezzegra 1945) são exemplos concretos destes veículos de doutrinação.

Large scale analysis of violent death count in daily newspapers to quantify bias and censorship

In this work we develop a series of techniques and tools to determine and quantify the presence of bias and censorship in newspapers. These algorithms are tested analyzing the occurrence of keywords ‘killed’ and ‘suicide’ (‘morti’’, ‘suicidio’ in Italian) and their changes over time, gender and reported location on the complete online archives (42 million records) of the major US newspaper (The New York Times) and the three major Italian ones (Il Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa). Using these tools, since the Italian language distinguishes between the female and male cases, we find the presence of gender bias in all Italian newspapers, with reported single female deaths to be about one-third of those involving single men. Analyzing the historical trends, we show evidence of censorship in Italian newspapers both during World War 1 and during the Italian Fascist regime. Censorship in all countries during World Wars and in Italy during the Fascist period is a historically ascertained fact, but so far there was no estimate on the amount on censorship in newspaper reporting: in this work we estimate that about 75% of domestic deaths and suicides were not reported. This is also confirmed by statistical analysis of the distribution of the least significant digit of the number of reported deaths. We also find that the distribution function of the number of articles vs. the number of deaths reported in articles follows a power law, which is broken (with fewer articles being written) when reporting on few deaths occurring in foreign countries. The lack of articles is found to grow with geographical distance from the nation where the newspaper is being printed. Whereas the assessment of the truth of a single article or the debunking of what are now called ‘fake news’ requires specific fact-checking and becomes more difficult as time goes by, these methods can be used in historical analysis and to evaluate quantitatively the amount of bias and censorship present in other printed or online publication and can thus contribute to quantitatively assess the freedom of the press in a given country. Furthermore, they can be applied in wider contexts such as the evaluation of bias toward specific ethnic groups or specific accidents.

The refiguring of Ancient Rome in Fascist Italy's national imagination

AbstractThe relationship between the Italian fascist regime and Roman archaeology was based on an extreme simplification of antiquity, reduced to a set of aesthetic motifs used to exploit their symbolic power. This article aims to examine how the culture of the ruling classes of liberal Italy came to identify its past in ancient Rome and then to highlight the decontextualisation and semantic transformation of certain symbols taken from ancient Roman iconography under the fascist regime which used them for political and nationalistic purposes. Through the analysis of the process of isolation and transformation to which the ruins of ancient Rome have been subjected, the article highlights how the same dynamics were adopted for iconographic elements of antiquity, leading to the creation of modern symbols invested with supposedly ancient values.

Agricultural Policy and Long-Run Development: Evidence from Mussolini's Battle for Grain

AbstractThis article explores the long-run effect of agricultural policies on industrialisation and economic development. I analyse the differential effect of the Battle for Grain, implemented by the Italian Fascist regime to achieve self-sufficiency in wheat, on the development path across areas of Italy. Employing cross-sectional variation in land suitability for advanced wheat production technologies, along with time variation in their diffusion, I find that the policy had unintended positive effects on industrialisation and economic prosperity, which have persisted until today. Furthermore, I find that the complementarity between human capital and agricultural technology was a critical mechanism.

Optimizing and normalizing the population through hormone therapies in Italian science, c.1926-1950.

This essay explores how hormone treatments were used to optimize and normalize individuals under Italian Fascism. It does so by taking the activities of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute - an Italian eugenics and endocrinological centre founded by Nicola Pende in 1926 - as the prime example of a version of eugenics, biotypology, which was based on hormone therapies. This essay first demonstrates that Italian Fascist biopolitics was not only concerned with increasing the size of the Italian population, but also with improving its quality. It suggests that under the Italian Fascist regime hormone therapies became eugenic tools of intervention to improve the Italian race. Second, while Pende's institute purportedly enhanced men and women, its activities show the extent to which the 'techniques of normalization' pursued by the Fascist regime were both systematic and invasive.

The Italian Fascist regime, the Catholic Church and Protestant religious minorities in ‘terre redente’ (1918–40)

This article explores the policies of discrimination and oppression towards Protestant communities in interwar Italy exercised by the state authorities and often incited by the Catholic Church. In particular, the circumstances in the multi-ethnic north-eastern region, the Julian March, are analysed in the context of so-called Border Fascism. The Protestant Churches had had in the past a prevalently ethnic character, but with the annexation to Italy, their background had been in several cases either concealed or, through migrations, Italians eventually became majorities. Another significant characteristic is that Slovene and Croatian minorities only rarely adhered to Protestantism, other than the relatively few Seventh-day Adventists and ‘Fratelli’. Based on the archival documents, oppressive actions of the Fascist authorities against Adventists in Trieste as a response to a complaint by the Catholic curia accusing them of proselytism are reconstructed. The investigations and harassments of Adventists show all basic similarities to the episodes of oppression against certain Protestant minorities in other parts of Italy, while the nationality of their members was a crucial factor in determining why of all minority religions, aside from the Jewish, it was this community which experienced the most oppressive police treatment in the Julian March region.

Italian Fascism and the Portuguese Estado Novo: international claims and national resistance

ABSTRACTTaking into consideration the transnational dimension of Fascism that had its epicentre in Italy − as Mussolini’s purpose of “marching throughout the streets of Europe and the World” plainly illustrates − this article explores the connections between the Italian Fascist regime and the Portuguese Estado Novo during the interwar period. From the moment Fascism became attractive for Portuguese intellectuals, state officers, and politicians, until it became a colonial threat to the Portuguese empire, the cultural diplomacy apparatuses of the two countries will be analysed from a balanced, bi-lateral perspective, encompassing actors, transferences, and resistances.

Cultivating Arid Soils in Libya and Brazil during World War Two: The Two-fold War between Colonial and Neo-colonial Experiences

Abstract This paper compares two schemes of agrarian transformation that occurred during World War Two in Libya and northeast Brazil, undertaken by the Italian fascist regime and US private and governmental officials respectively. Although developing different historical trajectories, these similar efforts aiming to convert desert and semi-arid areas into productive fields intertwined with military services and reflected colonial and post-colonial appropriations in the Global South. The article demonstrates how both Libya and Brazil represented militarised environments and contested spaces well beyond the WW2 timeframe and how the colonial expansion projects that preceded and resulted from WW2 combined military campaigns and mastery over nature. Our analysis builds upon Italian and US primary sources and scholarly publications in environmental history.

Towards the contemporary development of modern architecture inherited from the Fascist regime: the city of Sabaudia.

Carried out by the Italian fascist regime, the creation of the town of Sabaudia occurred during the draining of the Pontine Marshes in an intervention that was central to efforts in the organization of rural territory. This paper explores the “reinvention” of Sabaudia through an analysis of its town plan and buildings from the 1970s. Recent practices of conservation, preservation and restoration of this modern inheritance were studied. A lack of knowledge led to the modification or the demolition of some buildings. I review how these attempts to consider the legacies of Italian history were met with refusal in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the 2000s when a heritage-making policy was enacted to promote the town. The political question resurfaces here: does “patrimonialization” permit giving this architecture, resulting from a totalitarian regime, a recognition that is incompatible with their political origin? That is to say, can we think about Sabaudia without thinking about fascism? The presentation of some projects of renovation and restoration will highlight several questions regarding modern aesthetics, the relation to landscape, as well as uses and techniques.

L'inferno e il rifugio di Arbe. Slavi ed ebrei in un campo di concentramento italiano, tra fascismo, Resistenza e Shoah

In the context of the Nazi-Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia, this paper examines two parallel events that concerned Italy as an occupying nation: the repressive internment of Slavic civilians in Slovenian and Croatian areas; and the internment of Jews in Croatian areas annexed or submitted to Italian occupation. The paper analyses the establishment of Arbe/Rab. In 1943, Slavs and Jews were interned in two separate sections of the camp. The Slavs defined their experience as hell on earth, while the Jews saw it as a fortunate shelter. The first passed to history as one of the harshest episodes of Fascist persecution of minorities and war crimes, the second as an example of humanitarian intervention. Based on both witnesses and historiographical sources, this paper examines different types of internment practiced by the Italian Fascist regime in Yugoslavia: the repressive, the precautionary and the protective ones. Internment policies in Arbe, and the second occupation zone, and the treatment of some Jews as distinct from that of other groups of Slavs and Jews are analysed within three contexts: the policy of rejection of Jews at the Italian Croatian border; the creation of the clandestine Slovenian organization, Osvonodilna Fronta and its offspring, the Rabska Brigade, joined also by Croatian and Jewish internees; and the controversial death of Arbe’s commander.

Un pálido reflejo del fascismo: la dictadura de Primo de Rivera en los informes diplomáticos italianos

La investigación en que se basa este artículo se inscribe en el proyecto “España en la crisis del sistema liberal: una perspectiva externa, 1917-1936”, financiado por el Plan Nacional de I+D+I (HAR2012-31460), y cuyo investigador principal es el profesor Hipólito de la Torre.

Mussolini in Ethiopia, 1919-1935: the origins of Fascist Italy's African war

Mussolini in Ethiopia, 1919–1935 looks in detail at the evolution of the Italian Fascist regime's colonial policy within the context of European politics and the rise to power of German National Socialism. It delves into the tortuous nature of relations between the National Fascist Party and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), while demonstrating how, ultimately, a Hitler-led Germany proved the best mechanism for overseas Italian expansion in East Africa. The book assesses the emergence of an ideologically driven Fascist colonial policy from 1931 onwards and how this eventually culminated in a serious clash of interests with the British Empire. Benito Mussolini's successful flouting of the League of Nations' authority heralded a new dark era in world politics and continues to have its resonance in today's world.

The rhetorical construction of Popular Front France in the fascist Italian press during the ‘Paris, 1937’ international exhibition

This article will discuss propaganda in the press used by the Italian fascist regime to create and disseminate a negative image of France and socialism. The ‘Paris, 1937’ exhibition represented a pretext for the Italian press to attack the Popular Front on both policy and competence. Manipulating information, the propaganda fabricated an idea of ‘otherness’, presenting France as the chaotic antithesis to the orderly Italian regime. France was presented as a country full of drunks and idlers, as a nation descending into chaos due to the social economic reforms of the Blum government; images that were juxtaposed with a state thriving under fascist corporatism. With the use of archive files and press-clippings, this work intends to illustrate the construction of stereotypes to feed the fear of socialism in Italy by the fascist press.