Over half a century before Mussolini’s Caesarean march on Rome in 1922 (although, in the event, the Duce himself infamously took a sleeping car to Rome), Giuseppe Garibaldi, similarly set on the eternal city, marshaled his forces in the struggle for the reunification of Italy (the Risorgimento) under the banner of the ancient republican tradition (Bondanella 1997; Treves 1962). The general, along with many of his Risorgimento colleagues, invoked the republican trappings of ancient Rome as the symbol by and through which all Italy could be united, with all Italians heirs, figuratively and literally, of antiquity (Bondanella 1987; Giardina and Vauchez 2000). ‘‘Rome,’’ Momigliano has observed, ‘‘was more than a claim to ancient greatness: it was a promise of unity’’ (Momigliano 1987: 78).
In the decades following the Risorgimento this (re)turn to Rome remained a central and defining feature of the Italian political and intellectual landscape. Despite Mazzini’s insistence on the ‘‘universal’’ and nonimperial nature of the ‘‘idea’’ of Rome, romanita (Romanness) nevertheless gave impetus to Italy’s efforts to reestablish and expand its empire in the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (campaigns that sowed the seeds for Mussolini’s own imperial ambitions, most notoriously the invasion and conquest of Abyssinia in 1935). Emilio Gentile, for one, has noted that this increasingly conservative concept of romanita acquired an almost religious dimension and offered both an alternative to the unifying power of the Roman Catholic Church, which had resisted the reunification of Italy (and the loss of the Papal States) throughout the nineteenth century, and a legitimizing narrative for a new ‘‘civilizing’’ imperial mission (Gentile 1990,1993). The subsequent rise and - more importantly - success of nationalist romanita as political religion and cult in the Fascist regime of 1922-43 had its roots, therefore, in the political consciousness of the recently unified nation-state, and was frequently associated - whether legitimately or not - with the Mazzinian Risorgimento ideal (Chabod 1951: 179-323; Giardina and Vauchez 2000: 117-21). Romanita was, then, an integral part of an educated Italian’s mindset (Visser 1992).
In this sense, despite its claims to have precipitated a radical ‘‘new order’’ in Italy, Italian Fascism, qua intellectual endeavor, inherited and developed, rather than revolutionized, the political terrain (Wyke 1999a; Sternhell 1978). Mussolini himself, in a speech given in 1925 before the national association of war-wounded, argued that Italian Fascism was the continuation of the Mazzinian Risorgimento by means of its extension to the people en masse: where the nineteenth-century liberal intelligentsia had failed in creating a vital and organic third Italian civilization (after Rome and the Renaissance), Fascism would succeed (Susmel 1951-81: 29:439-41; Gentile 1997). While I would not want to insist on its intellectual ‘‘qualities,’’ it is clear that, although Italian Fascism indulged in political hooliganism, anti-intellectualism did not amount to a defining feature of the movement as it did in National Socialism. In any case, academics and intellectuals were not only attracted to it, but also central to some of its formative and foundational moments. The myth of Rome was frequently intrinsic to this process (Cagnetta 1976; Canfora 1976, 1980, 1989).
However, as Stone and Aicher, among others, have shown, romanita was a malleable and ever-changing phenomenon (Stone 1999; Aicher 2000). For Aicher, at least, its adoption by Fascism signified a ‘‘distinctive new phase of the myth of Rome,’’ which, ‘‘always present, ... now took center stage’’ (Aicher 2000: 119). In fact, more than this, it can be argued that in the two decades of Fascist rule in Italy, three distinct stages of romanita, correlative to the three main phases of the regime, are visible. Maria Wyke offers a succinct and helpful summary of this trajectory:
From the establishment of the regime in 1922 to the proclamation of a dictatorship in 1925, ancient Rome was translated into an ideal model for present revolutionary action, for the organization of combat, and for the promotion of Italian unity. Romanita then took on fresh authority and a new direction in the long build up to and following the declaration of an Italian empire, which took place in May 1936 after the conclusion of the Ethiopian war. Rome’s empire was now persistently mobilized to justify an aggressive foreign policy, imperial expansion, and a claim to new territories in the Mediterranean. Finally, in a climate of increasing racism towards the end of the 1930s, the Romans and their Latin language were utilized to isolate and elaborate the presumed physical, spiritual, and moral perfection of their Italian descendants. (Wyke 1999b: 168)
This use of Rome, as its historical precedents indicate, was not an opportunistic anomaly; rather, romanita comes to stand for the apparent paradox at the heart of Italian Fascism itself. For just as Fascism claimed both to bring about national renewal through the rejection of the previous, bourgeois order and also to continue and to reinvigorate the Risorgimento project, so, too, was romanita a ‘‘flexible’’ myth, both revolutionary and reactionary. Rome, therefore, not merely offered coherence or continuity for Italian Fascism, but was a critical palingenetic myth that shaped and propelled it (Stone 1999; Griffin 1991: 73-4).
At the epicenter of the use of Rome in the political currency of Italian Fascism and critical to this tripartite development was Benito Mussolini himself, not merely in his enthusiastic endorsement of romanita as a central tenet of Fascist ideology, but particularly in the analogies drawn - by the Duce, his supporters, and, indeed, his critics - between the dictator and at first Caesar, and then Augustus (Cagnetta 1976; Wyke 1999b). As Griffin writes, ‘‘[a]ll [the] myths of national renewal were subsumed in the leader-cult or ducismo. Mussolini was the dux, a modern Caesar, the restorer of the Augustan age, the heir of Mazzini and Garibaldi combined, the inaugurator of a new age’’ (Griffin 1991: 74-5).
It is worth separating the two models of Caesar and Augustus that Griffin here conflates. At the outset of his leadership, Mussolini adopted the persona of Caesar, the vigorous general and dictator who rescued Rome from the corruption of the decaying Republic (Kostof 1978: 284). Luciano Canfora has argued that fascist historiography recognized in the Caesarean regime, and particularly the three years following the death of Caesar, a Roman ‘‘revolution,’’ analogous to the fascist revolution with its violent rejection of democracy and suppression of the privileged classes (Canfora 1980: 253-4). Yet this observation also highlights the weakness of the Caesarean exemplar: it was Caesar’s death that precipitated the so-called ‘‘revolution.’’ As such, this paradigm could only be a temporary one for the
Duce. Augustus, therefore, particularly in the wake of Italy’s imperial activities of the 1930s, became the more popular model. This found its most complete and extravagant realization in the 1937-8 Mostra Augustea della Romanita (The Augustan exhibition of Romanness), an exhibition in Rome that attracted over one million visitors. Although its stated purpose was to celebrate the two-thousandth anniversary of the birthday of Augustus, the event was - unsurprisingly - used to draw explicit parallels between the golden age of the Roman empire and the contemporary fascist regime, with an emphasis on the continuity between past and present.
In retrospect, the vigorous use of Rome in the aesthetics and ideology of Italian Fascism may seem dramatically anomalous. Yet, from the intimate association of romanita with Italian nationalism - whether imperial, republican, or monarchic - derives a frequent congruence between Italian Fascism and more traditional forms of political thought. When considering studies on the Roman world produced during the Fascist period, it is thus more difficult to isolate specifically ‘‘fascist’’ scholarship from work that displays a more ‘‘generic’’ nationalistic tenor. Of course, studies that make explicit, for example, the parallels between Mussolini and Caesar in a hagio-graphical fashion or those that reproduce a recognizably fascist vocabulary might now be easily dismissed, but other scholarship produced at the time can be difficult to categorize (Canfora 1980: 76-103). Furthermore, the various roots of Italian Fascism, from anarchic socialism to nationalism, futurism to cubism, made it - at least initially - acceptable, if not attractive, to a wide variety of figures.
Emblematic of this problem is the Enciclopedia italiana, begun in 1925. Much like other encyclopedic works of its kind, it remains the Italian equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; additional appendices are still added today. Nonetheless, this was a project that - initially at least - was intimately associated with Italian Fascism. In 1932, in volume 14 of the encyclopedia, under the subject heading ‘‘Fascismo,’’ leading figures of the movement, including Mussolini, endeavored to expound to the world a summary of fascist doctrine. The Enciclopedia, then, contained a determined attempt by a stable regime at the formation of a coherent ideology. It is on the most famous entry, ‘‘The Doctrine of Fascism,’’ that the attention of historians of fascism has inevitably focused.3 Rome is, of course, critical to this definition:
Anti-individualistic, fascist thought is for the state; and for the individual in as much as he coincides with the state, the conscious, and the universal will of man in his historic existence... . Fascism is for the only liberty which can be a serious thing, the liberty of the state and of the individual in the state. Therefore, for the fascist, everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state. In this sense fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist state, which is the synthesis and unity of every value, interprets, develops, and strengthens the entire life of the people. . . . The fascist state is a will to power and empire. The Roman tradition is here a powerful force. According to the doctrine of fascism, empire is not only a territorial or military or mercantile concept, but a spiritual and moral one. One can think of an empire, that is, a nation, which directly or indirectly guides other nations, without the need to conquer a single square kilometre of territory. (‘‘La dottrina del fascismo,’’ Gentile 1932: 14:847-8).
Naturally it is fascinating - although not at all unexpected - to find (the idea of) Rome in this critical and definitive statement of Italian Fascist thought. Less predictable, but not less interesting - for my argument at least - is the fact that amongst the many academic contributors to the Enciclopedia were a number of distinguished classicists, including Giorgio Pasquali, Gaetano De Sanctis, and the latter’s younger pupil, Arnaldo Momigliano. The biographies of these scholars are proof of the complicated nature of Italian intellectual life in the 1930s: Pasquali was among the signatories of Benedetto Croce’s 1925 ‘‘anti-fascist manifesto’’; De Sanctis, a staunchly Catholic nationalist, refused to take the Fascist oath that was required from all employees of the state; Momigliano swore the oath, but then had to emigrate to England when, in the wake of Italy’s increasingly close alliance with Germany, a series of anti-Semitic racial laws were promulgated in 1938. None of these men could be rightly thought of as intellectual collaborators with Italian Fascism: rather their contributions show that scholars from different backgrounds felt able - for whatever reason - to participate in the work of the Enciclopedia italiana regardless (or perhaps because) of its political associations. Mariella Cagnetta has discussed the complex political, institutional, and cultural issues at stake in this matter with regard to classical scholarship in her study Antichita classiche nell’Enciclopedia italiana (Classical antiquities in the Enciclopedia italiana [1990]). The Enciclopedia and (for the purposes of this chapter at least) its classical contributors provide a good illustration of the problem facing scholars approaching the relationship between scholarship, Italian Fascism, and the idea of Rome.
World History
