Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome 9781442697379

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface: Death on the Via del Mare
Introduction: Rome and Fascism
1. The Landscape of the War
2. Roads to Rome: The Blackshirts and the città nemico
3. Demolitions: De-familiarizing the Roman Cityscape
4. ‘An uninterrupted racecourse’: Fascism’s Roman Roads
5. The Palazzo and the Boulevard
6. Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape
7. Return of the Roman
Conclusion: The Cinematic City
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ROADS AND RUINS The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome

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PAUL BAXA

Roads and Ruins The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9995-2

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Toronto Italian Studies Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Baxa, Paul, 1968– Roads and ruins : the symbolic landscape of fascist Rome / Paul Baxa. (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9995-2 (bound) 1. Fascism – Italy – Rome. 2. Fascism and culture – Italy – Rome. 3. Roads – Political aspects – Italy – Rome. 4. City planning – Political aspects – Italy – Rome. 5. Rome (Italy) – History – 1870–1945. I. Title. II. Series: Toronto Italian studies DG813.B39 2010

945⬘.632091

C2009-906665-3

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Patrizia and John Paul

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Preface: Death on the Via del Mare

xi

Introduction: Rome and Fascism

3

1 The Landscape of the War 16

4

2

Roads to Rome: The Blackshirts and the città nemico

34

3

Demolitions: De-familiarizing the Roman Cityscape

54

‘An uninterrupted racecourse’: Fascism’s Roman Roads 5 6

The Palazzo and the Boulevard

101

Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape 7

Return of the Roman

135

Conclusion: The Cinematic City Notes 163 Bibliography 203 Index 217

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Acknowledgments

Many people, too numerous to mention, have contributed to this project since its origins as a dissertation at the University of Toronto. Special thanks to Modris Eksteins, who provided invaluable advice and assistance over the years. I am especially grateful to Ave Maria University for a research grant which allowed me to return to Rome in the summer of 2007. A special thanks in this regard is owed to Michael Dauphinais. Gratitude is also extended to Colin Barr and Eric Jennings, for their advice in converting the dissertation into a book. I must also recognize in this respect the generous assistance of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Borden Painter Jr. While exploring the Vatican Archives in Rome, the aid and hospitality of Massimiliano Valente was indispensable. Special thanks as well to Mariapina De Simone at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome. I would also like to thank Ron Schoeffel at the University of Toronto Press, as well as the editorial staff. Many thanks as well to Christian Elia for his patient reading of parts of the drafts and for his friendship. Finally, I owe everything to my mother and father, whose stories of growing up in fascist Italy provided the spark of interest that ultimately led to his work. A very special thank you goes to my wife Patrizia for her patience, love, and assistance. In the summer of 2007, rather than visiting the sights of Rome, she spent many hours helping me in the archives. For that sacrifice, as well as for her many other sacrifices, I am eternally grateful. Ave Maria, Florida May 2009

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P R E FA C E

Death on the Via del Mare

It is Italy’s most dangerous road. When it opened in 1928, the Via del Mare represented the fascist regime’s dream of linking Rome to the sea. In the twenty-first century, it has become the ‘killer road’ responsible for some 250 deaths between 1996 and 2006.1 It is on this fast road that Italy has faced the rising death toll of the so-called ‘Saturday Night Massacres’ (Stragi del Sabato Sera), the name given to a phenomenon which sees mostly young men crash to their deaths after a Saturday night in the discos of Ostia. The phenomenon has become a national tragedy and a cause célèbre. Commentators have compared the holiday-weekend accident reports as something akin to war bulletins.2 In 2002 the Berlusconi government even passed a law curtailing the drinking hours of discos after a parliamentary commission was formed. New security measures have been created, but the deaths continue and roadside crosses proliferate along the twenty-three-kilometre route of the Via del Mare from its starting point in the Piazza Venezia in Rome to the pier in Ostia where the road ends. It is appropriate that this death road should begin under the Tarpeian Rock which overlooks the Via del Mare at its starting point underneath the Capitoline Hill. This precipice, over which the ancient Romans threw dissidents and criminals to their deaths, was excavated by the fascist regime in the 1930s after centuries of being buried under medieval buildings. The rock, along with the Via del Mare, was a pillar of Mussolini’s policy of romanità and its desire to link the Eternal City with the sea. Here was fascism’s route to Mare Nostrum finding its starting point beneath a symbol of Roman cruelty. Although the Via del Mare was opened in 1928 as part of fascism’s program of providing Rome with a modern transportation infrastructure, the brutality and violence of fascism have become the road’s lasting legacy.

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Ideology, however, was present in the road’s construction, as it was designed to reveal the newly revealed ruins of Imperial Rome. The road, built alongside the ancient Via Ostiense, is mostly straight, with a few high-speed curves leading out from the Piazza Venezia, the heart of fascist Rome. As it leaves Piazza Venezia and the shadow of the Tarpeian Rock, the Via del Mare reveals to the gaze of the passing motorist the ruins of Ancient Rome, through which the road weaves its way. In a carefully crafted trompe l’oeil the road seems to plunge straight into the arches of the Theatre of Marcellus, another Roman ruin ‘liberated’ by the regime, before taking a fast, swerving left-hand band out towards the Tiber River, where it encounters two republican-era temples in the Foro Boario also excavated by the fascist regime in the 1920s. The man responsible for overseeing the construction of the Via del Mare, Antonio Muñoz, claimed that the design of the road, made up of short straightaways punctuated by curves, ‘constituted an element of beauty, designed so that the motorist will find in every section surprising visions.’3 Thus, the Via del Mare functioned in the manner of a thrill ride in a theme park, taking the motorist through not past ancient Rome. After the Foro Boario, the Via del Mare sweeps along the Tiber River, past the gasworks, a rare and surprising industrial landmark in the Eternal City. Here, the Via del Mare leaves the walled city through the gate of St Paul, past the pyramid of Caius Cestius, the Protestant cemetery guarding the remains of Romantic poets, and the Stazione Ostiense, a train station purposely built for the visit of Adolf Hitler in 1938. Here, traces of fascist and ancient Rome coexist along with the memory of the Second World War. It was at this gate in 1943 that Italian troops engaged their former allies, the Germans, in combat after the surrender of Italy on 8 September. Once through the gate, the Via del Mare follows the ancient Via Ostiense, blasting past the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls, the imposing final resting place of the saint now barely noticeable to the driver speeding towards the sea. On the left, the motorist catches a glimpse of the EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma) and its modern basilica to saints Peter and Paul, but even this becomes a fleeting image as the Via del Mare straightens out into its final and fastest leg, to Ostia. This is the section of road where the ‘massacres’ take place. As the road heads towards Ostia it is straight and fast, with no chance for escape. It is on this final section that the coastline of Mare Nostrum fast approaches, feeding the Imperial dreams of Mussolini, who would often jump on his motorcycle and race from his office in Palazzo Venezia to his beach home near Fregene. Eluding his bodyguards, Mussolini set out

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to prove the efficiency and speed of his roads.4 As the Duce sped towards the coast he would barely notice the ancient osterie and villages of the Agro Romano. If he looked, Mussolini might have caught a glimpse of the borgate, shantytowns created by his regime to house the thousands of Romans displaced by the demolitions in the city centre, demolitions which made the Via del Mare possible. These shantytowns have long since disappeared, replaced by the ENI-Casa housing projects of the Italian Republic in the 1950s. On the right, before the Via del Mare enters the modern city of Ostia, the ruins of ancient Ostia appear with its pagan temples and mosaics. Just as the Via del Mare began amidst the ruins of Imperial Rome, so now it reaches its conclusion in the ruins of the port which facilitated ancient Rome’s dominion over the Mediterranean. A few miles beyond the ancient city, the Via del Mare ends abruptly on the Lido of Ostia. The road is extended, but only symbolically, by a pier which juts out into the Tyrrhenian Sea. A few miles to the north stands the now abandoned idroscalo (hydroport), where the fascist regime celebrated the achievements of aviators like the former squadrista Italo Balbo and greeted international aviators such as Amelia Earhardt and Charles Lindbergh. Thus, the Via del Mare connected the real sea at Ostia with fascism’s adunate oceaniche (oceanic rallies), which greeted Mussolini’s speeches in the Piazza Venezia. Why has fascism’s dream road become a death trap in the twenty-first century? Critics of fascist urban planning see this as yet another example of fascist ideology trumping sensible planning. It was built, so the argument goes, for the light traffic of the 1920s and 1930s and not the armies of Fiat ‘cinquecentos’ and ‘lambretta’ motor scooters which became a staple of Italian life during the Economic Miracle of the postwar era. This argument ignores, however, one of the most important features of fascism: the function of roads as monuments to the values of the regime. The purpose of the Via del Mare was not merely functional, nor was it designed to shift volumes of sunbathers efficiently to the beaches of Ostia. Rather, in the words of the Roman governor BoncompagniLudovisi, who inaugurated the road with Mussolini in 1928, the Via del Mare was a ‘distinguished monument.’5 Since Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris, roads had become, according to the historian of architecture Sigfried Giedion in 1938, ‘architectonic expressions.’6 No regime took this new concept of the road more seriously than fascism. Roads became the monument of fascism par excellence. These roads, however, were not conventional monuments. They were

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not meant for silent contemplation; rather they were intended as spaces for the expression of fascist values such as speed. In the 1960s, Lewis Mumford argued that Americans tolerated the increasing death tolls on their roads precisely because of their worship of ‘empty abstractions’ such as power and speed. This ‘American way of death’ could also be applied to the fascist regime and its roads.7 To view the Via del Mare as an example of failed planning is to forget fascism’s cult of speed and danger. In an article celebrating the opening of the road in 1928, the journal Capitolium noted that the few curves in the road were engineered to have a minimum width of 500 metres purposely to encourage speed.8 That the Via del Mare proved dangerous enough to take lives would have pleased those fascists beholden to the futurist and militarist origins of the movement embodied in squadrismo (early fascist movement). Much of the myth of squadrismo was born on the dusty roads of Italy, where the blackshirts tore around the countryside in their Fiat trucks terrorizing opponents in the years following the Great War. The Via del Mare thus became a lieu de mémoire for the ‘martyrdom’ of young, fascist thugs in the years preceding the March on Rome. The Via del Mare served as more than just a stage where martyrs could be remembered, and punitive expeditions recreated; it was an instrument of violence in its own right. The road itself was a weapon cutting a violent swath through Rome’s once densely populated quartieri (neighbourhoods). Two historic piazzas fell to the wrecking ball: the Piazza Aracoeli and the Piazza Montanara. The latter had once been a central part of Rome’s Jewish ghetto and a meeting place for farmers and shepherds bringing their produce from the countryside. It was a folkloristic site and, therefore, something that was made to disappear under the fascist regime’s attack on ‘local colour,’ a euphemism for the folkloristic. The road was a pitiless prefiguring of the attitude of Robert Moses, who referred to his Bronx Expressway as ‘hacking your way with a meat ax’ through an overcrowded metropolis.9 The Via del Mare was both site and instrument of violence on the historic cityscape of Rome. On this road was realized the marriage between technology and death theorized by Jean Baudrillard, who pointed out the thanatos at the heart of fascism.10 Baudrillard’s point is useful because it sees fascism primarily as a cultural expression rather than an ideology. Reading the Via del Mare as a representative of fascist ideology is just one level of the road’s significance. That the road embodied the ideological project of romanità is obvious, but ignores the broader cultural significance of fascism’s encounter with the Eternal City. In the following

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chapters, fascism will be viewed as part of a cultural phenomenon emanating from Italy’s war experience. The fascist regime did not simply use culture or adopt cultural policies; it was, in the words of George Mosse, a culture movement all its own.11 It is at this level that the true significance of a road such as the Via del Mare should be read. It was not only an ‘architectonic expression’ aimed at representing an ideological position; it was also a cultural expression of the fascist love for speed, danger, and death. On the Via del Mare one can see the two sides of fascism’s nature: the constructive, monumental side and the destructive, brutalist side. Death and monumentality find no more eloquent resonance than on this road. Reading fascism as a cultural phenomenon will help illuminate some of the more puzzling contradictions or ‘aporias’ that fascism presents to scholars, without an attempt to solve those contradictions by placing them into neat theoretical schemata. It is precisely in the contradictions that the significance of fascism is found. In order to grasp such a phenomenon as fascism, perhaps it is necessary to take Walter Laqueur’s advice on adopting an ‘impressionistic’ approach to its study. Such a study, however, seems more appropriate to the artist rather than the historian.12 The notion of fascism as primarily cultural helps to explain what Susan Sontag described as the fascination that fascism continues to exert on contemporary culture. The exposing of this fascination has often been left to non-historians such as Susan Sontag, who has attempted to show the continuing allure of fascism in different contexts long after the fascist regimes have disappeared.13 In Italy, the equivalent of Sontag was the poet, filmmaker, and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini, who, in the 1970s, consistently sought to expose the persistent fascism that continued in Italian life and politics in the years of the Economic Miracle. For Pasolini, historic fascism may have been dead, but fascism as a deeply rooted cultural impulse that aimed to destroy the traditional cultures of Italy was alive and well and expressed in the pro-consumerist policies of the Christian Democratic governments which had dominated Italian politics since the end of the Second World War.14 Even though they looked very different, there existed continuity – a thread – linking the fascist dictatorship and the First Republic. Pasolini sought, and found, the evidence of this new fascism in the streets and neighbourhoods of Rome, in the attitudes and lifestyles of Italy’s youth, and in the values promoted by the state. Pasolini’s search for the fascist thread in contemporary Italy ended abruptly and violently at the end of the Via del Mare. In November 1975, Pasolini, who liked to cruise Rome’s gay scene, picked up a young man

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outside Termini Station, then took him for a drive on the Via del Mare to Ostia, where he found a discreet location in the old idroscalo. There, at the spot where fascism reached its mare nostrum, Pasolini was murdered in what appeared to be an ambush, despite the official court ruling that it was carried out by one man. Pasolini’s friends, such as the poet Dario Bellezza, had no doubt that he was the victim of neo-fascist thugs. Bellezza claimed that it was no accident that Pasolini was killed there. It was ‘Ostia at its most fascist.’15 Whatever the truth of the matter, the site of Pasolini’s death raised the ghost of fascism in a landscape deeply imbued with fascism. It is this landscape that is the subject of this book.

ROADS AND RUINS The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome

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INTRODUCTION

Rome and Fascism

Fascist Rome has always elicited great interest from scholars largely because the Eternal City was, in the words of Emilio Gentile, the site of fascism’s most extensive ‘petrification of ideology.’1 Nowhere else could one grasp the ideological pretensions of fascism, which used the Roman cityscape to trumpet its dream of romanità. Scholarship on fascist Rome can be divided into two groups, centred on urban planners and culturalists. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians of urban planning denigrated fascism’s attempts at city planning, arguing that the regime’s policies were ultimately counterproductive. Italians such as Antonio Cederna severely criticized fascist planning as being nothing more than a cover for its megalomania, as a result of which Rome was transformed into a vast space of congested traffic and isolated ruins in order to satisfy what Cederna called the ‘sickness’ of reviving ancient Rome.2 Fascist urban planning was a façade to cover up the massive demolitions which destroyed the historic character of the Roman landscape. Daniele Manacorda and Renato Tamassia dismissed fascism’s ideological pretensions this way: ‘The invocation of romanità in its most superficial forms was considered by the Duce as a means, like music and women, to control, influence, and govern the crowds; to unite them and drug them, offering to them a facile and gratifying model of identification (we are the descendants of the ancient Romans; we are the inventors of civilization, the dominators of the world, we, the heirs of Rome).’3 Modern Rome was transformed by an ideology which Spiro Kostoff summed up in the words ‘traffic and glory.’4 Even the seemingly positive goal of exposing the ruins of ancient Rome to the light of day had the effect of rendering them meaningless. Andrea Giardina has argued that fascism’s isolation of the ruins has created a ‘poetry of emptiness … a distance between (the ruins) and life.’5

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A central premise of these urbanist assessments of fascist Rome is the notion that the regime was ultimately destructive in its so-called urban planning, and that this destruction was carried out in the name of an empty, rhetorical ideology. Two recent studies of fascist Rome have taken a different approach. Borden Painter Jr’s Mussolini’s Rome and Gentile’s Fascismo di pietra focus less on the success or failure of planning, and more on the ideological impulses which shaped the regime’s urban planning. Rather than dismiss fascist ideology as empty rhetoric, Painter and Gentile approach fascism’s ideological pronouncements seriously as a positive program. Painter’s superb overview of fascism’s interventions into the Roman cityscape makes the point that ‘the city has a fascist imprint that has changed the way we experience the city today.’6 Painter argues that this imprint remains strong despite half-hearted attempts by the Republic to remove it since the end of the war. Fascism’s transformation of the city was so far-reaching, however, that it would be impossible to erase the ‘fascist layer’ without massive changes to the cityscape. The merit of Painter’s book is that it amply demonstrates the many transformations created by the regime, ranging from the gutting of the historic centre to the construction of new suburbs and public housing. Modern Rome, as a result, cannot be seen without acknowledging the fascist presence in everything, from its streets and archaeology to its monuments. Whether the regime was successful in its urban planning is beside the point. The fact is that Mussolini was able to transform the Eternal City by giving it a distinctly fascist layer that coexists with the ancient and papal city. Gentile’s book has a narrower focus than Painter’s. He looks at the myth of romanità and traces its origins and stages through the regime’s encounter with the Eternal City. Gentile sets out to challenge the notion that romanità was nothing but empty words. Rather, the myth of Rome was a forward-looking idea which borrowed historical associations for the purpose of creating a New Order founded on a New Man. More than propaganda, romanità was ‘the essence of fascism.’7 Gentile skilfully demonstrates how the myth of Rome was used by Mussolini as a personal instrument in his rise to power. In 1921, faced with a seditious group of ras (the regional commanders of the Fascist squads before 1922), Mussolini introduced romanità as a means of centralizing his power within the fascist movement. Similarly, in 1936, after the war in Ethiopia, Mussolini would use the myth of Rome to construct the Cult of the Duce and initiate fascist Italy’s move towards a more aggressive foreign policy and alliance with Hitler. For Gentile, romanità is the key to understanding

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the development of the regime. The evidence for this is still plain to see in the fascismo di pietra which pervades the city of Rome. Gentile’s book concludes with him depicting a disillusioned Mussolini sitting in the Sala Mappamondo, his cavernous office in the Palazzo Venezia in 1942. Having just listened to the reports of the provincial federali, Mussolini concludes that his regime had failed in remaking Romans. All that remained of the policy of shaping the New Italian man was the physical reconstruction of Rome, much of which could be seen from the Duce’s balcony overlooking Piazza Venezia. Gentile and Painter thus offer a new perspective on the regime’s transformation of Rome. Rather than dwelling on the shortcomings of fascism’s urban planning, which had been the focus of the earlier school, these studies attempt to demonstrate the deeper ideological sources of fascism’s appropriation of the Eternal City. Both books, however, downplay the violence and destructiveness of fascism’s urban interventions. What results is a rather ‘bloodless’ view of fascism that reflects much of the scholarship on fascist ideology and culture since the 1990s.8 Painter and Gentile also share with the culturalist school a belief that fascist ideology was a top-down enterprise aimed only at forging consensus. Both historians place the Duce firmly at the centre of fascism’s myth of Rome to such an extent that the reader is left with the impression that fascist Rome was an emanation of Mussolini’s personal vision of romanità. Consequently, the myth of Rome is viewed strictly as a statesponsored enterprise imposed on unwitting Italians. In this way, Painter and Gentile share a common vision with the earlier Kostoff and Cederna school of thought. Paolo Nicoloso’s recent book, Mussolini architetto, shares with Painter and Gentile a belief that Mussolini was central to the regime’s architectural projects, arguing that he spent much of his time meeting with and discussing architecture with Italy’s leading architects. Mussolini, according to Nicoloso, took a keen interest in architecture as a means of fostering consensus, and also of educating Italians as a means of transforming them according to the fascist image.9 To be sure, Mussolini was a key figure in the regime’s transformation of the city and he did possess an obsession with the city and its cultural legacy, but fascism’s encounter with the Eternal City was defined and shaped by many others within the fascist movement. A more pluralistic notion of fascism’s cultural policies has been advanced by cultural historians such as Emily Braun, who, in her analysis of the work of Mario Sironi, has argued that the cultural policies of fascism were the product of ‘individual contributions and responses.’10

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat has demonstrated, in her book Fascist Modernities, that many intellectuals and artists contributed to the fascist cultural practice of bonifica or the reclamation of Italian identity.11 Yet, even these scholars present fascist culture as something manufactured after 1922, an instrument of the regime to maintain, consolidate, and justify its dictatorship through an elaborate process of meaning-making. Rarely is fascist culture presented as a phenomenon shaped by a specific shared, historical experience. Fascism as ‘Lived Experience’ This book will examine fascist culture as the product of a lived experience rather than a construct. This idea of a ‘lived experience’ is borrowed from a recent study of the socialist case del popolo in turn-of-the-century Italy by Margaret Kohn.12 The case del popolo were prime targets of the fascist squadristi after the war, and Kohn ably demonstrates how these unassuming structures, their layout, and their functions incarnated the values of socialists. She argues that these workers’ sites were the product of a ‘politics of personal transformation [linked] to a collective project for acquiring power.’13 Tellingly, these structures loom large in the memoirs of fascist blackshirts, who saw them as symbols of subversion. The following chapters will examine how fascist Rome was the product of the spatial and architectonic consciousness of the blackshirts, and of the war veterans who dominated the ranks of the squads. Just as the socialists were able to construct their own spaces in the case del popolo and on the shop floors, so too did fascism construct its own spaces out of its own cultural impulses. ‘Just as history is instinctively understood as a record of change,’ writes Kohn, ‘so must we begin to think of architecture, geography, and urbanism as traces of spatial transformation.’14 Where did fascism’s spatial transformation of Rome originate? The massive transformational experience that gave birth to fascism was the Great War. The story of fascism’s encounter with Rome was largely informed by the sights, sounds, and landscape of the Italian Front. Paul Corner has argued that the war was the ‘matrix’ out of which fascism was born, a fact that has always been recognized but never analysed.15 Contemporaries such as the anti-fascist Max Ascoli noted the war dynamic at the heart of fascism. Even in peacetime, wrote Ascoli, war formed the ‘innermost conscience of [fascist] man.’16 It is almost a cliché to argue that the Great War created the conditions

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for the rise of fascism – so much so that some historians have often taken for granted the direct relationship between the fascist phenomenon and the war experience, while others have suggested that the war’s influence has been overstated. The latter interpretation has been the predominant one since Renzo De Felice’s cautioning against viewing the war itself as the cause of fascism, preferring instead to identify the Interventionist Crisis of 1914–1915 as fascism’s true point of origin.17 Since then, owing largely to De Felice’s immense influence, historians have generally agreed that the Great War was more a catalyst than a point of origin for the rise of fascism. The birth of fascism, it is argued, lies in the cultural and intellectual revolt of the turn of the century.18 While central in the development of squadrismo, the war experience rarely is seen as central in shaping the fascist regime after 1922.19 Fascism is often presented as appropriating the memory of the war for its own propaganda purposes, and the deeper cultural link between the war experience and fascism is often glazed over. There are signs that this Defelician orthodoxy is being challenged, however, especially in the writings of Antonio Gibelli and Angelo Ventrone, who have placed greater emphasis on the transformational experiences of the war as the generator of fascism.20 These experiences became the foundational element of squadrismo, which subsequently became sublimated in the policies of the regime after 1922. Following the lead of Renzo De Felice, historians of Italian fascism often make a distinction between fascism-movement and fascism-regime.21 While the seizing of power did call for compromises and changes in the fascist program, many of which drew protests from original blackshirts, there are some deeper cultural impulses which provide for continuity. The violence and brutality of the war experience constituted the essence of fascism, and this can be seen in the spaces created by the regime throughout the Ventennio. Ventrone argues that the elements that formed fascism were first seen during the war, such as the use of concentration camps, denunciations of un-patriotic Italians, and ‘ideological contamination,’ in which parties and groups of opposing persuasions mixed together.22 All these developments describe the formation of the early blackshirts, who came from different political positions but shared the war experience. The lived experience of the war served fascism as a repository of myths which shaped the approach of the fascist regime to the Roman cityscape. The war experience itself became, in the words of George Mosse, a myth.23 This myth involved an interiorization of the landscape

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of war which influenced fascism’s later approach to urban spaces. One of the most valuable contributions made by cultural historians such as Mark Antliff and Roger Griffin, for example, is demonstrating the web of mythologies that informed the fascist mind.24 In its encounter with Rome, the fascist movement revealed its desire for myth and in doing so became part of a general cultural striving for myth after the war. Luisa Passerini has noted how the end of the First World War saw a resurgence of ‘traditional myths and images’ that were later appropriated by the regime, especially the cult of the Duce.25 Romanità was another such myth. Added to these well-known myths are the self-mythologies created by fascism, especially those of the war experience and the years of squadrismo. Fascism’s remaking of the Roman landscape was in part a reflection of these myths. One of the pillars of fascism’s imaginative landscape was open space. When Mussolini called for the opening of wide spaces around the ancient monuments of Rome in his New Year’s Eve speech of 1925 at the Rome city hall (Campidoglio), he was expressing the impulse at the heart of fascism: that of creating spaces and breaking out of confinements.26 In doing so, Mussolini embodied the mythical image of the ‘destructive character’ as outlined by Walter Benjamin. ‘The destructive character,’ wrote Benjamin, ‘knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open spaces is stronger than any hatred.’27 The destructive character, continued Benjamin, is young and cheerful, exults in clearing away the traces of the present, and never worries about replacing what he destroys. Such a description accurately depicts fascism’s urban interventions in the Roman cityscape. Not only did the regime subject Rome to massive demolitions and the opening up of new spaces, but nothing was built to replace what was destroyed. Instead, these spaces were traversed with wide boulevards slicing their way through the ruins. The regime’s demolitions combined with the construction of wide boulevards is often compared to Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris in the 1860s. To be sure, Haussmann cleared away medieval quarters, built grand boulevards, and uprooted thousands of working-class Parisians, but he replaced the old quarters with the characteristic, uniform apartment blocks lining the boulevards. Fascism, however, did not rebuild in the historic centre. Rather, it left the ancient ruins exposed to traffic on the new boulevards. More than Haussmann, Mussolini and his regime foreshadowed the work of Robert Moses in the Bronx. The image of the axe clearing away swaths of cityscape dominated fascist propaganda in the 1930s.

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It is not in Haussmann’s nineteenth century that we find the inspiration for fascist urban planning; rather, it is to be found firmly planted in the twentieth century – a century, according to Michel Foucault, dominated by the idea of space in contrast to the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with time.28 Fascism was obsessed with space. Spazio vitale and mare nostrum, the two key concepts which drove fascist foreign policy, were spatial concepts. Aristotle Kallis has argued that these desires came from the pre-1914, imperialist nationalism of Enrico Corradini.29 To be sure, the European imperialism of the previous century was influential, but it was the psychological experience of the First World War that most determined fascism’s craving for space. Just as the Nazi desire for lebensraum was born in the shifting landscapes and spatial desires of the First World War, so too did the Italian war experience on the Carso feed an aggressive drive for open spaces and vistas.30 In his reflections on the war experience – he fought on the Carsican front – the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote, ‘The Italian has a need for a war plan which gives him space, more space, always space.’31 The regime’s Master Plan of 1931 was guided predominantly by an urge to make space in Rome. Chapters 3 and 4 will show how two aspects of the plan embodied this impulse: demolitions and roads. Both shaped the new Rome, especially fascism’s obsessive hatred of the closed squares typical of medieval cities. Chapter 2 demonstrates how those piazze were associated in the fascist mind with socialist subversion during the years of squadrismo. The blasting open of new spaces in Rome allowed the fascist regime to express another key myth deriving from the war experience: the collapsing of time into space. New readings of time and history in a fascist key now became possible. Roger Griffin and Claudio Fogu have both noted how fascism entailed new readings of history. For Griffin, the fascist calendar expressed the sense of palingenesis, or new beginnings, while for Fogu fascism practised actualism, or the practice of making history present. Both are mythical reconfigurations of time. Griffin traces fascism’s policy back to the revolutionary tradition begun by the French Revolution.32 Fogu, by contrast, firmly places actualism in the tradition of Catholicism.33 Drawing from the Latin Catholic tradition, argues Fogu, ‘the fascist imaginary always tended toward a spatial annulment of time.’34 My book, however, will locate fascism’s conflation of time into space in the battlefields of the First World War. Christopher Coker, in his insightful book War and the 20th Century, argues that the war experiences of that century led many to believe that modern society could liberate itself from history. The nineteenth-century liberal vision of history as

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continuity and progress was no longer tenable after the experiences of the trenches.35 Time as a coherent and logical process lost meaning in the spaces of the battlefield. Fascists approached Rome as iconoclasts. The Eternal City was, to paraphrase Nietzsche, burdened with history. Many fascists, especially those influenced by Futurism combined with the trench soldier’s impatience with convention and tradition, found Rome’s layers of history oppressive. Rome’s landscape had always inspired both synchronic and diachronic approaches to the city’s past. The former approach was embodied in the work of archeologists in the nineteenth century, who aimed at revealing the multiple layers of Rome’s built history.36 The diachronic view of Rome’s history was best seen in the Catholic Church’s eschatological approach to the Eternal City’s history, where the pre-Christian pagan city was transformed as history moved towards the Second Coming. In both cases, continuity was the dominant theme, whereby every epoch in the city’s history contributed to a coherent narrative of that history. By contrast, the fascists approached Rome elliptically, choosing to destroy or omit parts of Rome’s history. Claudia Lazzaro has argued that the fascist regime was motivated by a desire to ‘liberate’ the ancient ruins in a process ‘which obliterated other pasts and established a direct relationship with the present.’37 Chapter 6 will demonstrate how fascism’s mythical approach to history came to clash especially with the Church’s eschatological vision. The key issue was Rome’s pagan heritage and the place it had in fascist Rome. For the church, the vestiges of paganism had been overtaken by Christianity and transformed; the regime, by contrast, wished to reveal pagan artefacts and temples divested of their Christian superstructures in the interests of retrieving the primordial landscape of Rome. Roger Griffin has identified, as a central component of fascist modernism, primordialism, in which fascism was responding to ‘the presence of an innate human drive to achieve transcendence and create new cultural worlds, a drive which becomes particularly active whenever an established order is threatened by collapse.’38 Romanità was an example of primordialism, as were Nazism’s Aryan fantasies. A desire for the primitive was not new to the postwar world, as intellectuals and artists had been interested in primitivistic themes in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A strong yearning for atavistic experiences, however, came out of the war experience. George Mosse has argued that fascism’s desire for a ‘new paganism’ and ‘primitivism’ began in the trenches of the First World War.39 For Mosse, as for Griffin, primitivism went hand in hand with a desire

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for a new order created out of the midst of the chaos of the modern world. In the fascist world view, fascination with the primordial was linked with the myth of the barbarian, a myth apparently at odds with that of Romanità. The attitude of the early Fascists towards Rome oscillated between respect and iconoclasm. In their ambivalence, the Fascists saw themselves as both Romans and Barbarians. Fascism’s construction of roads linked the movement to the activity of the Romans. Historians such as Ettore Pais, who also served as a senator during the regime, frequently exalted fascism’s road-building projects. According to Pais, true civilizations were identified by two activities: agriculture and road building – best exemplified by the Romans, who saw it as a matter of pride to ‘build, prolong, or perfect roads.’40 For Pais, fascism had restored Italy’s predominance as road builders. This activity of road building, however, required extensive demolitions similar to that wrought by the barbarians in late antiquity. This double act of construction and destruction can be traced back to the war experience. Giuseppe Bottai, ex-ardito and governor of Rome at a time when the regime was transforming the Eternal City’s landscape, remarked in 1936 that the soldiers of fascism were like the ancient Romans, ‘invincible warriors and at the same time builders of roads.’41 This attitude of destroyer and creator characterized Mussolini and his mixed feelings towards the Eternal City,42 for civilizers and barbarians were conflated in his mind as well. Tellingly, in a speech given at Gorizia (a central location on the Italian front) in 1942, while another war was waging, Mussolini reminded his listeners of the Great War and said that it was in the Roman tradition to ‘destroy everything that belongs to one’s enemies.’43 This phenomenon of soldiers identifying themselves as both saviours of civilization and the bearers of destruction can be traced to the war experience. What had been an intellectual fad in the prewar years – that of finding the savage in the breast of civilization – had now become a central feature of industrialized warfare. Nietzsche’s warning that barbarism was waiting to break out seemed to come true for many.44 Both the desire for, and the fear of, barbarism was accentuated by a postwar society in crisis. Hayden White has shown how, in times of crisis, the West often experiences a movement towards primitivism in the hopes of releasing the ‘wild man’ who is always present in culture.45 White argues that the West had gradually interiorized the Wild Man after the concept had been de-spatialized by progress. In unsettled times, however, such as

12

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that which characterized the West after 1918, society has been encouraged to ‘throw off the restraints of civilization and thereby enter into a kingdom that is naturally theirs.’46 The blurring of identities between the categories of barbarism and civilization found in the fascist movement places fascism squarely in the primary cultural impulse of the twentieth century. French philosopher Simone Weil, who saw Adolf Hitler as a Roman reincarnate, theorized in 1939 that barbarism was always present beneath the veneer of civilization, and that ‘when any human group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.’47 Weil was writing this just a year after this ‘Roman’ had been feted by the fascist regime in Rome, an event which encapsulated many of the cultural impulses of fascism, and forms the basis for chapter 7. In the postwar period, the distinctions between Civilizers and Barbarians were confused to the point where a movement like fascism could identify with both. Roads and Ruins The multiple mythologies of fascism and their complex interactions can be read in the landscape left by the regime in the historic centre of the Eternal City. The two predominant landmarks of that landscape were roads and ruins. Any landscape is a product of both nature and culture, of what is revealed and what is constructed. In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that all landscapes are ultimately shaped this way; even untouched, wilderness landscapes have an element of construction to them.48 In the case of Rome’s historic centre, the ruins revealed by the regime’s archaeological excavations, while they predated the regime itself, were shaped by the perceptions created by the new roads. Through demolitions and road building, the fascist regime created a new way of experiencing the ruins of Ancient Rome. Previously, in order to see even imposing ruins like the Coliseum, one had to navigate through a maze of narrow, medieval, and densely populated streets. If one paid close attention, evidence of antiquity could be seen in doorways and shops or behind clotheslines. Once through this maze of streets, the searcher would be suddenly confronted by the Coliseum. The effect was surprise and wonder. The fascist regime brought an end to all this by demolishing everything that surrounded the ruins, thus opening them up to the panoramic gaze. This act of de-familiarizing the cityscape through the agency of the dieu voyeur was advocated by archi-

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tects like Le Corbusier.49 Demolitions, just like war, revealed a hidden landscape opening up new and strange vistas to the observer. Panoramas and landscapes were ultimately more important to the fascist gaze than individual buildings or monuments. The fascist landscape was made up of a network of roads serving as platforms for the mobile gaze of the fascist New Man. The importance of the roads in shaping new perceptions of the Eternal City was a leitmotif of fascism’s remaking of the Roman cityscape. Capitolium, the official journal of the Roman municipal government, emphasized the importance of the new arteries which the regime had laid out in the midst of the ruins. The following is a typical example: ‘Via dell’Impero, Via del Mare, Via dei Trionfi … The new roads opened between the sacred ruins have revealed previously hidden magnificence and have brought the dynamicism of modern life amongst the glories of the past, providing, in a sense, an urban function to the ruins.’50 The movement of traffic was crucial in giving meaning to these mute stones through the lens of the mobile gaze. This element was celebrated by fascist writers such as Pietro Maria Bardi, who, in his novel La strada e il volante, celebrated the mental transformations caused by the automobile upon Italians. In this novel, published originally in 1935, Bardi’s protagonist Filiberto, a dull bourgeois Italian, undergoes a personal epiphany once he begins driving throughout Italy. Although he enjoys Italy’s roads, it is on the regime’s autostrade that a transfiguration occurs, especially in the landscape between Milan and Turin. He thought that the autostrada, with its flat and straight trajectory, would be monotonous, but here he discovered speed: Filiberto was crazy for speed. He finally understood, for the first time, that the only respectable people on earth are the record speed holders. He, the automobile, and the road had become one pointing towards one goal: speed … He was defiant; a conqueror; a law giver. He saw himself as a pair of scissors slicing through the green blanket between Milan and Turin. He believed in the illusion that was setting a new speed record.51

Bardi’s account of Filiberto’s exhilarating ride on the Milan–Turin autostrada demonstrates the impact of fascism’s road building on motorists. Speed is an act of violence, akin to cutting through the landscape. Nature had been shattered by the desire for new speed records: ‘Filiberto could not see the countryside, which was a shame, but he was compensated by his imagination, which inserted the fantastic landscape into the

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course of his amazing race.’52 To be sure, railway travel had introduced a similar aesthetic in the previous century, but one was a passenger on a train, while in an automobile one was a protagonist. Fascism’s roads were intrinsically violent. Death and catastrophe were ever present – which brings us back to the Via del Mare. Speed, danger, death, and new perspectives on a once familiar landscape all came out of the war experience. The first two chapters of the book will trace the origins of these ideas in the exploits of the arditi, the specialized crack assault units of the Italian Army introduced late in the war to break the stalemate of the Carsican trenches. It was the mystique of the arditi that later became the mobilizing myth of squadrismo when the blackshirts took to the open roads of Italy looking to crush their opponents in a manner similar to the assault squads of the Great War. The arditi and the blackshirts provided fodder for mythmaking. They raised the spectre of returning barbarians coming to render an account from Rome, a city of imboscati (shirkers). The roads provided the avenues for these myths to come alive under fascism. Not only roads, though, but the modern technologies of the automobile and truck also became the handmaidens for these new primitives. Here, fascism tapped into the mystical, non-rational fantasies which the automobile raised in people such as Aldous Huxley, who claimed that the automobile, a product of science and technology, had the effect of putting one into a trance, dreamlike state. Marcel Proust wrote that the ‘speed of a car imposes a particular, mysterious vitality to the scenery, making trees, houses and churches into something fable-like.’53 Marshall McLuhan noted in Understanding Media that the automobile has brought chaos to the modern city with its implosions characteristic of primitive societies. For McLuhan the modern driver was a new kind of tribal warrior protected by his chariot. Influenced by Lewis Mumford’s claim that speed was compatible with war, McLuhan argued that the automobile ‘provided a protective and aggressive shell of urban and suburban man (transforming) the rider into a superman.’54 The modern road, constructed for the automobile, was essentially militarist. Fascism’s roads were not meant for simple pleasure riding or contemplation of Rome’s historic landscape; rather, they recalled the ‘lived experience’ of the Great War. Jörg Beckmann has recently argued that the modern highway, once a symbol of freedom, has become in the early twenty-first century a battlefield of road rage: ‘Highways … have now become the grounds where hate replaces hope.’55 Mikita Brottman and Christopher Sharrett have noted that war, the automobile, roads,

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and ruins are central to the ‘spatio-temporal compressions’ of modernity. The destruction and creativity associated with war have returned in the form of the automobile.56 This book will show that they too were central to fascism and thus form a point of intersection between fascism and modernity. Traffic thus played a central role in defining fascism’s Roman landscape. Far from being a sign of failure in urban planning, as Cederna and Kostoff would argue, traffic was the crowning achievement of fascist culture. Urbanists like Scipione Tadolini would write in journals such as L’Urbe that the new roads planned by the fascist regime would ‘hopefully’ move traffic through the historic centre towards the E42 (fascism’s new Rome designed south of the city).57 In 1938 Siegfried Giedion noted that the automobile had forced the ‘incorporation of movement as [an] inseparable element of architecture’ and that modern traffic ‘educates and sharpens our sense of space,’ such that the modern city dweller ‘seems almost to know what is taking place behind him.’58 Giedion argued that this new sense of space acquired by the motorist ‘was unknown in baroque times; it may be the case of a redevelopment of a primitive sense.’59 Roads and ruins worked together to shape fascism’s mythological landscape. While the fascist regime paid lip service to rational urban planning in shaping this new Rome, the process was, in the words of Tim Benton, a ‘revolutionary act’ of violence.60 Violence, myth, and technology, which combined to create the fascist landscape, cannot be understood, however, unless we turn to the war experience on the Carso.

CHAPTER ONE

The Landscape of the War

Aquileia In 1928, ten years after the end of the First World War, Friulian writer Chiro Ermacora made a pilgrimage to the ancient city of Aquileia near Venice to render homage to the ten unknown soldiers buried next to the ancient basilica. These were the ten who had not been chosen to be honoured as the Unknown Soldier in Rome in 1921. Ermacora was writing an elegiac book on the region of Friuli, in northwestern Italy, the site of many of the most ferocious battles of the First World War. Aquileia was not too far behind the Carso front, where Italian and Austrian troops had engaged each other in a series of futile and bloody battles between 1915 and 1918. The city and its ruins were well known to troops going to and from the front lines. It fell to the Austrians during the retreat from Caporetto in October 1917. It was here, after the war, that the partially destroyed basilica became the site where Maria Bergamas, a mother from Trieste who had lost several sons to the conflict, chose one of eleven unknown soldiers to become the Unknown Soldier. The solemn ceremony was held on 28 October 1921, after which the chosen coffin was placed on a flatbed railcar and moved, procession-like, to Rome, where it found a home on the Victor Emmanuel monument. The remaining ten soldiers were buried next to the basilica, not far from where they had fallen on the ‘bloodied Carso.’1 As he stood contemplating the tombs, Ermacora’s imagination was filled with the events of the Great War and the distant memory of the Huns. With the ‘greyish’ Carso plateau looming in the distance, the vision of trucks and trains passing the town gave rise to fantasies of Roman legionnaires and Attila’s hordes. In Aquileia, wrote Ermacora,

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‘dreams and reality are intertwined.’2 Like Rome, Aquileia gave rise to feverish images of past destruction and rituals of death in the mind of Ermacora. In fact, the entire region of the Veneto would bear witness to the orgy of slaughter that had been played out there during the Great War, and which seemed to fall into ancient patterns. Civilization in the form of the Roman Empire had been inundated here by the so-called barbarians; the Great War, in the minds of many who fought here, would reproduce that scenario in the fall of 1917. Through the Unknown Soldier, the bond between Aquileia and Rome was restored after centuries of separation. A once-great frontier city that had been visited by emperors, Aquileia never recovered from the invasions of the Huns and later the Longobards. Its original inhabitants had either been killed or fled to the islands in the lagoon. The bond was restored in the form of the mutilated remains of a soldier who had died on the frontier in a manner similar to the Roman legionnaires. Aquileia resumed its function as a copy of Rome on the frontiers of the empire, a martyred city to the new barbarians who had come over the Carso. Its ruins, similar to those of the Roman Forum, served as a reminder that Roman civilization had once found a home here. The city was remarkably like Rome; it was a major archaeological centre; it had a forum and Via Sacra like the Eternal City. Similarly to Rome, Aquileia was always on the verge of destruction and pillage. Whether they were Huns, Longobards, or Austro-Hungarians, Aquileia always was at the mercy of invaders from beyond the Dolomites. Now, in 1921, this once-frontier city of the Roman Empire was resurrected by the events of the war. It was no coincidence that exactly one year after the Unknown Soldier made his journey from Aquileia to the heart of Rome, Benito Mussolini unleashed the March on Rome. Like the Unknown Soldier, the fascist blackshirts descended on Rome carrying with them the marks of the Great War. These squadristi were, in the words of Curzio Malaparte, a participant, the heirs of the ‘holy damned,’ the new pagans coming from the trenches of the Carso into the Eternal City as conquerors.3 The first place these ‘conquerors’ visited was the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, located on what Italians referred to as the Altar of the Fatherland. The true altar, according to Auro D’Alba, war veteran and blackshirt, was located on the frontiers.4 The Landscape of War Fascism was created by the war. Without the war, fascism would not have existed, at least not in the form it took. The first fascists were, to a man,

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war veterans freshly out of the trenches. The war experience informed their decision to join Mussolini’s upstart movement in the Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan on 23 March 1919. So close was the identification between the movement and the war that we can speak of fascism as the political incarnation of the Great War. The sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of the war were transformed into a political ideology. Fascism identified closely with the war, both its successes and its frustrations. Giuseppe Bottai, ardito, squadrista, and future governor of Rome, spoke of it as the war distinct from any others.5 Ultimately, the landscape of war found its way into fascism’s identification with the war experience. The unique features of the Italian front, such as the Carso plateau, the mountains, and the flat, straight roads of the Veneto and Friuli, formed a major part of fascist imagery during the years of squadrismo. Udine, the main city of the Friuli region, was called the ‘capital of the war’ in the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution: ‘The war conferred on Udine a privileged place in Italy,’ wrote Ermacora. ‘Refuge for the irredentists before the war, it became the heart of the nation in arms after May 24, 1915.’6 In the memoirs of those who fought in the war, especially those who later became fascists, two outstanding topographical features were prominent in their memories: the Carso plateau and the Friuli plain (pianura). The former came to represent the reality of the war and the transformations it was effecting in the soldier; the latter symbolized civilization and the world the soldiers had known before the war. In the events of 1917, the blurring of the clear boundary between the two landscapes gave birth to the fascist landscape. The Carso ‘On the night of June 8, 1915 our troops occupied San Polo and Monfalcone. They had arrived at the extreme limit of the Friuli plain. Throwing a bridge over the wide irrigation canal serving the fields of the Monfalcone region, they subsequently occupied the edge of the Carso plateau.’7 Thus wrote the Irredentist hero Scipio Slataper on his deathbed in a military hospital in 1915. Wounded at Monfalcone, Slataper was writing an introduction to his now classic Irredentist book Il mio Carso. At that moment, this forbidding rocky plateau, barely known to Italians before the war, was becoming familiar to Italian troops. It would eventually become the symbol of the war in the minds of the millions of soldiers who fought there. On this plateau one of the most brutal and bloody

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fronts between the Italians and Austro-Hungarians was established immediately after Italy’s entry into the Great War in the spring of 1915.8 The Carso, wrote Slataper, was shrouded in mystery. Inaccessible and subject to harsh climate, this lunar landscape contrasted sharply with the lush landscapes of the rest of Italy. It was in many ways the perfect home for the Great War. Slataper describes it as a ‘primordial’ landscape, ‘as if the violent and monstrous substrata had come through to the top, throwing off the surface of the earth. It is as if the humid and soft fecundity of the living flesh had been stripped away revealing, only the immobile and white bones. The Carso extends underneath the sun like an enormous geological skeleton.’9 The Carso’s landscape, which remained indelibly imprinted on the memory of those who survived the war, was violent and pitiless; it was savage and primordial in its features. The elemental nature of the landscape was in keeping with the Carso’s location on the boundary of the Latin, Germanic, and Slavic worlds. It was a place of blurred distinctions and mixed boundaries owing to its functioning as a highway for peoples since prehistoric times. Located on the route of the prehistoric Amber Way, the Carso had been a migration route for the Venetii, the Illyrian, and the Celtic peoples. Attila’s Huns in the fifth century used the Carso as an invasion route. The soldiers of the Great War were very aware of the Carso’s history. Giovan Battista Bussi, a survivor of the Carso, wrote in his memoirs: ‘No one who didn’t fight on the Carso could know what it was like. Generals would sacrifice soldiers to gain 30 or 40 metres of these damned rocks where Attila had certainly descended, because here there exists no grass or water.’10 The Great War seemed only the latest chapter in this tradition of the Carso as a site of conflict between civilizations. Futurist writer Mario Puccini noted how the city of Gorizia on the Carso introduced the Italian soldier to a confusing world of mixed identities. Gorizia was a city, according to Puccini, that was Italian in architecture and form but with Austrian street names.11 A forbidding site of passage and conflict, the Carsican landscape was a place of great inscrutability. During the war, soldiers and civilians referred to the Carso with the cryptic lassù or ‘up there,’ rarely mentioning it by name.12 In their march to this mysterious place, the Italians had to cross the Isonzo River, which became a boundary between the known and the unknown. Leo Pollini writes about how soldiers made the sign of the cross as soon as they crossed the Isonzo and how ‘faces became dark and preoccupied.’13 Crossing the river sent the soldiers into a place of such mystery, fear, and death that they could only compare it to a via

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Roads and Ruins

crucis leading to a Calvary.14 Pollini described in vivid terms the sudden transition in landscape as soldiers moved from the town of Gradisca on the right bank of the Isonzo, the last town of refuge before going ‘up there’ to the front. From Gradisca’s comfort the soldiers were immediately greeted on the outskirts of the town by a ‘disorderly and macabre’ scene of ‘overturned cars, cylinders, cases and ruined houses.’15 Adding to the Carso’s mysterious and deadly appearance were the labyrinthine roads and trenches carved out of the jagged rocks of the plateau. All roads on the Carso began straight but eventually transformed themselves into narrow laneways which inevitably ended in some cavern.16 According to Leo Pollini, the rocky landscape of the Carso meant that any road was ‘archaeological’ in nature, as it ‘fights with the rock threatening to reveal hidden depths.’17 Roads on the Carso were bleak, forbidding, and dangerous. The landscape was formed by different levels of rock which resembled a stairway. According to Carlo Delcroix, future president of the Association for Wounded Veterans under fascism, the Carso was ‘broken up by sinkholes deep and wide enough to shelter entire regiments.’18 This was the ‘madhouse’ of the Carso. It was a place made for defence, not movement. Emilio Lussu described life on the Carso as ‘unbearable … We had done nothing but capture trench, after trench, after trench. The situation remained always the same. Trieste was always in view, in front of the gulf, the same distance away, tired.’19 The narrow, claustrophobic, and dangerous roads and caverns of the Carso remained a lasting memory for those who served there and would give rise, as we will see, to fantasies of wide thoroughfares and open country. On a visit to the front years after the war ended, Mussolini’s biographer and mistress Margherita Sarfatti noted how ‘despite the sweetness of the air and peacefulness of the fields, how lugubrious the Carso remained even in 1922! … Oh mournful, sad Carso! The terrain remains completely dishevelled.’20 On the Carso, rocks took on new meaning. Artillery strikes on Italian trenches had the effect of splintering rocks and transforming them into deadly projectiles. Before the arrival of sandbags, soldiers had to use the Carso’s rocks to build parapets, and as a result, the rocks became both necessary for defence and also a threat. Curzio Malaparte noted how time spent in the Carso changed his view of rocks. Back home he had ignored them, but at the front they could make the difference between life and death.21 Rocks, too, became the graves of soldiers. Sarfatti noted how Mussolini was saddened by the thought of the ‘poor dead, buried atop the impervious, solitary, rocky cliffs of the Carso.’22 Burial amidst the

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rocks was a shock to Italians who, after centuries of Catholicism, could only conceive of being buried in consecrated soil. This strangeness was captured by Giuseppe Steiner, a war veteran, futurist, and fascist in his poem The Song of the Dead on the Carso: ‘I am the dead of the Carso / I was naturally infantry / Now I remain at the bottom of this sinkhole beneath a pile of rocks / And you, don’t turn up your nose because I stink!’23 Amidst the Carsican rocks, soldiers cowered in the natural caverns and sinkholes which marked the landscape. Pollini describes the soldiers’ world on the Carso as a ‘troglodyte’ village where soldiers hid in every possible feature of the landscape sitting around their campfires which came to resemble the ‘focolars of primitive humanity.’24 Within this troglodyte world the soldier lived, slept, and died. As Paul Fussell has argued in his seminal book The Great War and Modern Memory, a similar feeling existed among the soldiers on the Western Front. Yet, this return to primitive existence seemed more appropriate to the Carso because the landscape, with its precipices and caves, was already in place for this kind of existence. Today, as in some primitive society, the Carso retains names carved on rocks by soldiers who served there. The industrial nature of the war contributed to the troglodyte image of the Carso. Soldiers were labourers as much as fighters in this context. The Great War in Italy provided scenes of soldiers incessantly working on the Carso plateau. Ungaretti noted, ‘Today soldiers go into the line as if they were going to work.’25 For those approaching the Carso from the Friuli plain, the spectacle of soldiers working and moving amidst the rocks and ruins of the plateau provided one of the most distinctive sights of the war. Frescura likened the scene to a human beehive.26 Malaparte equated the war to a massive work project which transformed the men who laboured there.27 The peasant-soldiers’ duty, it seemed, was to construct a new world on the forbidding landscape of the Carso. He built roads ‘out of the living rock … All the energies of the race were channelled towards the accomplishment of a massive work, which needed years of sacrifice and torrents of blood.’28 The transformative process of the war was evidenced in the ability of the Italian soldier to make himself at home on the Carso. Frescura noted how the Italian soldier could sleep soundly in a ruined house on the Carso that was squalid and full of refuse: ‘Probably out of nostalgia for home,’ wrote Frescura, ‘the soldier is able to live there.’29 Pollini notes how soldiers would move into the houses that they had watched being demolished, ‘day after day, brick by brick, stone by stone, or being blown up all at once. It was like witnessing a resurrection … When someone lit

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Roads and Ruins

up the focolare (hearth) the house was reconsecrated, like an altar, even if the walls were in ruins.’30 Pollini was astonished at how soldiers would jealously guard their new possession and refer to a ruin as their house. The ruins of the Carso suited the landscape of the plateau and provided a new environment far removed from the home front. Ruins would dominate the accounts of the Carso as much as other topographical features. Paul Fussell has noted how each sector on the Western Front had a symbolic ruin which became a reference point for the soldiers passing through.31 The symbolic ruin on the Carso was San Martino del Carso, a small village on the front lines that saw some of the fiercest battles of the war. Pollini described it as the ‘mysterious martyred village’ that soldiers had been looking at for fifteen months. Once in, soldiers could not resist wandering its barely recognizable streets and piazzas full of debris. For these soldiers, Pollini observed, San Martino was not on the battlefield – it was the battlefield.32 A mythic view of the world was born out of the soldier’s life on the Carso, which in turn led to thoughts of the primitive, the buried, and the suppressed. The poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti elevated San Martino’s ruins to the status of myth. The poem San Martino del Carso, written at the front in August 1916,33 makes an analogy between the ruined houses, ‘of which not even a piece of wall is left,’ and his own soul, ‘which is the country that is most damaged.’34 San Martino became a metaphor for the life of the soldier on the plateau. In Ungaretti’s poetry, the ruins of war became associated with the ancient ruins of his hometown of Alexandria, Egypt. The poem was first published in a volume entitled Sunken Harbour, a reference to the sunken harbour of Alexandria, which had been discovered in his lifetime by the father of a friend. For Ungaretti, the title was a metaphor for that ‘secret within us which is indecipherable.’35 Ungaretti thus made a link between the inscrutable ruins of Alexandria and the equally sphinx-like and mysterious ruins of the Carso and its landscape.36 Ruins, both ancient and modern, also preoccupied Pollini, who came to associate San Martino with Pompeii.37 The imagination of the soldier conflated the ruins of the war with the more familiar ancient ruins of history. Slowly the Italian infantryman, or fante, began making himself at home in the forbidding landscape of the Carso and increasingly identified with the suppressed mysteries of the place. Parallelling the association with home, the soldier developed an ambivalent relationship with the Carso. A constant in the memoirs and war diaries is a compelling fascination with the plateau added to a horror and distaste for it. ‘Squalid and rocky

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Carso,’ wrote the futurist F.T. Marinetti, ‘broken ground, tormented, crushed, fissured, filled with sinkholes and caverns.’38 For Puccini, the Carso was one massive ruin, a place of dreadfulness where cemeteries were shelled and where the ‘ground would often throw up bones’; still, ‘this is our land. Here one doesn’t talk of dying!’39 Frescura spoke of wonder at seeing the town of Gorizia and the Carso during a night-time bombardment. It was, he wrote, ‘a fantastic spectacle,’ even as the wind carried the ‘putrid smells’ of cadavers down from the plateau.40 Leo Pollini came to despise the sinkholes and caverns of the Carso because of the pervasive stench that was a mixture of ‘cadavers, deep earth, cesspool, rats.’41 The Carso was a place where the boundaries between life and death were erased and soldiers were exposed to a grotesqueness matched by the landscape itself.42 It was typical of the Great War that for all the horrors presented by the battlefield, soldiers were also fascinated by it. Welsh writer David Jones, who authored an account of the war, In Parenthesis, that was full of mythical allusions, described the Western front as a ‘place of enchantment.’43 Despite the obvious horrors of living on the Carso, almost all the memoirists expressed deep regret and even nostalgia at having to leave it in 1917 during the retreat of Caporetto. Italian soldiers came to feel as if the Carso had become their own. Mario Puccini, in his account of the retreat of Caporetto, wrote of the great pain experienced by soldiers when they had to give up the Carso trenches: ‘The Carso was so familiar to us! Hated yes, but we knew every sinkhole, every path; it was ours like the town we were born in is ours.’44 Marinetti, who found the Carso squalid in 1917, waxed nostalgic about it in later years during a visit to the Southern Italian island of Capri. Speaking at a convention of environmentalists in 1926, Marinetti came to compare the rocky landscape of Capri with the Carso: ‘When I say that these rocks resemble those of the Carso, I am defining them as typical Italian rocks, rebellious, tumultuous, lyrical, violent, warrior-like, revolutionary just like our soul … your rocks are identical to those of the Carso.’45 Even though, as one soldier wrote, ‘the Carso ruined you,’ there was a sense of home and place with which the Italian soldier came to identify.46 Leo Pollini described looking back at the Carso in 1917 as if he was leaving home. ‘O, Carso, addio!’ is the last line of his book.47 This nostalgia for the Carso was due to the deep identification that soldiers had made between themselves and the landscape. As Ungaretti exclaimed in 1917: ‘My God, how we have remained attached to the Carso!’48 The effect of leaving was traumatic according to Ungaretti, who noted that the Italian soldier, known

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for his singing, had stopped doing so during the retreat of 1917: ‘‘‘How was it,” said my companions, “that in twenty-four hours we lost the work of three years?” They remained attached to the Carso.’49 From this attachment or identification with the landscape of the Carso came the belief in the plateau as the place of origin of a new Italian. Curzio Malaparte had no doubt that a new man, represented in the Italian infantryman, was born on the Carso. For Malaparte, a moral revolution in Italy could only be carried out by the fante who had been formed, through ‘suffering,’ on the Carso.50 Ferruccio Vecchi, ardito and early Fascist, wrote that the Carso was the birthplace of arditismo: ‘They were born in the furrows of the trenches. They were born in the high Carsican furnaces.’51 No longer a place of passage, the Carso during the Great War was a place of origin and a dwelling for the new man represented by the fante and the ardito. Gibelli has argued that the Great War transformed life permanently for those peasants who had fought there by modernizing them and forcing them, among other things, to become literate.52 The Carso’s environment suited a man who could live on the periphery where the civilized and uncivilized worlds met. Pollini devoted an entire chapter of his memoir to an Italian soldier he had served with in the trenches who had previously lived in Utah. This soldier had lived in a deserted place in the ‘midst of savage mountains’ servicing a train which passed through twice a day.53 Life in Utah was not unlike that on the Carso. Hours of monotony in a strange land were broken by a few minutes of intense work: ‘For us, abandoned up there,’ said the ‘American’ to Pollini, ‘those few minutes were our whole life!’ Pollini had to admit that this man was right at home in the trenches. He would do anything asked of him and he never rested. This ‘American’ was the prototype of the new man forged in the Carsican trenches. Fascist hagiography would later celebrate General Sanna in the days of the March on Rome as the ‘most Carsican of all the generals.’54 A dominant theme of fascism was the creation of a new man who would create a new world order out of the ruins of the past. The notion that a new man was born in the Carsican trenches thus acted as a precursor for this fascist obsession. The Plain If the Carso created a new man or type of soldier, the old civilization that soldiers had known before the war remained always visible in the plain, or pianura, which lay at the foot of the plateau. The plain came to represent everything that the Carso was not. On the plain, vistas were long,

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roads were straight, towns were intact, flora and vegetation bloomed. It was the last outpost of civilization before ascending to the primitive heights of the Carso. During the war, the pianura became an object of great desire for soldiers, not only on the Carso plateau, but also on the Asiago plateau at the foot of the Dolomites. Soldiers would gaze wistfully at the plain while holed up in their narrow, claustrophobic trenches. One time, Emilio Lussu on the Asiago plateau could not understand why his troops were so excited about capturing a particular trench until he looked behind him: ‘In front of me, completely illuminated by the sun, resembling an immense blanket covered by shining pearls lay the pianura veneta. Beneath us were Bassano and the Brenta River; and then, further out to the right were Verona, Vicenza, Treviso, and Padova. Further still, to the left, Venice. Venezia!’55 Throughout Lussu’s account, the plain represented the opposite of the front line, a constant reminder of normality in an abnormal world. It was the world of the familiar, of home. Although it was constantly in view, however, the plain was increasingly elusive, becoming almost like a mirage. A similar spectacle presented itself to soldiers on the Carso. The view of the plain from the Carso was spectacular, wrote Chino Ermacora atop the Monte Nero. After a difficult march to reach the summit of Monte Nero, and in anticipation of a battle, the Friulan native Ermacora and a companion looked longingly on the plain and exchanged knowing glances with others sharing the same desire.56 ‘Oh what a sublime spectacle loomed in front of us,’ wrote the futurist Ardengo Soffici, gazing at the plain from a castle at Sacile near Udine during the Caporetto retreat.57 The sight of endless spaces appealed to soldiers after the claustrophobic experiences on the Carso. The extreme disparity between the Carso and the plain, however, made the frustration more palpable. Malaparte bitterly recalled how soldiers on leave remained close to the front lines on the Carso and were rarely allowed to go as far as the plain. On the rare occasions when leave was enjoyed on the plain, the soldiers were only allowed to stay in remote farmhouses far from the towns. The point was to keep soldiers on leave uncomfortable.58 While in the trenches of the Carso, in the middle of the night when soldiers were left to their own thoughts, the fante would recall the fields and landscapes of his home projected against ‘the black background of those unknown forests, of that torment of rocks and crags, of land broken up and dried out by the ice.’59 The stark contrast between the plain and the plateau made a strong impression on those who fought there. Whereas the confines of the Carsi-

26

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can trenches encouraged immobility and stagnation, the plain promised movement and space. From this landscape, the Italian soldier associated the idea of freedom with movement – both of which were lacking on the jagged rocks of the Carso. It was on the long, straight roads of the Veneto that the Italians experienced the freedom of the march. The predominant view of the Great War in popular and academic history has focused almost exclusively on the immobility of trench warfare, ignoring the almost incessant movement of troops behind the lines. Denis Winter has argued that, on the Western Front, the march provided one of the few pleasurable aspects of the war, noting how his uncle smiled recalling the memories of marching on the long, straight cobbled roads of northern France. For British soldiers, the march was a link to past wars, and the ‘unknown destination’ of marches released soldiers from a sense of personal responsibility.60 The only difficulty of the march, apart from the heavy loads soldiers had to carry, was that the long straight roads, ‘pleasing to the motorist today,’ proved fatiguing to the eyes.61 On the Italian front, the use of an automobile or truck could provide some degree of pleasure and control on the open roads of Friuli. The arditi forged their identity on the roads of Friuli, the most familiar part of the Veneto plain for soldiers, travelling in vehicles at breakneck speeds from their base at Sdricca di Manzano to the Carsican front. The arditi’s method of reaching the front was a way of replacing the traditional march: ‘Don’t tire me with endless marches!’ was the title of an article published by Mario Carli in the corps’ journal Ardito after the war.62 The infinite vistas, and monotony, of the Friulan roads would crumble before the wheels of the arditi’s Fiat trucks. The roads of Friuli became legendary in the memory of the Great War and took on a special significance in the minds of the arditi. They became a symbol of rapid, motorized advance against the trenches of the Carso. The flatness and infinite views of the plain became the object of great desire for soldiers in the Carsican trenches. The plain was a place of refuge, a place of symmetry, and a home for all the regions of Italy to come together in unity. Giovanni Comisso, soldier-writer and future legionnaire who followed D’Annunzio to Fiume, recalled with fondness the Friuli plain. Watching the interminable columns of soldiers heading to the Carso, Comisso noted with delight that all regions of Italy were passing through, so as to unite Italy in a way that the Risorgimento had not been able to do. Comisso’s war memoir, Giorni di Guerra, is obsessed with the dusty roads of the Friuli and the ‘geometric designs’ of the streets and piazze of the northern towns. Anticipating the grid-like patterns of

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the Friulan roads, Comisso took pleasure in the ‘geometrical proportion created by our marching columns through the Piazza dell’Unità’ in Florence.63 Compared to the chaos of the Carso, the towns and roads of the Friuli were a model of precision, proportion, and tranquillity. Not only did the pianura offer a comforting geometric order compared to the jagged and broken Carso, the plain’s spaciousness offered the possibility of attaining the infinite. According to Ungaretti, this desire for the infinite was in keeping with the Italian character: ‘The Italian is impatient; the Italian has need for adventure. He needs a war plan which gives him space; more space; always space.’64 Curzio Malaparte saw infinite space as something to be recaptured by the war. Pre-war society, according to Malaparte, had lost all sense of ‘mystery and of death; the infinite had been lost.’65 The experience of war and the new man that was the result would recapture the ‘oceanic’ instinct in the Italian people. Friuli’s wide-open roads were thoroughfares to the infinite. ‘It feels as if we’re returning to life,’ wrote Pollini while admiring the straight roads penetrating into the lush green landscape as he returned from the front.66 The roads of the Friuli provided the ultimate escape from the reality of the war. In the final days of the Caporetto retreat, Soffici and other officers desperately searched for the open road that would take them out of the war zone and into the Veneto. After making their way through the ‘squalid and melancholy’ streets of Treviso, Soffici’s party finally found the road to Montebelluna: ‘Laid out, almost supine, in the racing car I look between the rows of trees along the road. Like the countryside which races by the train, the sky rolls over us during our headlong rush. I rediscover the sense of eternity.’67 This is the final entry in Soffici’s diary. Caporetto and the Return of the Barbarians In late October 1917, after two years of futile battles, an Austro-German offensive finally broke the Carso front and sent the Italian army reeling in retreat. The advance was not halted until November along the Piave River, with the Italians suffering heavy casualties and desertions. With the Caporetto defeat, the Friuli plain witnessed invasion and occupation by the Austrians, but not before the Italian army had swept through it in retreat accompanied by thousands of fleeing locals. With the Austrian advance, the Carso came to occupy the plain. The ordered, symmetrical roads of Friuli, which had provided dreams, pleasures, and escape for Italian troops on the plateau now witnessed the chaos and disorder

28

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of war. During the retreat, the roads of the Friuli became jammed with humanity, animals, and military transports desperately racing for the few bridges over the Tagliamento and Piave rivers.68 Accounts of the retreat abound with scenes of confusion, terror, and tragedy that raise the event to biblical proportions.69 Coming down from the Carso were the soldiers transformed by years of war on the plateau. Accounts of the retreat would characterize these soldiers as neo-primitives, a new species of men shaped by an anthropological transformation that emphasized a return to the primordial helped by modern technology. The plain proved a nightmare for military defence. Everything the Italian soldier had learned about fighting on the Carso was now useless. ‘The infantry, used to the Carso, can’t believe that one can fight here as they did up there,’ wrote Puccini in his account of the retreat.70 Fighting a rearguard action, Puccini’s men set up machine-gun posts on the roads waiting for the Austrians, but the night made it difficult to identify anything on the horizon. The reason for this was the flat landscape: ‘The soldier has no precise sense of the time of events as when he was on the Carso, where every hiding spot was known.’71 The limitless horizon of the Friuli plain, a source of pleasure when it was behind the lines, became a menace during battle.72 Some looked forward to finally fighting on the open plain. Benito Mussolini, convalescing from a wound, wrote in his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, that the ‘second Marne’ was now being fought on the plain: Let’s put an end to the episodic war, with guerilla warfare, with local offensives, with frontal assaults against a mountain or hill, or an elevated post, or a village, or a group of cottages. We have great means; we must have great aims! Today, Germany offers us a battle of movement, the great clash in the open field, outside of the trenches. On the Fruili plain we are no longer isolated.73

Mussolini, in this editorial, displayed the type of rhetoric that he would use years later when calling for the opening up of spaces in Rome. The distaste for small, confined places in favour of the open plain came to be a familiar refrain in fascism. Fighting on the plain, however, would not prove to be so easy. Waiting for the Austrians to appear on the horizon not only threw Puccini’s men into a panic but also played on the imaginations of others like Ardengo Soffici. While waiting for the Austrians to appear on the banks of the Tagliamento, Soffici noticed a series of mysterious red lights punctuating

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the horizon which had the semblance of something ‘dead and frightening about it.’74 Soffici’s account of the retreat is emblematic of the new sense of terror and dread which had invaded the Friuli plain with the retreat. The road from Pordenone to Casarsa, for example, ‘would have been fun in other times but today was a new reason for melancholy.’75 Soffici was both witness and participant to the chaos of the retreat, and was often at pains to restore some military discipline to Italian troops fleeing the enemy’s advance. His odyssey to secure transportation and find the open road was marked by despair, rage, and tragedy. All around him were scenes of devastation and the madness of the retreat. ‘Oh, the vision of disaster as we left (Udine),’ wrote Soffici as he looked upon the masses of people, cars, and animals jamming the main road out of the city: ‘A sea of bodies and vehicles packed in between the houses on either side (were) moving slowly in the dust and sun.’76 The once harmonious and beautiful scenery of the Friuli was destroyed by the visions of the emigration. Frescura witnessed the ‘painful vision of the dreadful emigration of sad people, made ugly by the long escape, without help or destination. Nothing speaks more of the war than the rotting corpses of horses on the roadside displaying swaths of red meat where soldiers had carved out some flesh.’77 Dead horses and abandoned vehicles came to dominate the roadscapes. Once wide open to transport, the Friuli roads became fatal to that traffic during the retreat as the world of the Carso invaded the Friuli. The arditi who had once flown down these roads towards the front now had to fight their way through the mobs using their bayonets. Cars and trucks which had once been used to dominate the roads of the Friuli were now a hindrance, and Frescura was forced to order several of them torched in order to clear the way.78 Soffici found himself driving on the shoulders of the roads and eventually taking sidestreets and lanes: ‘In the rainy night, through strange towns, we found ourselves in inextricable labyrinths of lanes and alleys that left with me the image of dreamy and mysterious places.’79 Caporetto was forging a new myth. Suddenly, the Friuli plain had become the Carso with its immobility, scenes of death, darkness, and images of the fantastic combined with the grotesque. The troglodytes of the Carso now intermixed explosively with the civilians of the Friuli. The retreat was quick to reveal a latent hostility between soldiers and civilians as they came into contact with the civilization of the pianura. Comisso wrote of how a group of soldiers carrying a cart full of bread forced their way through the crowds blocking

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the roads: ‘Menacingly, the soldiers were ready to defend themselves. The crowds, after letting them through, would scream after them, ‘you, camorristi (mafiosi) of course have your bread!’ or ‘Fattened up sell outs!’ Even the women screamed and showed their fists.’80 The suspicion of civilians towards the retreating soldiers was confirmed to Comisso when the lady of a house where his soldiers were billeted looked at them as if they were thieves. After the war, Archbishop Rossi, a leading Roman Catholic archbishop who had stayed behind after the retreat, noted that the retreating Italians had left behind ‘nothing but devastation and ruin,’ while the Austrian occupiers had left the region untouched.81 Who were the conquerors? Was it the Austrians or the fante descending from the Carso? For the inhabitants of the pianura the Italian soldier in retreat was the new Attila. This view of the soldiers was the product of increasing looting and vandalism carried out by the Italian troops during the retreat. Military misconduct became a cause for scandal after the war and served to distance soldiers from civilians already during the conflict. The violence of retreating soldiers also revealed a striking primitivism that was not lost on contemporary observers. It seemed as if the ancient barbarian invaders had returned over the plateau to wreak destruction on the plain. Before the retreat it was thought that barbarism was the preserve of the Austrians, but the effects of war on the Carso had forced the Italians to adopt barbarism as well. Frescura noted how the Austrians used medieval-type instruments to kill the wounded, revealing their savagery. A general told him, however, that Italians had to adopt similar tactics to compete with them on the Carso. In the end, mused Frescura, a steel bullet was just as ‘barbarous’ as any spiked club or mustard gas.82 Although much of the looting resulted from a desperate search for food, there is evidence that the Italian soldier-barbarian was engaging in violence for its own sake. Puccini recounted an incident where a soldier named Croci had to be restrained from torching a house along the retreat: ‘Croci, and many others like him, want to ruin and demolish, for the pure pleasure of seeing fire and ashes, of putting his hands in gas and straw in order to feel inside of him reverberating the slow burning of things which are dying and disappearing.’83 Along the road to Latisana as the troops retreated, Puccini noticed how the villas, which had once been symbols of ‘cleanliness and wealth,’ were now at the mercy of retreating soldiers. ‘The fires, the hasty encampments of passing troops, the plundering have increased the scars and the macabre sights,’ he wrote. ‘Some houses have collapsed; others burn.’84 On the road through San Daniele, Frescura witnessed soldiers in ruined houses destroying furniture with the butts of their rifles: ‘Dirt black with barbarian helmets, they resem-

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ble the ugly vandals from long ago who had inhabited the fantasies of childhood and now come back in adulthood as nightmares.’85 Frescura noticed the transition from civilized man to savage in himself when he was ordered to clear two automobiles blocking a road. Immune to the sight of ubiquitous death on the roads, Frescura realized that the will to dominate had now come as he and others pushed the automobiles: ‘I am the strongest,’ wrote Frescura. ‘Men, violently knocked about, look with amazement at my face, which must be terrible.’86 The new man, savage and powerful, had come down from the Carso bringing barbarism to the civilized plain. ‘The Veneto was put to the sack,’ according to Malaparte.87 A striking feature of this new barbarism was its use of modern technology. The new barbarian was a paradox in that he brought with him ancient savagery characteristics of the modern. Dead horses lay next to burning trucks and abandoned cannons. The symbols of the modern became the targets of suspicion and hatred for the fleeing inhabitants of the Friuli, who were either on foot or on mules. Even the marching soldiers, who did not have the luxury of an automobile, would throw rocks at passing cars carrying officers.88 The Italian soldier was viewed by many as the carrier of modernity. Puccini, who had realized the transformative process brought by the war to Udine, also noted how the inhabitants of the small town of San Giacomo looked upon his retreating soldiers as ‘modern.’ One inhabitant asked Puccini, ‘Why do you want to break this harmony? The war doesn’t reach here.’89 The often grotesque mix of modernity and primitivism, technology and the savage, disturbed Friuli’s traditional tranquillity. Frescura’s account of an incident on the roads of the retreat is full of symbolism: A vile humanity latches onto the car, shouting savagely, ‘–away with you!–’ Suddenly, the crowd on the road scatters as a car zig-zags down the road. It’s an awful sight – the car is full of soldiers, one with his stomach ripped open screams with a terrible voice. At the wheel is a cadaver, with its entrails exposed. The phantom car disappears quickly and the macabre sight ends.90

The boundary between the pre-modern and the modern was demolished in the retreat of Caporetto, when modern war and primitive humanity had come down from the Carso to destroy the harmony of the Friuli plain in 1917. The Italian soldiers had gone up to the Carso as peasants, dreaming about their farms, and had come down as high-tech primitives wreaking havoc on the peaceful pianura that they had so much longed for in the Carsican caverns. The metaphor of the soldier-primitive could not have been completed

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had not the image of the war been viewed as archaeological. A recent history of the Great War has argued that the war had the effect of rendering things ordinarily hidden visible.91 Like the war on the Carso, the retreat of Caporetto was also archaeological in nature, revealing aspects of the frontier culture in the northeast long buried by centuries of civilization. Writing to his friend Giovanni Papini, Giuseppe Ungaretti feared that the war had released the ‘semi-barbarous lower Slavs’: ‘It’s a furnace that has been lit by Europe. As with all half-primitives, half-brigands, halfintriguers, there is in them a mystical depth that no one can comprehend; it will manifest itself in unexpected ways, just like all actions by people still subject to hallucinations.’92 Ungaretti was writing about the Slavs who lived on the other side of the Carso, but he could have been speaking about Italians as well. Not only had the war revealed the blurred boundary in people between the civilized and the savage, it also performed an archaeological excavation on the plain. The impact of the war on the Friuli is best expressed in Chino Ermacora’s book Piccola patria, with which we began this chapter. Written as part war memoir and part travel diary, Ermacora’s book is exceptional because of its celebration of regionalism, which ran counter to official fascist policy.93 Although Ermacora writes about his native region, the book is really about the war experience and the impact it had on his beloved Friuli. Ermacora begins his book with a consideration of Friuli’s location on the border between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’: ‘Located as it is in the extreme east of Italy, it faces the dark lands of the ancient Aryan migrants, towards the lands which ancient Greek cartographers gave few names to, towards the mysterious barbarisms of ancient Europe. From here comes its importance and its unhappiness.’94 As it was during the Roman Empire, Friuli had once again been subject to a barbarian invasion, only this time by Italians. Traces of ancient Rome could still be found in lost roads discovered accidentally by farmers. The ancient Friuliani, wrote Ermacora, had sought refuge from the barbarians by fleeing to the lagoon islands on the Adriatic. Towns such as Grado, with its sunken Roman ruins, are testament to this. While Ermacora is keen to emphasize Friuli’s Roman heritage, his account of the region is full of the pagan and the magical. Often he returns to the focolari, or hearths, characteristic of the Friuli home which recalled pre-Roman times. During the dark days of the Austrian occupation, ‘the focolari were relit amidst the ruins and the massacres.’95 Ermacora’s fondest memory of the Caporetto retreat was the sight of

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an abandoned house that still had its focolare burning in defiance of the advancing invaders. In Friuli, Ermacora failed to see any concrete signs of the war. Instead, he noticed that the war had become like a dream. It was as if it had never happened. ‘Who remembers the past – even the most recent past?’ he asked himself as he contemplated the ruins of a fourteenth-century church. ‘The war has become a myth. Even I ask myself if the war wasn’t a dream – and I fought in these parts.’96 Friuli was the site where the modern and the primitive met. After taking part in a traditional wine festival, Ermacora spent an evening in a café where a modern jazz band was playing. He was shocked by what he saw: ‘Pale faces, short skirts, and short hair have obliterated thirty centuries of civilization. I feel as if I am submerged in the darkness of an equatorial forest, moving back towards the mysterious springs of humanity, and groping through the sunset of the world.’97 Refusing to participate in such a dance, Ermacora is accused by a companion of being a passatista (lover of the past) – a favourite epithet hurled by Futurists at those who refused to be modern. The savage and the modern revealed themselves in this jazz club in the same way that the war had revealed them a decade earlier. The war had not transformed Friuli as much as revealed its true nature as a place where the boundaries between the civilized and the noncivilized were blurred. In Friuli, especially in Aquileia, the pagan and the Christian lived together in a city of fantasies and dreams. It was here – in a town that was largely uninhabited and a shadow of its former grandeur – that the Carso and the plain melded together. Ermacora’s book, which tries to place Friuli in the context of the new Roman Empire under fascism instead reveals the region as a site of undefined boundaries. Through this region came modern barbarian invaders who would take their invasion to Rome, as they had done in the fifth century. After the war, Rome and the ‘heathens’ would meet again in the form of the fascist squadristi who were the fruit of the Caporetto retreat. Because of Caporetto, the pianura, site of civilization and nostalgia, became a place of myth, violence, and primitivism wedded to the technology of modern warfare. The wide-open roads were now theatres of death and dreams; the desire for infinite space became nihilistic. Here, during this retreat that Malaparte described as ‘odyssean,’ the fascist landscape was born.

CHAPTER TWO

Roads to Rome: The Blackshirts and the città nemico

‘Sire, I bring to you the Italy of Vittorio Veneto!’1 With these words, Mussolini greeted the king, Victor Emanuel III, on 28 October 1922. On that day the blackshirts marched through Rome triumphantly celebrating their supposed revolution, while Mussolini, in top hat and coat-tails was given the post of prime minister by the king in the Quirinal Palace. Mussolini’s pronouncement reflected the fascist belief that the heroic Italy, that which fought and won the battle of Vittorio Veneto in the closing days of the war, was embodied in the squadristi who were formed around the ideals of the arditi. According to fascist mythology, the blackshirts were not the armed thugs their opponents made them out to be, but the incarnation of the Italian warrior who had fought valiantly on the craggy rocks of the Carso and the peaks of the Dolomites. Domenico Maria Leva, the chronicler of Roman fascism, described how the young blackshirts, as they approached the gates of Rome, were joined by veterans wearing their ‘trench uniforms faded by the sun and rain of the Carso, the plateaus, the Grappa: warriors who form the backbone of fascism and who, finally, marching through the streets of Rome towards the tomb of the Unknown Soldier … reap the rewards that were denied them after Vittorio Veneto.’2 One blackshirt was alleged to have told a military official who had half-heartedly tried to convince the squads to turn back that ‘the last battle of the Carso has begun.’3 A participant in the March, the Florentine writer Curzio Malaparte, would later write that the March on Rome was the concluding act of a revolution that began in 1917 on the slopes of the Carso. In the days following the defeat of Caporetto, wrote Malaparte, ‘the Veneto was plundered.’4 The ‘holy damned’ of Caporetto began their March on Rome that fateful October of 1917, descending on the imboscati (shirk-

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ers) behind the lines only to find the towns of the Veneto deserted as the inhabitants fled the ‘peasants from the Carso.’5 The retreat was the beginning of a revolution: ‘Now the cry of the senza fucile (unarmed) was raised from the roads of the Veneto, heading towards comfortable Italy.’6 In October 1922, the streets of Rome too would be deserted to greet the blackshirts. For Malaparte, the war had caused what Antonio Gibelli has called an anthropological revolution, transforming the peasants of Italy into a ‘social class’ that hated everything that was ‘bourgeois, intellectual, and imboscato.’7 What is remarkable about Malaparte’s account is the connections and associations the soldier (fante) makes between the imboscati and the physical shape of the cities. The soldiers, claims Malaparte, were from the countryside and the suburbs, while the imboscati could always be found in the cities, especially in the piazze (town squares) where in 1914–15 they had screamed for the war they now avoided serving in. The peasant-soldiers were sacrificing their lives to ‘defend the wide streets, large squares, and the sumptuous palaces’ which the imboscati called home and from which they fled during the Caporetto retreat.8 In Malaparte’s acount, the characteristic villas of the Veneto region expressed the ‘abstract ideas of war’ held by the Supreme Command in Udine in contrast to the ‘mud and blood of the trenches.’9 It was only fitting that the March on Rome in 1922 was held during a rainstorm, where the mud and blood of the front could be authentically recreated. For Malaparte, the blackshirts not only embodied the spiritual essence of the fante from the Carso, they also brought with them the landscape of the war. The towns of the Veneto were now Rome, the imboscati of the town squares were now the parliamentarians and the socialists of the Eternal City, representatives of a society ‘ill on particularism, local colour, and nationalism.’10 Although he would later renounce fascism, Malaparte’s sensibility to the landscape of the war and its incarnation in the fascist squadristi was a common trope in the accounts of the March on Rome. The previous chapter demonstrated how the landscape of the war, its sights and sounds, were interiorized by soldiers. This interior landscape determined, in large part, how the early fascists perceived their country after the war. It was the transformative experience of the Great War that especially informed early fascism’s attitudes towards Rome. The impact of the war on the fascist imagination should not be underestimated. Giuseppe Bottai, ardito, squadrista, and future governor of Rome, spoke of it as the war distinct from any others.11 The mental landscape of the Great War continued to form the fascist mind long after Mussolini took

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power in 1922. That landscape, which included the Carso plateau and the Friuli plain, shaped how fascists approached the March on Rome in 1922 and would continue to shape the fascist attitude towards the Roman cityscape long after the march. The Landscape of Squadrismo Founded in March 1919 by the ex-socialist newspaper editor Benito Mussolini, the Fasci di Combattimento was composed entirely of war veterans. Of these veterans the majority were arditi led by Mario Carli and Ferruccio Vecchi.12 The influence of the arditi on squadrismo was fundamental. The first squadrist action in April 1919, an attack on the Milan head office of the socialist newspaper Avanti!, was essentially an ardito action.13 Later accounts of squadrismo would amplify the role of the arditi in fascism’s birth. In his memoir-diary as a squadrista, Mario Piazzesi emphasized the crucial role played by an ardito who came to dinner at his home. In one of the longest entries in the diary, Piazzesi transcribed verbatim the ardito’s account of the Italian government’s betrayal of its veterans. This encounter inspired Piazzesi’s involvement with squadrismo.14 The influence of the arditi on early fascism extended beyond battle tactics and political propaganda. It also manifested itself in attitudes towards Rome and was often expressed in aesthetic terms. Ardito and founder of Roman fascism Giuseppe Bottai claimed in 1937 that the arditi were not just a military unit, but an ‘ideal category’ of the Italian people.15 This ideal category, as mentioned in the previous chapter, found its home on the open roads of the Veneto during the war. This was not a trench-bound unit, forced to cower in the caverns of the Carso, but an elite squad that revelled in moving rapidly across the Friuli plain on its way to making lightning assaults on specific points of the front lines. Not surprisingly, this love of the open road and its possibilities of speed made arditismo sympathetic to Futurists after the war. On the thirteenth anniversary of the founding of the ardito association, Carlo Scorza urged the ex-arditi to ‘march on, not blindly, but in a straight line.’16 The straight road was the playground of the arditi and of the Futurists that found full expression during the war. In 1916 the founder of futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, issued his manifesto The New Religion – Morality of Speed, in which he envisioned a new world dominated by geometric symmetry: ‘Tortuous paths, roads that follow the indolence of streams and wind along the spines and uneven bellies of mountains, these are the laws of the earth … Speed finally gives to

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human life one of the characteristics of divinity: the straight line.’17 Attacking the city via the straight road was a pillar of the fascist imagination between 1919 and 1922, and played a prominent role in the mythology of squadrismo. The most important and ubiquitous symbol of this view was the Fiat 18BL. Used by the arditi during the war, the squadristi appropriated this vehicle for their punitive expeditions. Their adoption of the 18BL was not just a tactical move, but also a deeply symbolic one which linked squadrismo to the war experience. An expedition in an 18BL took on the characteristics of an ardito advance from the Friuli plain up to the Carso. Piazzesi’s account of his first motorized expedition in March 1921, travelling from Florence to Perugia deep in the Apennine Mountains, is instructive. Much as in a professional motor race, the squads left at staggered times according to the speed capabilities of their vehicles. While the foot soldiers used 18BLs and 15 TERs, the leaders crammed into a small red sports car. They were the last to leave. For Piazzesi, the expedition was full of both wondrous expectation and trepidation. As the Carso was for the arditi, the region of Umbria was an ‘unknown’ for Piazzesi and his comrades. Under the constant fear of ‘red lairs,’ Piazzesi noted how colourful Tuscany gave way to the ‘greyness’ of Umbria: ‘We never seemed to get to our destination. The goal seemed lost in the whiteness of the road.’18 As with the Italian soldiers who discovered another part of Italy during the war, Piazzesi recounted with pleasure his discovery of the Lago di Trasimeno, which eased some of the escalating tension of the expedition. The spell was quickly broken by an attack on a Casa del Popolo (socialist headquarters) at the side of the road. Once in Perugia, Piazzesi and his companions found it difficult to fight in the ‘labyrinthine’ streets of the city, streets ‘the Reds knew well.’19 Like the Carso, the streets of Perugia seemed to help the defenders and only led to failure for the attackers. The ride back to Tuscany was uncomfortable, but Piazzesi took some solace in the fact that the dust thrown up by the truck acted as a cover against enemy attack. Like the arditi, the squadristi felt a sense of invincibility on the open road. Squadrismo as a movement forged on the open roads of Italy was central to the memoirs of Italo Balbo, whose Diario 1922 is full of references to how the landscape of squadrismo resembled that of the war. Balbo’s use of motorized transport in his expeditions became part of fascist mythology. In his years as ras of Ferrara, Balbo made the open roads of the Emilia-Romagna his own. First published in 1932 on the tenth anniversa-

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ry of the March on Rome, Balbo’s diary revealed important elements of squadrist mythology.20 No other ras revelled in the use of vehicles the way Balbo did, and his wartime service as an ardito was without doubt a major reason for this. On 30 July 1922, Balbo conducted his most notorious expedition, the so-called ‘column of fire.’ During this violent crusade, Balbo commandeered a fleet of trucks and raced around the countryside near Ravenna attacking and burning socialist ‘lairs.’ Allegedly going without food or sleep for twenty-four hours, Balbo led this fleet in his own car: ‘It was a terrible night. Our passage was marked by high columns of flames.’21 His mission complete, Balbo returned to Ferrara, ferrying the fascist dead with him. This escapade bore the hallmarks of an ardito expedition. Like most squadristi, Balbo was obsessed with motorized transport. He judged Mussolini’s character favourably after having witnessed the future Duce driving a car: ‘Mussolini was audacious, extraordinary, with a speed that was too high yet precise and secure. I will go to the ends of the earth for him.’22 For Balbo, the automobile and truck were the keys to power. On one occasion, he recounted how the fascist way of fast driving was enough to disperse a demonstration without resorting to rifles. In the hours leading up to the March on Rome, Balbo had to get into his car and drive from the operational headquarters in Perugia to Rome in order to ‘gain contact with reality.’23 For an ardito like Balbo, waiting for information was sedentary and pointless; only a journey in his car at high speed could satisfy him. The obsession with mobility made the open roads of Italy an important lieu de mémoire in fascist mythology. Squadrismo found its home on the streets and roads. Not only was it the medium used for the punitive expeditions, but it also provided refuge. Balbo wrote of the ‘picturesque sight’ of blackshirts camping in the streets during the ‘siege’ of Bologna in May 1922. During the march on Ferrara a few weeks previously, Balbo recalled the blackshirts camping out on the streets when the local schools were not open to them. On the streets the fascists shared food with workers while fires and burners were lit to warm coffee. These sights reminded Balbo of the war.24 The road was the preferred place for squads and a source of fond memories. Piazzesi remembered the road to the town of Troghi in Tuscany as a site of past expeditions. It was on this road that the local inhabitants greeted his squadristi as liberators.25 In fascist mythology, the road was the site of triumph but also of death. The squadristi’s willingness to march on the open road invited ambush from the roadside. The hagiographies of fascist martyrs often paint a

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picture of the heroic, marching blackshirt, head high, being attacked in an ambush and left to die on that road. One example among many is the account of the ‘martyrdom’ of Franco Baldini in the days of the first Fascist Party Congress in 1921: ‘Formed in a cortege with Baldini at the head, the ardito group of fascists marched towards the San Lorenzo quarter, noted nest of social-communists, singing patriotic songs. Baldini, marching with his son, was murdered by assassins hiding behind trees.’26 For this reason, the fascists came to despise the narrow streets of the medieval quarters. This is best described in Italo Balbo’s account of the assault on Parma by the squadristi in the summer of 1922. On 1 August a general strike had been declared and the fascists mobilized to break it. Balbo was sent to Parma to take the city allegedly in the hands of the communists. Bringing with him some 15,000 blackshirts, Balbo encircled the city and immediately laid siege.27 His account of the battle is replete with comparisons and analogies to the war. Crossing the Via Garibaldi, which led into the city, became a ‘rite of passage’ for the fascists, as it meant walking into continuous ambushes.28 As with the Isonzo River below the Carso, a river had to be crossed in Parma to enter the battle zone. This fact of nature proved no obstacle to the motorized fascists, as Balbo proudly asserted: ‘Even special trains arrived.’29 Balbo’s account of the battle of Parma is useful because of the spatial ideas it evoked. Fascist mythology was dominated by the contrast between the open, straight road where the fascists dwelt, and the dark, hidden recesses favoured by their enemies. While the fascist was on the open road, the ‘subversive’ was usually hidden in a lair at the side of the road. One account of the death of Tolemaide Cinini, a Florentine blackshirt, uses all the tropes of this mythology. Cinini and his comrades, riding in an open truck, had descended into the plain when they fell into an ambush (imboscata). As the story goes, the socialists, alerted by the bells of the church, hid behind a bale of hay next to a farmhouse on the road: ‘Suddenly, a homicidal burst of gunfire hit the fascists, who had just entered the plain. The singing of Giovinezza, which could be heard getting louder as the truck approached, suddenly stopped.’30 The emphasis on the pianura and the open road with the fascists singing patriotic songs clearly showed echoes of the arditi during the war. The accounts of ‘martyrdom’ were always careful to point out the architectonic sites of death. The farmhouse, little church, as well as osterie and inns became architectural symbols of fascism’s enemies. All these types of buildings would later make up the colore locale that the regime tried to destroy in Rome. In most accounts, these concealed spaces were found either in the nar-

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row medieval quarters or in the piazze. The centrepiece of Italian town planning and social life for centuries, the piazza was fraught with danger for the fascists. To stand in a piazza was to leave oneself open to the intrigues of the enemy. In his linking of the squadristi with the warriors of the Great War, Malaparte noted that the real Italian was by nature a street fighter and that the Holy Damned of the Carso were ‘alone in the piazze against the ferocious crowds.’31 The deep division between the soldiers from the Carso and the civilians was represented in the piazza – the location where those who wanted war but did not want to fight it held their demonstrations in 1914–15.32 Malaparte couched his criticism of the piazza in architectural terms, noting how the long columns of infantry marching towards the frontier contrasted with the piazze and their ‘old palaces surrounded by the cold eyes of marble statues.’33 Old-guard fascists carried this attitude into the 1930s. One example was former blackshirt and war veteran Gabriele Cruillas, who, in an article celebrating the closing of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in 1934, exclaimed, ‘The piazza is Mammon’34 The piazza as the site of rhetoric and inaction was common in fascist accounts. Emilio De Bono, one of the fascist quadrumvirs of the March on Rome, denounced the number of speeches being given in Perugia’s main square in the days of the March on Rome, even though they were pro-fascist.35 In his diary, Balbo distinguished between two opposed ‘mentalities,’ that of the piazza, where political meetings and rallies were held, and that of organized fascist action aimed at taking power, a legacy of the war.36 The association between the piazza and the political corruption of Italy made it a prime target in any punitive expedition. The piazza, Mario Isnenghi reminds us, was often seen as a place of sedition and intrigue. Dominated by left-wing groups in the early twentieth century, the fascists made it their project to wrest control of the piazza from the socialists.37 According to Isnenghi, fascism used the piazza to gain power and then effectively moved away from it owing to its inherently plebeian character. Fascism’s disdain of the piazza was also due to the latter’s encouragement of immobility. Once the piazza was secured, fascism set about to destroy it. The squadristi, like the arditi, identified with movement and speed, while the piazza favoured the hidden sniper and immobile warfare of the trenches.38 For the blackshirts, the piazze needed to be taken and then demolished. The only means of ensuring this was the demolition of the buildings next to the road. A favourite fascist exercise was to shoot at buildings and put them to the torch, especially the Case del

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popolo (socialist headquarters) and printing houses. Before torching the buildings, the squadristi liked to break in and throw the printing presses, papers, and furniture out onto the street, subsequently incinerating them in large bonfires. In this way, Mario Carli’s dream of ‘vulcanizing’ the piazze of the cities became reality. The assault on buildings housing ‘subversive’ activities often found an architectural corollary. The following is a blackshirt’s account of the torching of the Balkan Hotel in Trieste on 13 July 1920: It was a massive edifice, square shaped and in bad taste, resembling more a barracks than a hotel. Compared to the low military buildings surrounding it in the Piazza Oberdan, it had the air of a colossus inflated by treason and threats. After about an hour, the flames spread out and very quickly the gloomy building was nothing but a smouldering brazier, where the menace was destroyed. The city inhabitants walked past the glowing ruin with a lightened heart and breath as if one had just awakened from a nightmare.39

In the fascist imagination, the torching of the Balkan Hotel and its new status as a ruin had a liberating effect. Trieste was now safer because an oppressive example of architecture had been destroyed. This mindset would characterize squadrismo’s approach to Rome in 1922. Rome against Rome Squadrismo brought its war-inspired landscape to the March on Rome in October 1922. In its attack on the Eternal City, fascism inherited much of the pre-1914 cultural revolt against Rome as the city of political corruption. It was, in the words of the future governor of Rome Giuseppe Bottai, a case of ‘Rome fighting against Rome,’ as the squadristi from the provinces restored to the Eternal City the idea of Rome currently lost in the morass of Liberal Italy.40 In the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Mazzini called for a ‘Third Rome’ to lead Italian unification. This ‘Third Rome’ would spread the values of republicanism, democracy, and nationalism. At the turn of the century, a new generation of artists and intellectuals saw this ‘Third Rome’ as mired in corruption and scandal, preventing Italy from achieving its greatness. Rome was now the seat of ‘official Italy,’ a political class committed to keeping Italy weak.41 Much of this sentiment came out in the interventionist campaign of 1914–1915, during which neutralists such as Giovanni Giolitti were attacked as representative of official Italy.42 As a movement, fascism often identified Milan,

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its birthplace, as the representative city of a working Italy.43 Celebrating industrial Milan was in keeping with the legacy of Futurism, which, like fascism, was based in the Lombard capital. The fascists put this rivalry between Rome and Milan in urban-landscape terms: ‘In Milan, only the fascists could hold their rallies in the piazze undisturbed.’44 The piazza in Milan was a fascist stronghold, whereas in Rome, by implication, the piazza was a place of subversion. Early fascists also used geological metaphors with echoes of Slataper in describing Rome as a city ‘encrusted in tough minerals.’45 A week before the March took place, the fascist newspaper based in Trieste, Il Popolo di Trieste, looked forward to the ‘conquest of Rome … Marching on Rome for us means eliminating once and for all those tenacious encrusted mines and ugliness which suffocate the deep breathing of the nation.’46 Rome then was like the Carso; it needed excavating in order for it to be hospitable to the new Italian represented by fascism. In the fascist mind, Rome was an enemy city to be taken by force. Not only was it the home of ‘official Italy,’ but it was also dominated by the presence of the Vatican, which could be compared to the ‘other Vatican’ in Moscow.47 Although fascism would later place itself in the tradition of the Roman Empire, the regime never concealed the fact that Rome was never receptive to the fledgling movement after the war. Bottai, one of the founders of the Fascio Romano, wrote in 1943 that squadrismo as an activist movement did not exist in the Eternal City and that fascism was more ‘political’ there.48 Fascism did not pretend that any social group in the city would accept it, nor did it put its hopes in any popular revolution calling for the blackshirts to enter the city. The fascists knew that they would have to enter a hostile city and fight their way through its streets. Like the Italian army during the war entering the towns on the Carso, squadrismo planned to take Rome militarily and reduce it to ruin if necessary. Fascist criticism of Rome was often portrayed in architectonic symbolism, a feature borrowed from the Futurists. In Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto, Let’s Murder the Moonshine, Rome was portrayed as a city called Paralysis in terms that resembled fascist invectives: ‘The city of Paralysis with its henhouse cackle, its impotent prides of truncated columns, and its bloated domes [gives] birth to mean little statues.’49 Through Giuseppe Bottai and Mario Carli, the Futurist and ardito approach to the Roman landscape found articulation in the pages of the journal Roma Futurista. Founded in 1919 by Carli, this journal combined futurism, arditismo, and fascism in one package.50 From the pages of Roma Futurista emerged the vision of a new Rome free of the old class of politicians, a fact reflected

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in the physical landscape of the city. In the minds of Bottai and Carli, the cityscape was intimately connected to its political function. If Rome hoped to become the centre of Italian renewal, then drastic changes to its cityscape would be required. Not surprisingly, the transformation of the cityscape was to be violent and swift. Although Roma Futurista would only publish a few issues and Carli would eventually abandon fascism, this line of thinking was maintained by Bottai, who would become governor of Rome during the transformations of the Master Plan of Rome in the 1930s.51 Roma Futurista adopted the Futurist views of Rome as a city of passatisti whose ruins became a metaphor for the liberal politicians and the clergy. One caption called for a pickaxe to knock down these ruins of Rome for the sake of public hygiene.52 In true Futurist fashion, the journal took aim at the monuments of the city, especially those which embodied the rhetorical style of Liberal Italy. The monument to Victor Emmanuel II, known as the Vittoriano and located in Piazza Venezia, was especially reviled and called the ‘marble ruin which represents Art with a capital A!’53 The solution to Rome’s moral and political problems was the demolition of its ‘ancient and unhealthy quarters and of the anti-hygienic and cumbersome ruins.’54 The idea that Liberal Italy was embodied in its most prominent monuments and buildings was a running theme after Mussolini came to power. The journal of the Roman municipal administration, Capitolium, carried an article in 1927 which condemned the Liberal regime of not knowing what to do with the Eternal City once it became capital of the new Kingdom of Italy in 1870: ‘The ghost of Rome oppressed them and filled them with fear, causing them to push it away when it reared itself. Thus they concealed the Capitoline Hill behind the monument to Victor Emmanuel, and Hadrian’s Tomb was hidden behind the Palace of Justice.’55 Under this Futurist aesthetic Carli added a uniquely ardito perspective to the remaking of Rome. In an article entitled ‘Let’s Vulcanize the Great Cities,’ Carli called for new cities that rejected the dull, monotonous styles of the nineteenth century. The problem with our cities, he wrote, ‘is the wide and straight boulevards which end up always in either a piazza or another road, and never in a minefield or an abyss.’56 Carli demanded roadside architecture that offered surprise and shock because soldiers were used to a constantly changing landscape: They have seen the ground collapse at every step because of the blast of a 305 or a 280; they have seen houses ripped open up to the fourth floor

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because of the hit of an unstoppable bomb; they have seen entire sectors go up in the air with acrobatic pirouettes. When they returned home, these young Italians could no longer tolerate the spectacle of fossilized cities where everything is predictable, exact, mediocre, and rational. Fantasy, improvisation, and madness need to circulate more openly in our streets.57

For Carli, the new city needed zigzagging tramlines and cars that descended flights of stairs. Sidewalks had to be large and collapsible under one’s feet. The new city needed a new dynamic provided by lights and incessant movement: ‘Form and reflection had to change every few hours of the night and day.’58 This was the ardito’s city: an apocalyptic vision of exploding bombs, ruins, incessant movement, and constant surprise and change. Carli’s dream was of a city transformed into a battlefield. Carli did not prescribe any new monuments or buildings – his was a city where the road and movement were supreme, where the subjective experience of the ardito at the front came to life. A Neighbourhood versus the Nation When the first Fascist Party Congress was held in Rome in November 1921, the fascists discovered an even more specific geographical space within Rome to focus their violence – the Quartiere San Lorenzo. This working-class neighbourhood where socialism received its greatest support in the Eternal City became for the fascists a cancer that needed to be excised. This neighbourhood figured prominently in three legendary accounts of fascist mythology: those of the party congress in 1921, the return of the remains of war hero Enrico Toti, and the March on Rome. The party congress was held in the Augusteo, a popular theatre built on the ruins of the Emperor Ceasar Augustus’s tomb in the centre of the city. The 1921 congress came at a delicate moment in the relationship between Mussolini and the ras, who objected to Mussolini’s Pacification Pact with the socialists, and also to the conversion of the movement into a formal political party.59 This tension occurred against the general backdrop of over thirty thousand blackshirts roaming the Roman streets to the general hostility or indifference of the inhabitants.60 Sensing potential conflicts between the squadristi and the Roman populace, Mussolini urged the squads not to provoke anyone amidst howls of protest from the fascists gathered in the Augusteo.61 This call to order was jeopardized, however, by the omnipresent memory of the war in those November days. The congress opened just

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three days after the Unknown Soldier had been brought to the city, on 4 November. Mussolini told the squads that fascism was responsible for the Unknown Soldier.62 Although aimed at pacifying the rampaging squads, Mussolini’s evocation of the Great War ended any chance of the squadristi remaining docile in the city. Between 9 and 13 November, fascist squads engaged in battles throughout the working-class quarters of Rome, especially in San Lorenzo. When the congress ended, the squads were responsible for seven murders and numerous incidents, while the fascists lost five blackshirts.63 Mussolini’s evocation of the war experience no doubt inflamed those squadristi who already had a negative opinion of the city and its inhabitants. Mario Piazzesi for one went to the congress in a foul mood over the transformation of the movement into a party: ‘The word party evokes for some parliament, corruption, negation of the Victory.’64 He feared that the ‘alchemy’ of Rome would drag fascism into the ‘swamp of Montecitorio’ (the building which housed the Chamber of Deputies).65 Rome, according to Piazzesi, was a ‘swinish city’ which only brought hostility onto fascism. For Piazzesi, the worst of Rome was symbolized in one neighbourhood – the working-class San Lorenzo quarter, where much of the anti-fascist resistance was centred. Fascism controlled the centre of the city during those days in November, but the periphery was in the hands of socialist and anarchist elements hoping to harass the squads as they came in and out of the city.66 Subsequent events in Rome confirmed for Piazzesi that the periphery of Rome was a nest of subversives waiting to ambush fascism’s march to the centre of Italy. The problem of San Lorenzo was reinforced in May 1922 when the remains of Enrico Toti were repatriated to his native city. Legendary for fighting on one leg and on crutches, Toti was quickly appropriated by the fascists as one of their heroes. Toti’s life had conformed in many ways to the fascist vision of the new Italian. Born in Rome, Toti was an adventurer who dreamed of travelling the world visiting exotic locations in Africa and South America. In 1907, while working on the railroads, Toti lost a leg in an accident. Not willing to succumb to this handicap, Toti attempted to ride a bicycle around the world. He got as far as the Baltic Sea before bad weather forced him to return home. Not discouraged, Toti soon embarked on an Egyptian expedition. An ardent Italian patriot, he convinced a cycling battalion of the Bersaglieri regiment to conscript him for service at the front when Italy entered the Great War. He was killed in 1916 on the Carso, where, as legend had it, he threw his crutches at the Austrians in a final display of defiance.

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Toti’s story was excellent material for fascist hagiography. In 1934 Alessandro Pavolini dedicated an article to him, describing Toti as a heroic Italian ‘dreaming of primitive and remote ports of call in order to bring to them some civilization.’67 Pavolini’s description of Toti resembled Malaparte’s mythical fante who straddled the line between civilization and primitivism and was at home in both. This was best revealed in a diary entry by Toti in which he wrote of his dream of entering Trieste carrying the standard of the Bersaglieri and singing an aria from Verdi’s Aida. Toti was also valuable for fascist myth-making because he was an exceptional Roman, which Pavolini expressed in architectural and urban motifs. Toti, Pavolini argued, was not a ‘domesticated Roman’ who lived in a Giolittian ministry or in the Caffé Aragno, but could be found ‘walking alone in the middle of a road (or) amidst the arcs and columns of the ruins of Rome. One had to imagine him between the Capitoline Hill and the Fora.’68 The open roads and ruins were Toti’s dwelling places, not the cafés or the piazzas and least of all the palaces of power in Rome. On 24 May Toti’s body was brought to Rome and interred in the massive Verano cemetery in the San Lorenzo quarter. After the clashes of the previous November, the fascists had come to despise this neighbourhood. Characterized as ‘vile’ during a speech at the Fascist Party Congress by a certain ‘Signora Mezzomo,’ San Lorenzo’s dense streets and low-rise apartment blocks gave the perfect opportunity for ambushes. It was here, Leva noted, that the police discovered a ‘cache of arms and munitions’ during the Congress.69 During Toti’s funeral procession, Leva observed that while some hostility was expressed in Piazza Venezia, the real trouble came when the cortège moved onto the via Tiburtina, which cut through San Lorenzo. This ‘nest of subversives’ immediately erupted in a hail of gunfire from the windows of adjoining buildings, accompanied by ‘savage cries’ from ‘anarchists and their female sympathizers.’70 The dark narrow streets further advantaged the subversives, according to Leva, as at night when the squads were returning from the cemetery the anarchists used search lights to attack the fascists. Dark alleyways and feminine tendencies thus characterized the world of the socialists. Chiurco’s account of the incident in his multi-volume history of the fascist revolution employed similar imagery. Chiurco pointed out that the socialists, communists, and anarchists of the San Lorenzo thrived in the piazza, and that their tactic was to fire from concealed positions at windows. For Chiurco and Leva, the enemies of fascism suited their surroundings. The month of Toti’s funeral, the fascist paper Il Popolo d’Italia ran a series of vignettes which depicted San Lorenzo as a quarter

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of monotonous block houses with ominous-looking windows.71 Leva noted that the narrow streets became death traps for the squadristi gunned down in a hail of bullets ‘coming from every window and doorway.’72 Fascism, like Toti, found its home on the open road and not in the narrow streets of the San Lorenzo. ‘It is not right,’ declared Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘that an entire quarter of the Capital is armed against the people of the Nation!’73 The next day, Mussolini, writing in Il Popolo, declared ominously that ‘all obstacles will eventually come down’ in the face of squadrismo.74 This prophecy materialized in the 1930s, when construction of the University of Rome led to the demolition of much of San Lorenzo. The March on Rome All these architectonic and geographic symbols of Rome would take centre stage in the accounts of the March on Rome. The choreographing of the march was suited to the mental landscape forged in the war. The event that fascists later claimed inspired the march was a speech given in September 1922 by Mussolini in Udine, the capital of the Friuli region, to a congress of squadristi from the Veneto region. Speaking to the assembled blackshirts, Mussolini reminded the fascists that 20 September was the anniversary of the Italian army taking Rome in 1870 and that fascism had to take Rome in the same manner: ‘Rome has to become a city of the fascist spirit, a city that is purified and disinfected from all the elements which corrupt and muddy it.’75 Mussolini chose the location for this speech carefully. Udine had been the so-called capital of the war, and from this moral capital the taking of Italy’s real capital began. Its role in the renewal of Italy formed the conclusion of Mussolini’s talk: ‘I salute Udine, this dear old Udine of which I have many fond memories. On its wide streets have passed generations of Italians. Many of these young men sleep soundly in the small isolated cemeteries along Italy’s sacred river, the Isonzo. Udinesi, fascists, Italians, recall the spirit of these unforgettable dead and make it the ardent spirit of the immortal Fatherland!’76 From Udine, fascism would march on Rome the same way an ‘eastern religion unknown to us’ had once captured the Seven Hills of Rome. Fascism, like Christianity, was a strange force that would transform Italy only after taking Rome. The images evoked by Mussolini in this speech spoke directly to the war experience and its links to fascism. With the Carso looming in the distance, Mussolini played on the memories of those who fought in the war, paying close attention to the landscape of the war, from the roads

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to the cemeteries to the ‘sacred river’ of the Isonzo, which soldiers had to cross to get from the plain to the Carso. In order to emphasize the landscape of the war surrounding Udine, Mussolini visited the Carso just before entering Udine for the congress.77 The landscape of the Friuli was bound to have a powerful effect on those blackshirts who were also veterans. In his account of the congress, Italo Balbo noted the impression a long cortège of squadristi on bicycles on the ‘interminable roads of the Friuli’ made on him.78 From Mussolini’s speech Balbo quoted the section on the March on Rome starting from the banks of the Piave River, the river where the Italians had halted the Austrians during the retreat of Caporetto. Balbo’s focus on this part of the speech is significant, as it suggests that the March on Rome was somehow connected to the retreat of October 1917. It was as if the Italians, once having stopped the Austrians, would continue on to Rome to fight the internal enemy. The interminable roads of the Friuli, it seemed, led all the way to the Eternal City. The march was planned as a movement from the periphery to the centre. The squads were to be mobilized throughout Italy and converge at three jump-off points around Rome where, after massing, the squads would march into Rome, only after receiving the order from the four quadrumvirs headquartered in the city of Perugia.79 Moving from the periphery was central to the choreography of the March. This was not an exaltation of provincialism or regionalism, but a symbol of fascism’s outsider status in Italian politics. Mussolini’s speech in Udine identified the squadristi as the reincarnation of the fante marching from the rocks of the Carso, via the Friuli plain, to Rome. According to Malaparte, the true Italian was a natural street fighter, ‘born in the countryside, ancient, populist, antimodern.’80 He was someone who had suffered on the Carso and was now entering Rome to take back the streets from subversives. Despite the anti-modern character of squadrismo, the March used very modern means to reach Rome. A main part of the spectacle was the omnipresence of automobiles, trucks, and bicycles bringing the blackshirts to the jumping-off points. One of the march’s leaders, Ulisse Igliori, wrote that ‘some 2,000 men arrived on all sorts of vehicles, like trucks, old cars, bicycles, various types of carriages, and not a few on horses.’81 Igliori’s account was accompanied by a romanticized illustration of squadristi blasting their way through a town in an 18BL. Balbo recalled a vision of fascist leaders racing through the streets of Italy in beat-up old cars.82 He baptized his own automobile as the ‘phantom car’ racing on the roads between Perugia and Rome, clearing all roadblocks.83 Taking their cue from Balbo’s account of his harrowing night journey into

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Rome, several of the squad leaders, such as Dino Perrone Compagni and Gustavo Fara, tell of driving on the roads to Rome in the days and nights leading to the march. Compagni even provided technical details of the car he used.84 The ubiquitous presence of vehicles and transport recalled the days of the Caporetto retreat, when the flat, straight roads of the Friuli were packed with transportation of all types. Rather than fleeing from the enemy, as at Caporetto, the vehicles in the march were bringing liberation to Italy. Another prominent fascist, Dario Lischi, told of how the igniting of engines was the signal for rounding up the local squadristi in Florence. Later, Lischi’s group of cold and shivering blackshirts at the train station had their spirits buoyed by the ‘fantastic vision’ of the train’s ‘flaming eyes’ as it pulled into the station ready to take them to Rome.85 For Lischi, the train journey became a microcosm of Italy, as on the train all dialects of the nation could be heard moving towards the ‘zone of death and the altars of glory.’86 Lischi’s account also tells of an ‘old republican’ who encouraged the squads by showing up in his own car as an example. This image of the solitary hero at the wheel of a car is a common one in the narratives. While marching in the rain towards Rome, Lischi was inspired by the sight of a fascist leader hurling down the Via Aurelia in his sports car.87 Not only was the car or truck a convenient tool for advancing, it also represented hope and liberation. Another theme of the march narratives was the presence of the war experience. The bivouacs at the jump-off points, with their campfires, reminded many of the war. Mario Piazzesi wrote of how he encountered his war-veteran father, who had also joined the fascists in one of these camps. This meeting inspired fantasies in his head about the Great War as told to him by his father.88 Under strict orders not to bother residents of the towns for food or shelter, the blackshirts encamped under the incessant rain and suffered through a scarcity of food, which did not, however, prevent problems between fascists and civilians. Hostility between soldiers and civilians, characteristic of the war, re-emerged in the days preceding the march between locals and squadristi. The deserted-looking houses and lack of welcome for the blackshirts gave the impression that the squads were an invading army faced by the hostility and incomprehension of the civilians. The houses of Santa Marinella looked ‘dark and murky’ to Lischi.89 The gloomy appearance of the town intensified with the incessant rain, which quickly turned the ground into mud, recalling the days of the Caporetto retreat in 1917. Unaware of the backroom deals that would

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eventually bring Mussolini to power, the squads began to grumble.90 Ten years after the march, one memoir recalled the suffering of the waiting blackshirts, a suffering aggravated by the proximity of Rome: ‘It was close yet so far!’91 Like Trieste in the Great War, Rome was a distant object of desire which could only be reached after a painful rite of passage. One participant in the march wrote of his column stopping on the way to Rome to pay homage to a dead blackshirt in the deserted town of Mentana. Alessandro Del Vita’s memoir of the march in Il Selvaggio was replete with darkness and death. He tells of the excruciating march in the rain in total darkness, broken occasionally by the ‘spectral illusion given by street lamps.’92 Before reaching Rome, the squads were greeted by the vision of a dead ‘subversive’ on the road. The lights of Rome could be seen in the distance, but they never seemed to get closer. Dal Vita notes how a few days of discomfort had given the squadristi the look of grizzled veterans. His memoir, which resembled in many ways Curzio Malaparte’s writings, brought the experience of the march very close to the retreat of Caporetto in its allusions to roads, death, darkness, and an unreachable city. Like the Friuli plain in the days of Caporetto, the Agro Pontino around Rome became a place of both fascination and horror. Rome itself was both enemy and lover. War veteran, blackshirt, and writer Gabriele Cruillas, in his book La Terra, described the plain surrounding Rome during the march as a ‘solemn altar during a universal rite … The face of Rome revealed itself as if Elevated.’93 Giuseppe Bottai recalled the ambivalence of the blackshirts who approached Rome during the march: ‘Difficult, this Roman fascism: This city which was at the same time target and destination; it was the reviled city yet also the greatly desired city. It was the city against which we had to fight but which we also fought for. This Roman fascism dwelt inside a city against which we bitterly fought but which we also marched for.’94 The squads did finally reach Rome on the morning of 30 October, but by then the king had already decided to make Mussolini prime minister. As a result, the columns of squadristi met no resistance from the Italian army at the gates of the city, even though these were guarded by machine-gun units. The sense that the squads were entering a war zone was reinforced by the presence of surveillance planes and barbed wire on the Cavour bridge over the Tiber River.95 Although the squads did not have to fight the regular army, they did encounter resistance from the socialists once they entered the city.

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The San Lorenzo quarter once again became a battleground when Giuseppe Bottai marched his column through it in direct provocation of the socialists. One foreign observer wrote, ‘It was feared that the triumphant fascisti would destroy the local Socialist working-class quarter.’96 As Bottai’s column passed through the district, it was ambushed by gunmen concealed behind the windows of the adjoining buildings. Bottai recounted how his column was stopped at the Mammolo bridge by General Piola Caselli, who warned him not to pass through San Lorenzo: ‘I am disappointed to inform you,’ Bottai told Caselli, ‘that my road passes directly through San Lorenzo and I will not deviate from it.’97 Whether the exchange occurred this way or not, Bottai’s memoir suited the myth of squadrismo with its allusion to fascists as conquerors of the open road. Once past the bridge, Bottai symbolically stopped his column beneath the walls of the Verano cemetery, where Toti had been buried, before moving on to the inevitable clash. Death and the road provided the familiar setting for the fascists before they marched into the San Lorenzo, where, as Bottai tells it, ‘the subversives fired from behind the safety of the curtained windows.’98 Bottai’s account of the march placed squadrismo firmly in the tradition of the arditi and their expeditions of the Great War. The fascists were in control of the open, wide boulevard, while the enemy could only cower in the dark corners of the neighbourhood. The image of the piazza as a place of danger informed the accounts of the march. Chiurco filled his entrance narrative with tales of ambushes in the Borgo Pio quarter near St Peter’s Square and of gunfire in the Piazza del Popolo that wounded a leading member of the PNF (Fascist Party) directorate.99 Although owned by the squadristi, the open roads of the city also became deathtraps during the march. The 18BL trucks became easy targets, being ‘fired on as usual from behind shutters and doorways’ when they passed through the Quartiere Trionfale, another working-class district hostile to fascism.100 Although fascism depicted its enemies as barbarians, the squadristi reinforced their own image as savage and primitive invaders. Leva believed that the fascists were a primitive group descended from the lost world of Atlantis. Their goal, according to Leva, was to return to the primordial Roman.101 This view resembled Malaparte’s belief that the fante represented the true, primordial Italian taking the corrupt city from the countryside. The squadristi’s self-definition as savages or primitives was reflected in the title of Mino Maccari’s journal dedicated to the myth of squadrismo, Il Selvaggio (the savage).102 Squadristi took a kind of bar-

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baric joy in riding around the streets of Rome looking for socialists, and Piazzesi wrote of ‘falling in love’ with the machine gun on his 18BL.103 Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s biographer and mistress, wrote of how the ‘fascists brought to Rome an enormous, rancorous barbarism resembling the fanaticism of a jilted lover.’104 Foreign observers such as the American journalist Carleton Beals also noted the atavistic character of the blackshirts in the streets of Rome. He observed that the Via Nomentana had been the historic invasion route of invaders and that rumours told of ‘50,000 fascists’ camped out on the Via Nomentana with cannons ready to attack the city.105 Beals also remarked on the ‘explosive automobiles’ which descended on the Roman streets and piazzas carrying the squads and on the use of different varieties of vehicles. The violence of the squads caught Beals’s attention. He noted how the fascists lit bonfires on the ‘fashionable Corso, where newspapers were heaped upon the muddy stones tracked with three days of marching and countermarching.’106 Beals and his wife had narrowly escaped being victims of fascist violence when the hotel they were staying in was accidentally shot at by squads firing on a Casa del Popolo next door. For Beals, Italy had fallen victim to a trend which began all over Europe after the war and which could only lead to disaster. He saw the fascist March on Rome as similar to the Russian Revolution. It was an irony, he noted, that the newspapers the fascists were burning on the streets contained articles by Trotsky and Max Stirner: ‘What are these but their own gods?’107 The ‘shattered columns’ of Rome’s forum ‘bear mute witness to the futility of human violence – and its apparent inevitability.’ According to Beals, Italy had been delivered into the hands of a militant minority whose impact would be to ‘reawaken bitterness and stark passions.’108 Although he was an opponent of fascism, Beals’ analysis would have found approval from the tribalistic fascists who were setting fires and attacking socialist buildings in Rome in a manner worthy of the arditi. Curzio Malaparte would lament a few years after the march, in an article entitled ‘Barbaric Italy,’ that the squadristi should have ‘filled Rome with dead bodies.’109 The New Primitives Malaparte’s desire to see dead bodies on the streets of Rome would come to haunt him in 1944 when he returned to Rome accompanying the U.S. 5th Army during its liberation of the Eternal City. In his semi-autobiographical novel The Skin, Malaparte recounted his service as inter-

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preter and guide for the American forces as they made their way up the Italian boot. The ex-squadrista Malaparte suggested that the Americans enter Rome via the archaeological zone. Not only would the Americans take the Via Appia Antica, thus recalling fascism’s celebration of Ancient Rome, they would enter the city using the the Via dei Trionfi and the Via dell’Impero, both built by the regime in the 1930s. On the way into the city, Malaparte witnessed atavistic scenes. He saw in the distance partisan units chasing German soldiers in the fields next to the Aurelian Walls, while crowds wildly cheered the advance of the U.S. army. Like the fascists in 1922, American soldiers demonstrated an aggressive love for the architectural legacy of the city. When Malaparte pointed out the Church of the Quo Vadis? on the Via Appia Antica, he explained that this was the spot where St Peter had a vision of Jesus. Desiring to behold the shrine immediately, the soldiers started to break down the door of the church when they found it locked. When the Americans passed through the San Sebastian gate, the mythology of Rome finally dawned on some of them. Twenty years previously, Malaparte had called for a new age of myths to rejuvenate Italy. Now, as he moved into Rome under the moonlight, Malaparte pointed to the moon, declaring to an American officer that it was not the moon they were seeing, but Achilles. Once the Americans entered the city, one final echo of fascism’s march emerged. On the Via dell’Impero, a hysterical crowd composed mainly of women engulfed the Americans. The confusion of the scene described by Malaparte had echoes of Caporetto. One person, in his enthusiasm to greet the Americans, was crushed under the wheels of a Sherman tank. As in the days of squadrismo and Caporetto, the road became a site of violent death and liberation, only this time it was on the wide, straight boulevards constructed by the fascist regime in the 1930s. The building of these roads, more than anything else, embodied the fascist love of death, danger, and speed, and it was to build these monuments that the regime submitted the Eternal City to transformations on a massive scale. It is to these transformations that we now turn.

CHAPTER THREE

Demolitions: De-familiarizing the Roman Cityscape

In the spring of 1937, a small gallery off the Piazza Venezia in Rome called the Galleria Cometa, not far from Mussolini’s headquarters, opened an exhibition called Demolizioni (Demolitions), a collection of paintings by Mario Mafai. This gallery, which took its name from the comet depicted in the coat-of-arms of Pope Leo XIII, had opened only two years earlier and had already acquired a good reputation among the artists and literati of the Eternal City.1 Thus, when this curious exhibition opened it immediately attracted attention. By 1937 Mafai was a well-known member of the Scuola Romana, a group of neo-expressionist painters whose leading figure, Scipione (Gino Bonichi), had died only a few years earlier. Mafai’s exhibition at the Cometa caused some surprise, however, as it represented a new, realist aesthetic for the artist. The subject matter was also striking: demolitions. Mafai had made the extensive demolitions in Rome undertaken by the fascist regime the subject of his work. Since 1931, when the fascist regime unveiled the Master Plan for Rome, the Eternal City had been subject to massive transformations of the historic centre which included demolitions, population displacement, and the laying out of wide, straight roads. In the 1930s, demolitions became spectacle, and Mafai was one of many Romans who gazed daily at the transformations in the once-familiar cityscape of Rome. Like thousands of other Romans as well, Mafai was personally affected by the demolitions. He would lose his home on the Via Cavour owing to the construction of the Via dell’Impero. His home was also his studio and the meeting place for the Scuola Romana. It was one of the most frequented artist’s studios in Rome where he, and his wife, the Lithuanian sculptress Antonietta, held court throughout the 1920s. He watched from the street the day his home succumbed to the pickaxe: ‘I personally saw my old house fall, the

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walls tumbling one by one, rooms exposed to the light of day only briefly before becoming rubble and dust themselves.’2 Inspired by this scene, Mafai set out to paint the various demolitions around the city, focusing on those around the old Augusteo theatre built atop the ruins of the Emperor Augustus’s tomb. This too had once been a prime meeting place for artists and intellectuals, as well as the site of the various fascist party congresses, and was now being demolished to expose to the light of day what remained of the tomb. Mafai understood that these were not simply old, decrepit buildings being demolished; rather, they represented an era that was being lost. In an interview given in 1940, Mafai said, ‘We are witnessing continually the demolition of all that is openly nineteenth-century.’3 Mafai’s collection of paintings was a tribute to a century that was disappearing in the interests of exhuming the long-buried ruins of antiquity. Cesare Brandi, commenting in 1939 on the paintings, wrote that Mafai’s ruins were not those of Ancient Rome, but rather were the ruins of ‘little bourgeois rooms … shattered but still warm from having been recently occupied.’4 Mafai captured one of the key motivations behind fascism’s urban plan to tear away all that was nineteenth-century in Rome, specifically the city associated with the liberal monarchy after 1870. What came under the guise of rationalistic, scientific planning was actually the continuation of fascism’s March on Rome. Malaparte had been disappointed that the fascists did not leave any dead bodies lying around in 1922, but now, under the Master Plan, the regime could physically dismantle the old Rome and force Italians to forget about the preceding century in the interests of revealing Ancient Rome. Not only could the regime create its own ideal landscape, it could also now shift thousands of Romans, dangerously congregated in the city centre, out into the peripheries of the city, creating open spaces and exorcising the demons associated with overcrowded neighbourhoods that went back to the days of squadrismo. An atmosphere of war and catastrophe surrounded Rome in the 1930s. Mafai and his associates in the Scuola Romana such as Renato Guttuso saw this and commented upon it. In an interview to Il Selvaggio, Guttuso claimed that the late 1930s were ‘dangerous and extraordinary times.’5 He would later scribble down in disjointed prose the reasons for his disturbing Crocefissione series: ‘This is a time of war: Abyssinia, gas, gallows, decapitations; Spain and elsewhere.’6 For Mafai, these dangerous times could be discerned in the demolitions of Rome. Years later, just before his death, Mafai in a bout of despair would write in his diary: ‘Even reason and man as a human and thinking being suffered hard

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defeat in the folly and barbarism of the last war. There is nothing to lean on. We are without a past. Our house is a ruin.’7 In this despairing passage the image of his home on the Via Cavour returned. Mafai’s ‘archaeological’ paintings serve as a useful means of examining the impact that fascism had on the Roman cityscape. Not only did the regime reduce the city to a pile of ruins, but it did so in a way that rendered the Eternal City unfamiliar, shocked Romans, and brought into question the very meaning of history as embodied in the multiple layers of Rome’s soil. Demolizioni Instead of the emotional turmoil of the Scuola Romana’s neoexpressionism, the Master Plan of 1931 on paper resembled the ambitions of another artistic movement flourishing in fascist Italy: the Novecento. The Novecento artists wanted to reconcile modernity with classicism, something the Master Plan hoped achieve in urban planning. The plan aimed to unite functionality and grandeur by revealing the classical glory of ancient Rome while opening up the city to modern traffic. The need to reconcile art and traffic in a master plan for Rome was first expressed by Benito Mussolini in a speech given at the Campidoglio (Roman city hall) in 1924 and reiterated six years later on the occasion of the commissioning of the Master Plan. It was in the first speech that he coined the phrase ‘necessity and grandeur’ to describe the two main challenges facing any urban planning concerning Rome.8 The problem, according to Mussolini, was to build a city that would be at once monumental and a part of the twentieth century. For Mussolini, the new Rome had to be modern but also ‘worthy of its glory, a glory which renews itself incessantly.’ In October 1930, on the occasion of receiving the report from the commission of the Master Plan, Mussolini returned to this dyad of necessity and grandeur when he outlined that the new plan had to account for a future city of over two million inhabitants and ‘150,000 automobiles.’9 Although Mussolini warned about tampering too much with the ‘mystery’ of Rome and respecting the city’s historical associations, his speech left no doubt that the Eternal City was to be opened to modern life. The world of the machine was to find a home in Rome while at the same time respecting the city as a work of art. Aesthetics and functionality had to be reconciled in the Master Plan through what commission member Antonio Muñoz called a ‘marriage between art and science.’10 Maintaining the city’s historical integrity, however, was, as we shall see, the most difficult part of the plan to maintain.

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It was the task of the commission for the Master Plan to ponder this daunting challenge. Created in April 1930, the commission included a cross-section of experts representing urban planners, engineers, historians, and archaeologists. Not surprisingly, there was little agreement on how to reconcile art and traffic. This was, no doubt, a result of the commission including in its ranks Gustavo Giovannoni, Marcello Piacentini, and Armando Brasini, who had, in 1929, presented three different visions of the future Rome at the International Congress of the Federation for Housing and Town Planning. Piacentini’s idea, put forward as part of the Roman Urbanists’ Group, envisioned the new Rome as being built outside of the Aurelian Walls to the east, with the ancient centre thus left untouched. Gustavo Giovannoni’s project, entitled La Burbera, called for two wide boulevards to cut through the historic centre, criss-crossing each other at an intersection where a Forum dedicated to fascism was to be constructed. This intersection would be situated between Piazza Venezia and Piazza del Popolo, right in the heart of the historic centre, thus entailing heavy demolitions in this zone. This, however, was not the most extreme plan presented at the conference. That distinction rested with Armando Brasini, who projected a monumental ‘Via Imperiale,’ forty metres wide and five kilometres long, stretching from the Piazzale Flaminio in the north to the San Giovanni gate in the southeast via the Mausoleum of Augustus. This plan called for massive demolitions in the Piazza Colonna area in the heart of the Renaissance quarter in order to construct a monumental city centre dedicated to fascism. The solutions thus ranged from no demolitions (Piacentini) to excessive demolitions (Brasini). The Master Plan of 1931, a compromise solution, projected that Rome would grow by 800,000 inhabitants over the course of fifteen years. This expanded population would be accommodated in new residential quarters around the Consular Roads. According to the report submitted by the committee, the desire to save the historic patrimony of the city was heartfelt, but in the end ‘we had to renounce this absolute intransigence.’11 The plan adopted Giovannoni’s parallel road along the Corso Umberto I and Piacentini’s road linking Piazzale Flaminio with the Porta Maggiore using a tunnel underneath the Pincio Hill. Of these projects, only the isolation of the Augustus Mausoleum and the completion of the Via dell’Impero and Via del Mare would come to fruition. The plan also called for a comprehensive network of streetcar lines, but this too was never completed. In fact, even before the plan became law in March 1932, the provision to shift Termini Station outside the walls – a rem-

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nant of Piacentini’s original plan – was abandoned. Significantly, the only aspects of the plan that were fully carried out were those that concerned the widening or building of roads in the city centre, which, as we shall see, were crucial to understanding the true nature of the plan. The reluctance to demolish also proved to be half-hearted, as the plan would demolish extensively while abandoning some of the more positive solutions. The reservations of urban planners gave way to the nihilistic frenzy of committed fascists. Officially, the experts on the committee attempted to respect the complex artistic and historical heritage of the city by implementing the plan through a series of mini plans. Virgilio Testa, an important member of the Roman planning department, remarked that only by leaving the details to local plans would the ‘suggestiveness and beauty’ of the city be maintained, and that any solutions pertaining to ‘traffic and hygiene should not prejudice (but actually facilitate) the conservation and augmentation of the beauty of the urban centres and their historic and artistic importance.’12 The idea then was not to impose a monolithic plan on the city in the manner of a Baron Haussmann, but to change Rome in a way that took into account the artistic patrimony of each neighbourhood, or rione. The hope was to preserve Rome’s unique historical legacy in keeping with the tastes of the nineteenth-century Roman middle classes. This made sense to the urban planners, many of whom revered the nineteenth-century cities that had benefited from planning, such as Paris and Vienna. It did not suit the desires of the fascists, however, many of whom saw the plan as an opportunity to demolish Liberal Rome. The Spectacle of Demolition From the moment the first spades and pickaxes cut into the ground, demolition became spectacle in Rome. The ‘militant industry’ called for by Mussolini was found in the armies of construction and demolition workers who would descend on Rome from all parts of Italy. For nearly a decade, the Eternal City was subjected to a process of demolition it had never seen before. Journals and newspaper columns were filled with photographs of the demolitions. Not only did Romans see the demolitions, but so did all Italians through the medium of the LUCE newsreels. The regime used these newsreels as central instruments of propaganda, and the work of transforming Rome was a favourite subject in the 1930s. Demolition was a leading feature of the LUCE films. The newsreels focused on the act of demolition as carried out by

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armies of workers. In an almost poetic gesture, the workers are shown wielding pickaxes, pushing wheelbarrows, and toppling crumbling edifices. The work was done grimly with the determination of an army at the front. In order to demonstrate the military organization of these workers, one newsreel shows the Duce himself arriving at a worksite to wield the ceremonial pickaxe.13 Taking his work seriously, Mussolini takes off his jacket, removes by hand several shingles on a rooftop, and then proceeds to vigorously hammer away at the structure. While Mussolini does this, the LUCE film jump cuts to a phalanx of workers yielding their axes at the same rhythm as the Duce. Mussolini’s pickaxe became iconic of fascism’s reworking of the Roman landscape, but equally important was the relentless pace of work. The LUCE newsreels augmented this sight of workers by providing the sounds of demolition as well. Dispensing with commentary, the newsreels were content to convey the sounds of jackhammers, trucks, crumbling bricks, and shouted orders. The impression was that of a war zone where sound and fury combined. This was no longer the Eternal Rome of quiet contemplation, of which the Romantics dreamed, but one of noise and clamour that would have made the Futurists proud.14 Whereas many of the LUCE sound newsreels would often have commentary and music in the background, in these cases both were dispensed with. Sound, a crucial aspect of the war experience, was emphasized in order to augment the experience of demolition.15 During the war, noise became a dominant part of the soldier’s life, triggering a sensorial change that was part of the new mental landscapes created by the war. Through the workings of the Master Plan, fascism hoped to recreate that experience in Rome.16 Added to this sound experience were the camera techniques employed in the newsreels. In order to convey the scale of the work done, especially the building of the Via dell’Impero which linked Piazza Venezia with the Coliseum, the camera pans slowly from the Palazzo, through the Vittoriano, over towards the Coliseum. The deep-focus shot, later perfected in several Hollywood films of the 1940s, was first used in these newsreels.17 A ubiquitous image of fascist propaganda was that of a camera looking through the arch of the Coliseum down the Via dell’Impero during a parade. The bricks of the arch, the road, and the Vittoriano in the background are all in focus, and thus the Coliseum becomes the frame through which one looks at fascist Rome. Along with these panning shots were lingering frames of hollowedout, darkened buildings silhouetted against the imposing Vittoriano.18 The scenes of work and demolition almost overshadow the monument

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to Victor Emmanuel II. Since the monument was unloved by fascism, the message is clear that the new Italy would be the opposite of the liberal values seen in the Vittoriano. The monument stands as a sentinel over the workers, but is also a symbol of an older Rome being superseded by the fascist city. The image conveyed of Rome by the Giornali LUCE was of a city being purified by the unyielding pickaxe of the regime. The impression given by the newsreels was that of a massive military operation descending on an unsuspecting city. Mussolini’s frequent visits to the cantieri as depicted in the newsreels reminded Italians of a general’s visit to the front, controlling operations and lifting the morale of the troops. The only thing missing was the inhabitants. Like the war-torn towns of northeast Italy, the centre of Rome was shown as devoid of ‘civilians,’ yet these houses that the newsreels showed succumbing to the wrecking ball were once inhabited. The LUCE newsreels did not show the massive movement of people from the centre to the periphery into the makeshift houses of the borgate. Unplanned and lacking infrastructure, these zones resembled refugee camps more than anything else. The director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini would later compare them to military prisons. The shocking conditions of these borgate were noted by the Roman governor Boncompagni-Ludovisi, who denounced the houses ‘with their ramshackle walls through which pass rain and wind.’19 The governor, speaking in the Senate during a discussion over the Master Plan, assured his listeners that the municipal government was constructing new suburbs in the Primavalle and Prenestina quarters composed of modest homes, ‘of the type which fill the suburbs of all great cities.’ These houses would not only be hygienic, exposing the inhabitants to air and sunlight, but would also include little gardens for children to play in. Promises of settled domesticity were short lived, however. In the same speech, the governor promised that the ever-expanding Rome would push these inhabitants out farther into the distance. The new houses were projected to last for only fifteen years, after which they would be torn down and the land sold for higher prices. In the meantime, the expelled Romans would move ‘a bit farther out perhaps as much as three or four kilometres.’20 Romans whose families had lived nestled among the ruins of the ancient centre for centuries were now fated to a permanent and planned migration, moving farther away from that centre. Subjecting Romans to a life of transience was a consequence of the violent method of removal caused by the demolitions. As in wartime,

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self-preservation was the immediate need as the army of demolition crews advanced on the Eternal City. Romans flooded the planning office (Ufficio Tecnico, or UT) of the Master Plan with letters pleading that their properties be saved. Some claimed that the unique character of their neighbourhoods would be lost. One writer emphasized the aristocratic (signorile) character of his quarter as a justification for preserving it.21 Others advanced their own interpretations of the Master Plan, arguing that the mini plans did not fit into the larger one. Claiming local knowledge, some residents argued that certain buildings were not worth exposing, while widening the roads was not worth it because, in the words of a retired admiral living near the Porta del Popolo, grand boulevards would only ‘belittle’ Rome.22 For others, the demolitions seemed pointless and counter-productive.23 One group of merchants urged Mussolini to consider the effect on their neighbourhood should their market stalls disappear, while others pleaded that their family business be saved.24 One woman who lived near Trajan’s Forum pleaded for the preservation of her home as it was a family home given to her family by the municipal government when her father had donated his paintings to the city.25 The letters reflect a mixture of anger, shock, and disbelief. Romans were taken aback by the spectacle of demolitions, especially if they directly affected their neighbourhoods and homes. The shock of the demolitions and their scale was satirically reflected in a series of sketches in L’Urbe, a journal founded in 1936 by master planner Antonio Muñoz. The illustrations show crowds, in various states of agitation, gawking at the demolitions surrounding them. One man is shown angrily gesticulating at the worksite, while others simply stare in disbelief. In the illustration accompanying an interview with Le Corbusier, two bourgeois caricatures, with their bowler hats, canes, and bow ties, are angrily surveying the demolitions from a balcony. One of the men has a look of fear on his faces as he watches ‘bourgeois Rome’ crumble before him.26 The UT had little sympathy for the requests it received to modify the provisions of the plan. The correspondents framed their concerns in traditional language, pointing out mostly practical considerations. One widow noted that widening a certain road was not necessary, as the newly built Via dell’Impero would absorb all traffic in her neighbourhood. Not only that, but since the buildings on her street were all of unique architecture and proportionate to the road, any widening would cause a disproportion.27 These correspondents obviously assumed that the regime’s intentions in remaking the city were similar to Haussmann’s plans for

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Paris in the previous century. One complainant thought that the Master Plan included creating a piazza in one area near Porta del Popolo, while another believed that the homogeneity of street facades and the character of new neighbourhoods were important.28 One writer, taking the regime’s rhetoric about Romanità seriously, suggested that a baroque church near the Fora be demolished (and hence her home be saved as it obstructed a view of this church) since it had nothing to do with the ruins of ancient Rome.29 For its part, the UT showed lack of consistency and callous disregard for the homes threatened in its responses to the letters.30 Several of the complaints appealed to the regime’s love of aesthetics and respect for the past, but the UT often dismissed historical buildings that it did not feel were worth saving. Saving something for the sake of art was too much a nineteenth-century sensibility. The Palazzo Sonnino, for example, associated with an aristocratic Roman family, was defined as a ‘building not important enough to constitute a symmetry that must at all costs be respected.’31 Another aristocrat, the Baron di Romagnano, pleaded with the UT to make a slight modification to the proposed Via dell’Impero so that his home might be saved, but the technicians of the governor’s office were insistent that the straight road as planned was ‘crucial for the liberation of the Fora.’32 Aesthetics and history had to take a back seat to the straight road. The UT, whose job it was to provide a correct interpretation of the Master Plan and its objectives, came to reject the practical considerations raised by concerned citizens. When one citizen dared to raise the issue of finances with respect to demolitions around the Capitoline Hill, the UT brushed the matter aside by arguing that money was of little importance in the face of the ‘historic and artistic interest inherent in the liberation of the hill.’33 In one case, the UT argued that it was pointless to distinguish between aesthetics and practicality. The improvement of city aesthetics, the UT argued, was inherent in the notion of public utility. The two criteria were not mutually exclusive. The Master Plan was not simply about utility and hygiene, but about the ‘necessities of art, archaeology, the scenery, and urban aesthetics in general.’34 This rather meaningless statement showed that the Master Plan was only about demolition for the purpose of opening up spaces in the Roman cityscape. For the UT, the real goal of the plan was the ‘absolute necessity of safeguarding in the best possible way panoramic visions.’35 While Romans appealed to the UT’s sense of reason, the plan’s technocrats showed only a regard for the broad panoramas created by the large-scale demolitions. While some let-

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ters focused on financial and legal issues associated with the demolitions, the UT cared only for the vistas they created. In the midst of an economic depression, these citizens’ concerns were certainly valid, but the UT demonstrated that at the heart of the Master Plan was a desire to eradicate the fabric of the Eternal City regardless of cost, human or financial.36 The pitiless nature of the regime’s wrecking ball sent many Romans into desperation, and the demand grew to tear down the houses of neighbours. Several Romans suggested that the house or wall of a neighbour should be demolished rather than theirs.37 A retired admiral who lived in Piazzale Flaminio suggested that rather than having his house demolished to widen the Via Flaminia, a few buildings behind his property should be torn down in order to create a panorama of the Pincio Hill. The admiral warned that if the plan went ahead and his house was demolished, some ‘aesthetic disappointments’ would result.38 As the demolitions carried on into the more prosperous areas near the Piazza Navona and the swanky Ludovisi Quarter, the letters began to point fingers at the regime itself, accusing it of wanting to destroy the city. One widow who lived near the Augusteo flatly stated that if demolitions continued at the current pace they will ‘end up destroying large parts of Rome.’39 In the upper-middle-class district of the Ludovisi, one critic angrily wrote that the demolitions planned around the Piazza Barberini were ‘truly excessive and disproportionate,’ while a neighbour went so far as to accuse the UT of ‘extreme abuse of power, illegality and profit.’40 Clearly, the demolitions aggravated social tensions and raised the possibility of opposition to the regime. Nonetheless, the master planners showed little respect for title or property, thinking nothing of destroying the homes and territory which families had owned for generations.41 One merchant, in a cry of desperation, accused the regime of making him the ‘sacrificial lamb’ in his zone near Monte Mario: ‘This expropriation has brought me nothing but misery and dishonour. This expropriation came because of public utility and force majeur.’42 The scale and target of demolitions made the fascist regime seem like an occupying army. Rendering Rome Unfamiliar In a visit to Rome in the 1930s, the Calabrese writer Corrado Alvaro, who had last seen the city before the fascists came to power, declared that the new Rome ‘gives the impression of a city on the run … nothing is familiar.’43 Sowing disorder and confusion into the landscape of Rome

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was necessary in order to reveal the city in new and unexpected ways. The idea was not simply to construct a new Rome atop the old city, but to reinvent the city in a manner which rendered the old city unrecognizable. Like archaeology, the Master Plan had the effect of revealing previously unknown aspects of the Eternal City through surprising discoveries. The effect was to disrupt the memory of Romans, make what was once familiar strange, and thus challenge long-held beliefs about the city and its place in history. Rupturing memory and hence linear notions of time was the work of the sheer pace of change that characterized the city in the 1930s. The transformation of Rome had been so rapid, according to urbanist and Master Plan commissioner Gustavo Giovannoni, that ‘we who live in this era almost do not realize the immensity of the transformation that has taken place under our eyes … It is like watching a film at such a fast speed that you do not notice the fleeting image.’44 The effect of all this had been a rupture in memory so complete that even the recent past appeared remote: Who today remembers the appearance of the areas around Piazza di Venezia, Via Alessandrina, Via Bonella, Via di Marforio, or Piazza Montanara? Or the character of the semi-rural zone around Via delle Tre Madonne, Via Cupa, Vicolo dello Scorpione, of the Hostelry of the Povero Diavolo, of the vast regions outside the San Giovanni gate of the Porta Maggiore? Or the streetcar tracks in Piazza Venezia or Via del Tritone?45

The loss of memory was so intense that even Mussolini, on the occasion of wielding the ceremonial pickaxe to commence work on the Palazzo Littorio next to the Coliseum, felt the need to list the names of the streets that would disappear as a result of demolition.46 The shock to the casual observer caused by these changes was a running theme in several articles appearing in Capitolium by urbanist Vincenzo Civico, who noted in October 1937 how Rome was adding an average of two streets per month because of the plan, a rate that was rapidly changing the face of the city.47 Walking from the Piazza del Popolo down the Via Ripetta, Civico was struck by the sudden appearance of a gaping hole: ‘The calm ceases suddenly, are we still on the Via Ripetta or has the wave of a magic wand transported us far away?’48 This calm was disturbed not only visually but aurally as well, as the sound of construction filled the air. Civico experienced a similar disturbance strolling down the Corso Umberto I; approaching the Via della Frezza, where

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he suddenly exclaimed: ‘Via della Frezza is on the right … but, what is this? Was not Via della Frezza also a calm, homogeneous crossing of the Corso? Is there a breach in our memory? One side of the street has disappeared and in a line moved back from the road a barricade which still hides the new buildings in construction.’49 Civico’s apprehensions were reflected in letters to the UT in 1938 from concerned Romans who were greatly agitated by the heavy interventions into the landscape. Ruptured memory and shock were the effects that the changes to the cityscape had caused for many, since the Master Plan had de-familiarized the landscape. In order to attenuate some of the shock of the rapidly changing cityscape, the official journal of the Roman municipal government, Capitolium, began, as early as 1932, a regular column by Ermanno Ponti entitled ‘Roma Sparita’ (Lost Rome) alongside a photo essay showing Rome before and after the demolitions. The articles invariably toed the fascist line, using a sarcastic tone condemning what had been lost and mocking those who lamented its passing. In the first article, which appeared in the May 1932 edition of the journal, Ponti described what had once existed in the Trajan Forum area quickly, dismissing any nostalgia for what once was as a ‘pedestrian consideration’ before moving on to the ‘classical and monumental zone surrounding it.’50 The photographs allowed sentimentalists to have one last look at what was lost, but the text assured the reader that this was necessary and not to be regretted. For whatever photographs could not convey, Ponti made sure that the text reminded Romans of what they had lost. He recalled that Rome used to be a ‘sombre city with deserted streets.’51 The streets that no longer existed were often the scene of bloody episodes of street crime.52 Lost Rome clearly was not to be lamented. Other writers in the pages of Capitolium also tried to convince Italians that the demolitions were salutary. The regime, through the pages of the Roman governor’s official journal, wanted to show that there was a before and after in the Roman cityscape, and the divide was the comingto-power of the fascists. In order to define what pre-fascist Rome looked like, Capitolium began using the term colore locale (local colour). One such article published in 1935 used an old guide book of Rome to prove that the regime had done the right thing in gutting the historic centre: This is a Rome (the one in the old guidebook) that is beloved by the tourist of the prewar era; a Rome that resembles the old postcards of the nineteenth century which bring up memories of the uncle in the zouaves or the

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uncle who was a legate to the papal court; a Rome filled with dilettantes’ watercolours; a Rome full of ruins, of potholed pavements, of scabby houses nestled up against ancient monuments out of which grew grass, then became shrubs and then trees. It’s always the same caricature: the barefoot ragged children, the donkeys carrying wood … and in the picture somewhere a tourist with a tour guide whose hand is outstretched either asking for money or demonstrating something.53

What was lost therefore was not worth missing, as it was the city associated with the previous century – the papal city that became a caricature for foreigners. It was increasingly clear that the propaganda campaign in the wake of the demolitions was targeted at the previous century, the ‘bourgeois century.’ The End of Bourgeois Rome This effort to rid the city of the mediocrity of past centuries in order to allow sun and light into the historic centre was not just a condemnation of the Middle Ages, but was also directed at the Romantic sensibility of the nineteenth century. The plan, according to the commission, would attack the previous century’s ‘sentimental nostalgia’ for ‘little curiosities of bigotry’ while preserving the ‘real architectural, panoramic, and atmospheric marvels’ which Rome had to offer.54 According to Marcello Piacentini, the new Rome had no place for those who lamented the ‘suppressing of a curb stone’; the fascist era rejected this ‘love for modest things, the blind idolatry of things simply because they had been built in other times.’55 The regime’s attack on the Romantic sensibility was so successful that such foreigners as the French symbolist Paul Valéry informed Antonio Muñoz of the view outside Italy that ‘Romantic Rome’ had been lost.56 The Romantic era in and of itself was considered unhygienic. Hygiene was a dominant theme in the Master Plan. In his 1932 speech to the Italian Senate promoting the Master Plan, Mussolini drew inspiration from a nineteenth-century source, Hippolyte Taine, to make a connection between aesthetics and hygiene. For Mussolini, the ‘local colour’ of some of the older quarters of the city so much loved by nineteenthcentury romantics was, through the eyes of Taine, ‘indescribable, and horrid, with infected alleys and slimy corridors.’57 This distaste for the previous century’s Rome was echoed by senator and historian Ettore

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Pais, who recounted that, as a youth, he was confronted by a city full of ‘lurid and indecorous places.’58 For the framers of the plan, the unhygienic nature of Rome’s medieval quarters was suited to the nineteenth-century’s slack morality and lax work ethic. Mussolini again relied on Taine to make the point that Italians, especially Romans, needed to become an industrious people. For Taine, as for Mussolini, it was time to move from the ‘epicurean and speculative’ life to one of ‘militant industry.’ In Mussolini’s mind there was an intimate connection between the ‘filthy’ aesthetics of nineteenthcentury Rome and the moral character of its people. This connection was implicitly acknowledged in Antonio Muñoz’s book on the clearing of the Capitoline Hill through a juxtaposition of two images of the Roman Forum.59 One of the images, a lithograph from 1817, shows two men lounging on the ruins of the Temple of Saturn encircled by playing children. The second is a contemporary photograph showing the same ruins, only this time surrounded by workers clearing the ruins from the medieval houses around them. Intentional or not, Muñoz’s decision to place these images opposite each other illustrates Mussolini’s contrast between industrious, fascist Italy and the previous century’s decadence. The general condemnation of a nineteenth-century Romantic sensibility was accompanied by an equal distaste for Liberal Italy and its ideas of urban planning. For some urban planners such as Arturo Bianchi, the liberal regime had contributed to, rather than mitigated, the squalour of Rome. In an article published in Capitolium, Bianchi linked aesthetics and hygiene in the Master Plan’s work around the Piazza Bocca della Verita and the Foro Velabro. He noted how this site was once the home of dilapidated industrial warehouses from the nineteenth century which had obscured the ruins of the Foro Velabro. Also included in this group of buildings was a flophouse, which ‘housed the most miserable relics of humanity and seemed purposely put there to show tourists a modern Italy full of beggars.’60 Fascist Rome, therefore, had to conceal these from view and realign aesthetics in order to suit the aesthetics of the twentieth century. Bianchi writes that two residents of the area understood this perfectly and had remodelled their homes to conform to the classical lines of the recently uncovered ancient temples. One factory owner had even concealed his factory with a neo-classical façade in order to fulfil the spirit of the Master Plan. The role of the 1931 plan in displacing Liberal Italy’s notion of urban planning was made forcefully by art historian Diego Angeli in the literary

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journal Nuova Antologia. Angeli, who was critical of the Master Plan, was also a severe critic of the land speculation that passed for urban planning in nineteenth-century Rome. The disastrous developments touched off by the plans of 1873 and 1883 were the result of ‘artistic anarchy’ perpetrated by a ‘band of adventurers … that had descended on Rome from every region … men of lowly origins and low culture’ whose greed had resulted in the ‘greatest ruin of Rome.’61 For Angeli, this disaster was reflected in aesthetic terms. Ugly row houses and half-finished demolitions had ruined the cityscape, especially in those modern quarters designed by the liberal regime. Although far from perfect, the 1931 plan had to demolish these ‘obscene houses displaying their intimate shame and opprobrious rags’ and restore order to the city.62 Furthermore, such unhygienic buildings as the orphanage in the Collegio Clementino had to go as well despite their moral purpose. According to Roman governor Boncompagni-Ludovisi, the poverty of nineteenth-century planning was evident in the monotonous row houses built by the liberal regime, which resembled ‘army barracks.’63 For Senator San Just, the new suburbs created to house Romans who had lost their homes in the city centre would be filled with cheap houses that were ‘large, well designed and with good architecture.’64 Ultimately, the fate of the Romans who had lived in the city centre did not concern the regime. It was important that they were gone, not just for security and panoramic reasons, but also because the regime could now boast of having revealed the mythical, primordial landscape of Rome. Revealing Mythical Rome De-familiarizing the Roman cityscape entailed revealing the primordial look of the city. It suited the fascist movement’s hatred of the previous century and all it stood for, and it also allowed the regime to engage in the other fantasy of squadrismo: releasing the mythological impulses of the Italian people through archaeological excavation. The elimination of the memory of the nineteenth century was part of a larger plan that was not concerned with understanding the historical development of the Eternal City, but with annihilating the intervening centuries between the mythical founding of Rome and the fascist regime. When the plan was presented to him in 1930, Mussolini commented on its promise to reveal the famous Seven Hills of Rome, then ‘submerged under the chaotic constructions of past centuries.’65 The Master Plan was an act of scraping away the layers of Italian history that did not suit the propaganda of the

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regime, which was increasingly focused on romanità. The plan was also a means for retrieving the primordial and thus making a link to the war experience and squadrismo. It was no coincidence that Mussolini placed an ex-quadrumvir, Cesare de Vecchi, in charge of the archaeological digs on the Palatine Hill, where the objective was to find the settlements of the first Roman and, hopefully, the domicile of Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf. De Vecchi did not doubt the mystical implications of his work: ‘Our archaeological activity is an act of poetry which digs into the darkness of our millenarian consciousness.’66 The fascist-controlled newspapers frequently repeated this refrain of digging through the crust of the preceding centuries to reveal the essential: ‘Rome uncovers daily its precious gems, many of which are still hidden beneath the encrustation accumulated after a long period of administrative mediocrity.’67 Fascist archaeology entailed bringing things to light not for their own sake, but to restore the mythical landscape of the Eternal City. Archaeology under fascism was an act of mythical exploration, not of scientific enquiry. Antonio Muñoz, the man in charge of many of the archaeological digs during the regime, rejected the idea that the past could be examined scientifically and objectively in Rome, since excavations did not reveal enough. During the work around the Circus Maximus, of which he was in charge, Muñoz claimed that the excavations did not turn up anything of value, but this was ‘compensated for by a place rich in legend that was more beautiful than cold, historical reality.’68 Muñoz’s point reveals much about the fascist attitude towards archaeology. This was no longer the nineteenth’s century approach, which sought to overcome legend and myth, but a twentieth-century approach which saw myth as more meaningful than objective historical research. Muñoz’s attitude was especially evident in the works on the most ‘sacred’ of the Roman hills: the Capitoline. The Capitoline was the heart of the historic centre. It rose above the forums and Piazza Venezia, centre of Mussolini’s Rome. Muñoz, director of the Fine Arts Division of the Roman Governatorato and member of the Master Plan Commission, was placed in charge of uncovering the hill. For him, the Capitoline needed to be restored to its ancient grandeur, which required ripping away the houses that surrounded it and revealing the ‘uncultivated and savage’ Tarpeian Rock, from which Rome’s ‘impure’ enemies were thrown.69 The original look of the Capitoline fascinated Muñoz, who spent many hours poring over ancient maps of the site trying to imagine what this once looked like before the centuries added unnecessary constructions on it. The early Romans, noted Muñoz, did not build on the site, leaving

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the ‘pristine’ rock as a sign of the hill’s impenetrability. It was historical development, he argued, which buried the hill’s grandeur. That development, while leaving important structures like the Senatorial palaces and the Church of the Aracoeli, also obstructed the hill from view. One of these obstructions was the Vittoriano. Fascism, like the early Romans, would not build on the Capitoline. The work of revealing the primitive look of the Capitoline required demolishing some buildings with a vaguely fascist connection, such as the former home of Eleonora Duse, who had been D’Annunzio’s mistress.70 It also involved some danger, as some of the rock faces proved fissured and unstable when revealed. Still, the new Capitoline made a deep impression on observers. Silvio Negri, war veteran and Vatican correspondent for Corriere della Sera, wrote in 1941 that ‘while the rest of Rome is filling up with houses, one spot has seen houses disappear and virgin land appear.’71 Negri, like other Romans, was amazed at what the demolitions revealed: caves, many created by men but others primordial which once gave refuge to wolves, and, therefore, the myths particular to Rome’s origins: ‘These caves, which for decades has been used as a dumping ground for marble by the municipal government, could have very likely given refuge not only to wolves but to prehistoric man as well. It is stupefying that Rome could have such things and that we can contemplate the primordial and savage features of this cavern, here in the heart of a great metropolis.’72 Negri was stunned that, in the middle of Rome, the memory of the prehistoric peoples of Lazio were revealed ‘after millennia of obscurity and silence.’73 The Capitoline, for Negri and Muñoz, had been rediscovered. In boasting that the regime did not build on the Capitoline, Muñoz ignored the fact that the regime did make one architectonic contribution to the place, an altar to ‘martyred fascists’ set in a clearing behind the Aracoeli church and overlooking the ruins of the Forum. The altar was a simple block of stone made of Egyptian granite. Once the pedestal of Sallust’s obelisk, it had been left in a neglected state for centuries. The regime hauled this stone from its storage in Via Volturno and placed it on the Capitoline. The block added to, rather than took away from, the primitive character of the Capitoline as celebrated by Muñoz. Measuring roughly 9 cubic metres, the stone had no ornament apart from four vases at the base of the rock which were subsequently removed.74 Chronicles of squadrismo placed the Capitoline Hill at the heart of the blackshirt legend. Domenico Maria Leva’s account of Roman squadrismo, published in 1943, recounted how the ‘altar’ of the Capitoline Hill had served to con-

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secrate the fascist militias in December 1920, during a ceremony commemorating those who had died at the hands of ‘communist bestiality.’ During the ceremony, communists had rioted in the streets below, causing the fascists to ‘descend from the altar’ to deal with the demonstrations.75 Thus, the sacred, primordial aura invested by the Capitoline Hill had already been part of the fascist legend from the beginning. A desire to find the primordial and sweep away intervening centuries was seen also in the uncovering of the tomb of Augustus. A theatre overlay the ancient tomb and had been the site of important moments in fascist history. It was here that the party held its first congress in November 1921. It was here too that the avant-garde scene flourished in the years following the war, along with popular theatre. No one, claimed the newspaper Il Lavoro Fascista, would miss these once the ‘pickaxe’ had done its work.76 In May 1936 the last concert was held and the theatre came down, along with many of the surrounding buildings, in order to create a vast piazza around the revealed ruin. There was perhaps some disappointment in the condition of the ruin, wrote Muñoz in Capitolium, but this disappointment was not shared by archaeologists. Nor was it shared by fascists and those who sought the primordial. A theatre was too nineteenth century for their tastes; better to show the naked ruins of Rome’s greatest emperor, no matter how aesthetically ugly they were. That the ugliness of the ruin did not matter was demonstrated in a plaster-cast model of the ruin shown before the work was complete. Return of Caesar Making rubble and dust of the previous century was a central goal of the Master Plan. This goal came, not from the academics and officials who latched onto the fascist regime, but from the squadrista spirit embodied by people like De Vecchi, Mussolini, and Bottai. Just as the blackshirts had adopted his savage spirit from the arditi of the Great War, so now did the obsessive desire to search for origins find its way into the regime’s urban planning. Searching for the primitive was also a means of fulfilling that great desire of Italian fascism: resurrecting the primitive sensibilities of the Italian people. When the dust cleared after the demolitions, Rome was transformed from the densely populated, semi-rural city it had been to a massive archaeological zone traversed by feverish traffic. The Master Plan had made Rome into a city of panoramic views, whereas it had once been a city of romantic flâneurs winding their way through narrow, tortuous

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streets. Previously one had to search for the ruins, now they could be seen from afar. After years of continuous demolition, Rome seemed to fit the dream that Mussolini had articulated in the 1920s: the Eternal City as site of necessity and grandeur. Keeping to his promise of unveiling ancient Rome, fascism could now boast of tracing a pedigree back to the ancients. A central feature of the Master Plan was the experience of demolition, an experience that expressed the substance of the movement and its approach to Rome. Demolition became a fact of life for Romans, and a permanent spectacle for artists like Mafai. For thousands of Romans, the demolitions meant dislocation and forced removal to unknown territory after having lived nestled among the centuries-old ruins. The act of demolition was the point of the Master Plan, exposing Romans to the principle of transformation without end and rendering the city unfamiliar. A city traditionally defined as eternal, Rome resisted change by absorbing different centuries into multiple layers, leaving the old Rome visible while incorporating the new. Fascism changed this by obliterating the layers of Rome’s past through a massive archaeological operation that aimed at retrieving the primitive, mythical core of the city. What remained was an empty centre, filled with ruins and rubble and increasing traffic carried through by the new avenues constructed by the regime. The modern and the mythical thus met in a strange juxtaposition, vitality circling around death in a way that captured the essence of squadrismo. This was not the constructive synthesis between the traditional and the modern which Mussolini had called for in the Master Plan. Rather, the new Rome reminded Italians of the chaos of a battlefield. The militarist tone brought to urban planning by fascism inserted chaos and confusion into the Roman cityscape. This impression was best captured by that astute observer of Rome’s changing landscape Mario Mafai, in his Demolizioni paintings. Although these paintings provided a realist portrait of the transformations the city was undergoing under fascism, he was at the same time completing a mural for the Case Balilla in Trastevere. Titled the Trionfo di Cesare, it is today hidden by plaster, covered up by the postwar Italian state because of its bellicose and militaristic tones. Depicting the return of Caesar’s triumphant legions, the mural shows the Romans bringing back prisoners of war as slaves. The style of painting is almost abstract, allowing Mafai’s supporters to argue that Mafai was condemning the current Caesars in fascist uniform, yet also with enough ambiguity to make the partisans cover up the painting after the war.77

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Mafai’s abstract interpretation was surprising considering the realist Demolizioni he was working on at the same time. In an interview given to Quadrivio in 1937, Mafai spoke of the mural, explaining that he depicted the victors in the warm colours of reds, blues, and greens while the defeated were in darker tones. Mafai used the interview also to denounce the sterile debates and chatter his contemporaries indulged in. His tone in the interview was fascist, resembling the similarly aggressive commentary on the changing role of art in the late 1930s mentioned above. The Rome of the fascist Master Plan thus found its interpreter and witness in Mario Mafai. The Trionfo di Cesare and the Demolizioni, albeit in different ways, captured the spirit and tone of fascist Rome. Not only was Mafai intimately involved in the demolitions, losing his home and studio, but he also mirrored the sensibility of his times around him. Fascism brought the war time aesthetic to Rome in 1922, transforming the Eternal City. Caesar’s armies needed roads such as the ancient Via Appia to return home triumphant. In the Rome of the Master Plan, the regime constructed new boulevards and avenues to carry the modern gladiators driving automobiles into the centre.78 These roads were the real achievements of the plan and the idea of moving chaotic traffic into the Eternal City a desired result. Through the Master Plan, fascism brought a war aesthetic to urban planning, attacking the cityscape of Rome in a way the blackshirts had been unable to do in 1922. Now the old quarters with their narrow laneways had been cleared away and obstacles removed. Should anyone doubt that Rome had been conquered by a blackshirted army taking its inspiration from the Great War, the regime constructed the Foro Mussolini at the foot of Monte Mario. Opened on the day of the Decennale, the Foro Mussolini housed the offices of the Opera Nazionale Balilla (O.N.B.), the fascist youth organization. Its purpose was to create a space for physical development, a veritable ‘sports city’ where the fascist new man was to be trained.79 As such, it included an indoor swimming pool and two stadiums, one of which, the stadio dei marmi, was lined with 4-metre-high statues of athletes which idealized the fascist superman. These statues reflected the Nietzschean influence behind fascism and they predated the similar statues that Hitler would later commission for Nazi Germany. Although there were no ruins in the vicinity, the Foro made a direct connection to Imperial Rome. According to Enrico Del Debbio, the complex’s chief designer, the Foro Mussolini was conceived as an ‘architectonic complex of severe monumentality … The result is the emergence of a monumental group which can be traced back to the greatest

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monuments of ancient Rome.’80 The forum also included a broad avenue going from the Tiber River to a massive fountain consisting of a marble orb set in a sunken pool. At the head of the avenue was raised a 30-metre obelisk made from Carrara marble, with the words Mussolini– Dux carved into it. The odyssey of this obelisk from the mountains of Carrara to Rome was well documented by the fascist press.81 Mosaics and marble blocks depicting scenes of the fascist revolution filled the avenue between the two landmarks. The Foro Mussolini embodied everything that the fascist revolution claimed to be. Specifically, it was heavy with associations of the Great War. The predominance of stone and marble linked the two most important historical associations of fascism: the Roman Empire and the war. The obvious references to Rome, claimed fascist propagandists, made the Foro Mussolini the living embodiment of the ‘Mediterranean spirit and the Latin world at its best.’82 The rediscovery of the glorious ancient past included the revival of the plastic arts, such as outdoor sculpture and mosaic, thanks to Renato Ricci, the head of the O.N.B. and decorated war hero, who had requested them.83 The art of the mosaic especially recalled the Roman heritage; it had since become a lost art to be found only in the great Byzantine basilicas.84 Alongside this re-evocation of Ancient Rome were echoes of the Great War and the March on Rome. The blocks alongside the avenue marked important moments in fascist history, beginning with the intervention in the First World War in 1915. On the mosaic pavement came depictions of moments in that history. Here was the March on Rome, showing squadristi in their 18 BLs. The new roads such as the Via del Mare were also illustrated, as was the proclamation of the Ethiopian conquest. The avenue was baptized the Piazzale dell’Impero, designed for marches and parades.85 Not a place for sedentary contemplation, this piazzale, designed by the Rationalist architect Luigi Moretti, was meant to symbolize movement and conquest. A closer reading of the Foro Mussolini reveals the pervasive influence of the Great War experience on the fascist imagination. The new man, transformed by the rocks of the Carso plateau, can be discerned in the marble statues littering the complex. The mosaics, next to the marble statues, are the most predominant forms of art. They fill the Foro, not just in the piazzale but also on the walls of several buildings and the interior swimming pool. Not only did the Foro remind the fascists of ancient Rome, but it raised immediate associations with the Italian front. The mosaics in the Foro, made in the Friuli region, resembled modern versions of the mosaics of the Basilica of Aquileia.

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The other structures of the Foro also carried connotations of the Great War experience. The spherical fountain and the obelisk, along with the unadorned square blocks, resembled the primitivism which dominated the war experience. The complex between the two landmarks was referred to as the ‘spiritual focolare’ of fascist Rome which recalled the primitive hearths of the Friuli region.86 This whole area was connected to the other bank of the Tiber by a new bridge dedicated to the duke of Aosta, the commander of the Third Army who was buried in a massive granite block on the Carsican monument at Redipuglia. The crossing of the Tiber into this zone overlooked by the Monte Mario resembled in many ways the crossing of the Isonzo River to the Carso front.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘An uninterrupted racecourse’: Fascism’s Roman Roads

Above the roar of the crowd in the piazza, where the most important decisions of the Italian people are made, and from which the sound moves upwards towards Him in waves, the voice of the Duce flies clearly and precisely like the iron of an arrow.1

This scene depicts Piazza Venezia on 10 June 1940. A mass of Romans has crowded into every nook of the piazza to hear Mussolini announce that Italy has entered the war. The author of the article in Capitolium, from which the above quotation is taken, claimed that Italy in 1940 was repeating the call to war made by Scipio against the Carthaginians during the Roman Republic. This was a fulfilment of the regime’s policy of romanità and proof, according to Capitolium, that history works in cycles. Just as a small and devious mercantile empire had prevented the Republic’s claim to the sea, so now in 1940 a similar empire (Great Britain) funded by ‘gold’ was doing the same thing. Once again, Rome had to reclaim its spazio vitale.2 The notion of space dominated the LUCE newsreel of the event. The vast, ‘oceanic’ crowd in Piazza Venezia was shown more than Mussolini himself, who appeared to be dwarfed by the doorway leading onto the famous balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. The real protagonist on that day was the crowd, which not only filled the piazza, but also stretched along the Via dell’Impero and filled the steps and terraces of the Vittoriano. Long panning shots by the LUCE cameras gave the oceanic impression so desired by fascist propaganda. In a remarkable sequence of shots, the main squares of the other major Italian cities are shown, crammed with Italians listening to Mussolini’s speech from loudspeakers. Genoa, Turin, Milan, Venice, Trieste, Bologna, Forlì, Bari, Florence, Naples, and

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then back to Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini concludes his speech with a rousing call to victory (Vincere e vinceremo).3 As it turned out, this was to be the last of fascism’s great rallies in Piazza Venezia. It followed a series of similar spectacles held in Rome throughout the 1930s. These adunate oceaniche (oceanic rallies) were often called on short notice, with trucks carrying loudspeakers rounding up fascist party members throughout the city. The success of these rallies was largely due not only to the organizing abilities of the party in Rome, but also to the grand new boulevards built in the historic centre. Fascism thus filled the vast open spaces it opened up in Rome, a testament to the roads, all of which led to Piazza Venezia. Without the broad avenues laid out by the regime, Piazza Venezia would have been more difficult to fill in such a short period of time. By 1940, Rome’s historic centre had been rendered unfamiliar. As promised by Mussolini, the ruins of antiquity had been exposed and emptiness reigned where once thousands had lived. Empty space now surrounded the ruins, but this did not mean that Romantics could now sit quietly and contemplate what had once existed. Instead, this emptiness was filled with noise emanating from the new boulevards crossing the historic centre. The Via del Mare and the Via dell’Impero were just two of the major roads that fascism laid out in the Eternal City. Roads fulfilled Mussolini’s ‘necessity’ pillar for the Master Plan, allowing for the circulation of increasing traffic and expressing the fascist regime’s desire to fill the city with automobiles, symbols of modernity and speed. These roads, as flat and straight as possible, not only heralded the modern, but they reminded Romans of the ancient past. Building roads was the Roman skill par excellence, and the fascist regime, in its hope of resurrecting the Roman Empire from beneath the ‘crust’ of intervening centuries, made building roads its chief activity, not just in Rome but throughout the country. In the Eternal City, road building served many functions. Not only did the roads move increasing volumes of traffic and remind Romans of the new empire, they also recalled the days of squadrismo, when the blackshirts made the roads of Italy their instrument of terror. The regime enshrined this memory of the blackshirts in the Milizia della Strada, a police force founded in 1928 to guard the roads of Italy. More than just code enforcers, the Milizia was the incarnation of the fascist revolution, according to Pietro Maria Bardi. In his 1936 novel celebrating the automotive culture of Italy, Bardi claimed that the Milizia represented the ‘permanent uniform of the Revolution.’4 The Milizia, like the blackshirts

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before them, ‘race day and night on their motorbikes and cars. Their passing is like a laxative which washes the intestines of all waste.’5 The Milizia, too, had its martyrs and constituted, according to Bardi, the ‘innovative element of the Italian mind, the assiduous and authoritarian regulator of the principles which form the fascist plan.’6 Roads were central in the fascist imagination and it was through them that the fascist revolution was carried out. In Rome, the roads became the landmarks of the fascist city. Not only did they transform the look of the city, they also shaped how one looked at the city. This chapter will explore the transformations of the Eternal City caused by the new roads through the reconfiguration of the central feature of Italian cities: the piazza. The Roman roads also played a key role in shaping fascist spectacle and in determining a new way of experiencing the city in a fascist key. Critics The Master Plan’s roads inevitably drew its share of critics. In order to understand the innovative role played by the regime’s new roads through Rome, it is instructive to examine the arguments put forward by these critics. While no one condemned the plan outright, several urbanists, such as Nestore Cinelli and Vincenzo Civico, rejected aspects of it, especially the configuration of the new roads. Cinelli and Civico, neither of whom served on the Master Plan commission, provided the most persistent critiques of the plan in various journals throughout the 1930s. Their criticisms can be summarized as follows: The new roads did not move traffic efficiently through the city centre; they entailed unnecessary demolitions; they disfigured historic squares, and they took no notice of a need for a reverential silence around the relics of antiquity and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Piazza Venezia. In short, the plan did not live up to its mandate, put forward in Mussolini’s city hall speech in 1926, of building a new Rome based on ‘necessity and grandeur.’ Nor did the plan follow the example of European capital planning laid out by Baron Haussmann in the nineteenth century, and followed by liberal governments since Rome had become capital of Italy in 1870. Furthermore, the ruins of antiquity were not being respected by the new roads. Cinelli, who had been promoting his urban-planning ideas since the turn of the century, was a strong advocate of building tunnels through the ancient centre. His argument was that tunnels would avoid creating intersections (vie d’incrocio) which were the primary cause for gridlock. The liberal regime had built such a tunnel underneath the

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Quirinal Palace (the Traforo del Quirinale) in 1900, and Cinelli saw it as the best means of moving traffic efficiently without causing any unnecessary demolitions.7 Peace and tranquillity needed to reign in the centre of Rome, but the new roads proposed by the Master Plan would bring only traffic jams and confusion, thus disturbing the noble character of some parts of the city. For example, the new road linking Piazza Barberini and Via Veneto argued Cinelli, ‘would waste the aristocratic character of this beautiful road.’8 Moreover, the increased traffic in this area would transform the Piazzale Trinità dei Monti (more commonly known as Piazza Spagna) into a transit zone, thus ruining its character as a pedestrian area. In Cinelli’s view, traffic congestion was the greatest evil that urban planning had to combat, and he held up the Largo Tritone as the worst example of gridlock in the city. Cinelli attacked the theoretical abstractions of the Master Plan, pointing out that only by standing at the intersection could one see the problems.9 Cinelli’s supporters argued that only a comprehensive system of tunnels could realize the dream of building an east–west artery through the city. The surface roads proposed by the plan would only mean massive demolitions and gridlocks. The master planners’ intention of revealing the monuments of the city would be sabotaged by the demolitions which would inevitably destroy famous landmarks. One critic proposed that a tunnel through the Piazza Barberini could move underneath the Palazzo Barberini, thus putting Bernini’s ‘sumptuous palace’ on display.10 Meanwhile, a tunnel through the archaeological centre of the city could prevent traffic from accumulating into the Piazza Venezia, thus leaving the Unknown Soldier in peace. Necessity and grandeur, according to these critics, would best be served by a network of tunnels running underneath the soil of Rome. The roads proposed by the plan were denounced as dangerous since they encouraged high speeds on sometimes steep gradients. The aforementioned Largo Tritone, for example, apart from being a site of gridlock was also a death-trap for pedestrians.11 The traffic had increased to such an extent here that by 1934 some felt it necessary to warn pedestrians that ‘the road is for vehicles, and that it is dangerous to cross it.’12 Venerable archaeologist and master planner Corrado Ricci came to regret the new boulevards, as they became the primary sites of major motoring accidents, caused by drivers who persuaded themselves that the new roads were an ‘uninterrupted race course.’13 One critic argued that the effect of the new roads would transform Rome ‘into a race track.’14 Rather

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than contemplation and veneration of antiquity, the Master Plan’s roads encouraged reckless driving. The nineteenth-century Romantic poet would almost certainly end up as a traffic casualty in fascist Rome.15 These critics of the plan wanted the new roads to be functional, but at the same time unobtrusive. Moving traffic quickly through the centre, while respecting as far as possible the topography of the city, was the desired goal of any interventions into the cityscape. This view ran counter, however, to the real intentions behind the Master Plan. In his description of the plan, Marcello Piacentini rejected the notion that the landscape could be completely preserved. Piacentini anticipated future criticisms by condemning the ‘sentimental nostalgia’ which belonged to the nineteenth-century mind.16 The fascist road belonged to the twentieth century. It was not simply some unassuming highway meant to move traffic efficiently, but a monument in and of itself. For this reason, tunnels were pointless because they did not highlight the road itself. In fascist planning, the road became an instrument to shape the landscape, not conform to it. Tunnels gave way to the cityscape; roads transformed them, and it was this aspect of road building that appealed to the regime. Roads as Platforms Tunnels also missed another important function of the roads: to provide Romans a new means of looking at the new and strange landscape of fascist Rome. This function was left to the boulevards built by the regime, not just to act as conduits for traffic but also to act as observation points. According to Piacentini, the new roads constructed by the plan ‘sometimes … offer the possibility of putting on show monuments that had been suffocated, giving to citizens unexpected pleasures.’17 Shifting perspectives and new frames on familiar landmarks, in order to disorient the viewer, were central to the working of the Master Plan. Arturo Bianchi wrote that the new road linking Piazza Barberini and Piazza San Bernardo created a new frame on the modernist-style Teatro Barberini designed by Marcello Piacentini in 1932. According to Bianchi, this modern, fascist structure was the perfect antidote for a part of the city used to ‘idle gossip and frivolity,’ undoubtedly a criticism of the nineteenthcentury bourgeoisie.18 The demolitions and the new road would put the theatre in full view. Bianchi similarly applauded the recently completed Via del Mare for producing some ‘unexpected views of magnificent monuments of different eras grouped into one marvellous frame whose diverse styles seemed

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to have found a new beauty.’19 The panorama offered by the Via del Mare, for example, as one moved along it under the base of the Capitoline Hill towards Piazza Venezia, was so wondrous that it could not be put into words: ‘The photographs shown here,’ wrote Bianchi, ‘illustrate better than any arid description the characteristic detail of this part of the Via del Mare.’20 The benefits gained by this sight far outweighed the loss of Michelangelo’s ‘picturesque’ Piazza Aracoeli, which had to be partially demolished in order to build this road. The Via del Mare’s optical revolution was also celebrated by Silvio Negri, the Corriere della Sera’s Vatican correspondent. Negri, in admiring the revealed Capitoline Hill, remembered that previously, if one wanted to see ancient ruins, one often had to knock on the doors of private residences and ask permission to view them. Now, with the Via del Mare, two other ‘illustrious recluses,’ the Tarpaeian Rock and the Theatre of Marcellus, could be seen frontally, without any obstacles from the new road, rather than close up, which required one to look upwards.21 According to Diego Angeli, the importance of these surprising views of Rome distinguished fascist urban planning from that of liberal Italy, which had failed to ‘exploit superb perspectives’ in its own planning.22 Meanwhile, even the dean of Italian archaeologists, Corrado Ricci, who was also critical of the new roads, had to admit that these panoramas were necessary for Italians to finally ‘comprehend’ the greatness of Rome.23 When it was suggested that houses be constructed on the Via Imperiale, the road connecting Rome with the E42 project near the excavations of Ostia Antica, the director of the excavations at Ostia reminded the Ministry of Public Instruction that one of the ‘guiding concepts behind the construction of the new road was access to, and a full view, of the ruins.’24 The main innovation of the Master Plan of 1931 was optical, concerned not just with the physical remaking of the city but also with reconfiguring the gaze. The roads were central to this reconfiguration. Antonio Muñoz celebrated the juxtapositions offered by the Via dell’Impero, noting that the new Rome gave strange and uncommon views of the Eternal City.25 A similar justification served for the widening of the Via Flaminia as it proceeded through the Porta del Popolo. This project, according to the UT, was partly intended to provide a view of the Villa Strohl-Fern and the Villa Balestra, the Pincio Hill’s Renaissance palaces.26 The new Via Flaminia would thus reveal the Renaissance aspects of the famous hills of Rome. In the zone around the Mausoleum of Augustus, the plan hoped to capture in one frame the tomb of the first emperor and the Tiber

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River through the construction of a massive piazza around it – a view, according to the UT, that had not existed for centuries.27 In presenting Romans with new and strange sights, the Master Plan aimed to de-familiarize a once familiar setting and thus provide innovative readings of the city’s history. These new views could only be appreciated from the vantage point of the roads. According to Antonio Muñoz, the merit of the Master Plan was its cultivation of Rome’s unique ability to provide surprising palimpsests. In responding to critics who claimed that the church of San Nicola in Carcere should have been demolished, as it stood on some ancient temples, Muñoz claimed that leaving the church was more interesting for the viewer riding along the Via dell’Impero, as it combined in one frame the ancient, the medieval, the pagan, and the Christian.28 This juxtaposition of republic and monarchy was typical of the city’s character. Mussolini had noted in 1930 that the mixing of old and new had given Rome a ‘paradoxical aspect,’ and it seems that, far from solving this paradox, the Master Plan accentuated it. The heart of the plan, apart from isolating monuments, was the construction of grand boulevards, such as the Via del Mare and the Via dell’Impero, designed to move modern traffic through the historic centre towards the Alban Hills and to provide spectacular views of Roman monuments and ruins. The Via dell’Impero, for example, acted as a viewing platform for the ancient fora by splitting the Republican and Imperial Fora diagonally. Muñoz had celebrated the Via dell’Impero’s revolutionary revelation of the fora by noting ironically that ‘it disoriented even the most tenacious of advocates for the liberation of the fora.’29 This disorientation no doubt was due to the diagonal which the street cut through the fora. Virgilio Testa had hinted at this dual function of the new road when he argued that this solution to modern traffic would not hinder, but augment, the artistic integrity of the city.30 Representative of this desire for the road as a lens onto the glory of Rome was the plan’s refusal to consider Cinelli’s tunnels through the historic centre. Traffic was an intrinsic part of the picture laid out by the plan, as demonstrated in an article by Marcello Piacentini in the pages of Illustrazione. The text, a summary of the Master Plan, was accompanied by several illustrations showing how the new roads would open views onto the ancient monuments by showing gawking pedestrians and black cars mixing with the columns and temples of the fora.31 The road’s function as a viewing platform was central to the working of the plan, a fact demonstrated in the debate over the access ramp up the Capitoline Hill. Paolo Salatino, a member of the commission,

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argued that this purely functional and seemingly mundane road, which paled in comparison to the other grand boulevards built by the plan, was considered by some to be too low and thus lacking a panoramic view of the Roman Forum. The governor’s office, however, defended this lower elevation, as it made ‘more evident the remains of the temples of Saturn and Vespasian and the arch of Septimius Severus.’32 This increased magnification of the two temples was preferable because it brought the Forum ‘closer to the public.’ Furthermore, the road rendered visible the rocks of the Mamertine Prison, where Sts Paul and Peter had been held captive. A simple road, therefore, designed to move traffic up the Capitoline Hill, could also provide at once a vision of Republican, Imperial, and Christian Rome. Fascism’s new avenues became the privileged platforms from which to see the new city, preferably from the seat of a moving automobile. Antonio Muñoz criticized ‘romantic types’ who felt that the Via dell’Impero would bring too much noise and modernity to a zone that should be reserved for quiet contemplation: ‘If this be the case, it is certainly not something to complain about,’ wrote Muñoz in Capitolium; ‘it forces those who pass by minding their own business to comprehend the grandeur of the past.’33 Thus, the avenues created by the Master Plan created new frames and juxtapositions. Landmarks and monuments which had long been part of the Roman landscape would now be seen in new ways. Even Cinelli, who was opposed to many of the new roads, surmised that a new road built alongside the Corso Umberto I would not only create a great traffic hub with Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, but would also open up the medieval quarter of the city to the modern eye as it moved on these new arteries.34 In this manner, ‘sumptuous palaces’ buried in the medieval fabric of the Renaissance quarter would be revealed. While Cinelli was opposed to constructing major boulevards through the ancient centre, he did believe that some secondary roads would act as observation points for meditating on the ancient ruins. His proposal for a new wide boulevard slicing through the Renaissance Quarter was supported by L’Urbe, which argued that such a road would not only do away with unimportant buildings, but would ‘reveal buildings of great worth currently obscured by narrow and dirty laneways.’35 Although it rejected underpasses, the commission for the Master Plan seemed to agree with Cinelli’s vision in this case. The master planners pointed out that the new road constructed next to Via Arenula would ‘liberate traffic from the Via Ripetta and Via Scrofa, and will put into a dignified frame the Pantheon and Augustus Mausoleum.’36 Even Corrado Ricci applauded the proposed road linking

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the Piazza del Parlamento and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, since it permitted a vision of the dome of St Peter’s.37 Revealing the dome of the Vatican was, of course, central in Piacentini’s Via della Conciliazione, the new, grand boulevard built to link the Vatican with the rest of the city, a symbol of the new friendship between the Holy See and the fascist state, although in this case the dome lost the impact it once had over pilgrims, as noted by Governor Bottai.38 Before the Via della Conciliazone was built, a pilgrim would find St Peter’s only after having navigated the narrow, torturous streets around the Vatican. Once he found the basilica, his gaze was met with wonder by the hulking church. With the Via della Conciliazione, this optical effect was lost, as the basilica was visible the entire distance of the road. Another marvel of the Renaissance, the Palazzo Barberini, would also benefit from the Master Plan’s roads. The UT reminded concerned denizens of the Ludovisi Quarter that art and hygiene could not be distinguished in the plan, and that the new road to be built served aesthetics by providing a ‘complete view’ of the Palazzo Barberini, since it entailed the demolition of ‘salubrious old houses.’39 The new roads, therefore, played the role of revealing the sights of Rome and presenting them in novel ways which served the ideology of the regime. No road was more significant in this respect than the Via dell’Impero. The Via dell’Impero The Via dell’Impero, completed in 1932 in time for the celebrations of the Decennale (tenth anniversary of the March on Rome), immediately became the symbol of fascist road building. The building of the Via dell’Impero not only entailed massive demolitions of the medieval and nineteenth-century houses between the Piazza Venezia and the Coliseum, but also required the levelling of one of Rome’s hills, the Velia.40 This radical reconfiguration of the landscape was greeted with great enthusiasm the day when the Coliseum became visible from Piazza Venezia. This was an indication that the road served as an instrument of change in not only the landscape, but in how one looked at the landscape. Commission member Antonio Muñoz, future Minister of Arts and the man in charge of the demolitions on the Capitoline Hill, became the leading advocate of the Via dell’Impero as a transformer of the landscape. In a series of articles and books, Muñoz insisted that the Via dell’Impero and its counterpart, the Via del Mare, defined the roles that the roads would play in the new Rome. To be sure, the value of the Via

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dell’Impero, argued Muñoz, was not to be found only in the ruins it revealed, but also on the volume of traffic it could carry. In its first year, Via dell’Impero had carried over 6 million automobiles, 700,000 trucks, 2.7 million horse-drawn carriages, and 14 million pedestrians, making it a road that was ‘alive’ and not a ‘cemetery.’41 It was for this reason that the road was not constructed as an overpass where one could get a bird’seye view of the Roman ruins.42 The straight wide road proposed by the Roman governor, Boncompagni-Ludovisi, was the most ‘practical’ solution since it avoided the engineering difficulties presented by bridges.43 The functional virtues of the Via dell’Impero, however, were not enough to explain its importance. The road was a symbol of modernity, drawing traffic to itself like a magnet and encouraging speed through the ancient centre of the city. French modernist architect Le Corbusier, an enthusiast of high-speed traffic, noted in an interview for Muñoz’s journal L’Urbe that the new Rome did not allow for the contemplation of ruins, which required ‘calm, solitude and time for reflection.’44 While Le Corbusier lamented this fact, for Muñoz this was the point of the road – to inject the dynamic qualities of modern life into a dead centre. The Via dell’Impero lifted the ruins from the ‘dusty glass of a museum … The passer-by who is rapidly traversing the archaeological zone, concerned only with his own affairs, is suddenly, despite himself, forced to take a look and listen to the voices of the past.’45 The road was a work of art which not only provided a window on the past, but changed perceptions of that past and forced the viewer to take stock of this new perspective. Even the guide of the Touring Club Italiano had to change its description of the Foro Romano because of the road’s reorienting of one’s perspective.46 The fact that the Via dell’Impero crossed the ancient fora diagonally reinforced this notion that the road was not merely a window on the past, but also a lens which distorted one’s view of the past. The Road as Vector It was on roads like the Via dell’Impero and the Via del Mare, vectors which transformed the landscape, that fascism could truly express itself as a movement of speed and danger. As Ricci feared, the new roads easily became racing tracks. On the Via del Mare, Mussolini would often jump on his motorcycle and race to his summer home in Ostia from the Palazzo Venezia.47 The Mille Miglia motor race, begun in 1927, and eventually banned in the 1950s because of its high death toll among spectators, used these new roads in its obligatory passage through the Eternal City.

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The racing cars entered Rome at high speed and not in parade formation.48 To depict the fascist road as being dangerous was not a criticism but a compliment, as it highlighted the audacious nature of fascism. With danger came death. An accident in the 1938 edition of the Mille Miglia caused the death of ten spectators, including seven children. Rather than point to the inherent danger of the event, the prefect of Bologna blamed instead the ‘weak constitution and inexperience’ of the driver who ploughed into the crowd.49 To be sure, the prefect was simply trying to deflect responsibility, but the claim certainly had a fascist character. Death on the roads was acceptable to the fascist regime because it suited the fascist view of the road. In Rome, the dead soldier who lay in the centre of Piazza Venezia surrounded by traffic symbolized this view, as did the demolitions around the tomb of the Emperor Augustus. The plan proposed to demolish the theatre in order to reveal the tomb, and to create a cavernous square around it through which traffic would flow. The square served as part of the east–west axis of traffic through the city. Mussolini, who inaugurated the work with his famous pickaxe ceremony, announced that the roads of the Master Plan ‘were not roads used purely for archaeological purposes, but great arteries where the imposing life of the pulsating city can circulate.’50 In the middle of this dynamic life sat, in the words of Muñoz, an ‘obscured and scarred’ mausoleum, symbol of death.51 This juxtaposition of movement and stasis, life and death was a major leitmotif of fascist road building, and nowhere was it more on display than in Rome. The roads as instruments of movement and life through a dead cityscape motivated the assault on the most ubiquitous symbol of stasis in Italian urban design—the piazza. In order to move traffic quickly through Rome, and enhance the speed found on the new roads, squares needed to be transformed, and in some cases obliterated. The square, the centre of Italian social life through the centuries, was nothing more than an obstacle to the fascist roads. Critics of the Master Plan pointed to the manipulation of the squares as a major weakness of the plan, but this misses the point. The disruption of historic squares was not an unfortunate by–product of fascist urban planning, but its very purpose. According to fascist mythology, the square was a place of dark intrigue and the preferred hideout of socialists waiting to ambush the fascists proudly strutting on the open roads. As such, it had to be changed to reflect the new age of fascism. The voice of post-1922 squadrismo, Mino Maccari’s journal Il Selvag-

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gio, continued this myth by launching a campaign against the traditional squares of Rome. After the Matteotti murder in 1924, the paper urged Mussolini to leave this city of ‘putrid, stagnant blood [which is] coagulating in feces.’52 A favourite target of Il Selvaggio was the typical Roman piazza and their, ‘banal obelisks, and ignoble statues.’ Many of these squares were rendered even uglier after 1918 by the addition of war monuments.53 These monuments were a ‘horrible residue of the now demolished Italietta’ (little Italy) left behind by the war.54 The proliferation of war monuments in the squares of Italy caused an urban blight for which there was only one solution: ‘Destroy without pity and with sacred fury the masses of bronze, stone, marble, and Travertine which pollute the squares of Italy … squadrismo has to rise against this ugliness … We savages shout that it is not enough to deplore, we must destroy and suppress.’55 While the framers of the Master Plan did not put it so crudely, they also came to condemn the traditional squares of Rome, especially those in the popular quarters of the city as examples of ‘local colour.’56 The Via del Mare was especially instrumental in this process. The building of the Via del Mare in 1928, overseen by Antonio Muñoz, was responsible for destroying two historic squares at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, the Piazza Montanara and the Piazza Aracoeli. The Via del Mare, which overlaid the ancient Via Ostiense, was conceived as the major artery linking Rome with the sea. The Piazza Montanara embodied everything the fascist regime was trying to destroy in Rome. A meeting place for farmers coming into the city to sell their products at the market, the square was often full of livestock grazing on the slopes of the Capitoline Hill. Part of the Jewish Ghetto, the square was known for its folksy, popular character. It was a place full of osterie (pubs), one of which had been made famous by Goethe.57 It was a square where residents left their laundry out for all to see, and where local merchants operated out of the arches of the ancient Theatre of Marcellus.58 In the fascist mind, the Piazza Montanara took on a sinister character. One apologist for the demolitions recalled that the square was deserted at night except for ruffians singing ‘bitter, fighting songs [and engaging] in bloody fights.’59 Things were not much better during the day when the square was full of fraudulent, itinerant merchants.60 A hint of antiSemitism also influenced some of the reactions to the loss of the piazza: ‘The ghetto is now gone,’ wrote F.P. Mulé in the pages of Capitolium, ‘there – where the Jews had practised, from father to son, their adventurous commerce in junk, old irons, rags, and useless, second-hand items

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of every sort – now shines the sun.’61 The Via del Mare ensured that this square was obliterated, and that the ancient monuments in the area, like the Marcellus Theatre, were now in full view. Rather than being filled by shopkeepers, the arches of the theatre were now vacant and in full view of the fast-paced traffic coming in and out of the Piazza Venezia. Close by the Piazza Montanara, the Piazza Aracoeli also fell victim to the path of the Via del Mare. Despite their proximity, the two squares differed in character. More upper class and surrounded by finer architecture, the Piazza Aracoeli served as an antechamber to the Piazza Campidoglio at the top of the Capitoline Hill. Nonetheless, the regime disfigured the square by demolishing one side of it in order to make room for the widened Via San Marco, a short road which linked the Via del Mare to the Piazza Venezia. An important church, San Rita da Cascia, was dismantled and rebuilt down the road near the Marcellus Theatre. Left standing was one side of the square and the fountain. Unlike the demolition of Piazza Montanara, that of Piazza Aracoeli raised voices of protest. ‘The thorny issue of the transformation of the Piazza Araceoli spilled much ink,’ wrote Muñoz. ‘There are those who think that it should be restored, while others, whose eyes have become accustomed to wide spaces, would reject enclosure.’62 The fate of the Piazza Aracoeli and the Piazza Montanara was shared by the Piazzale Augusteo. The remaking of the Piazzale Augusteo, from a medieval quarter surrounding a theatre into a vast traffic clearing house in the 1930s, was a positive step for apologists of the Master Plan, as it put an end to this ‘indecent neighbourhood.’63 It was not enough, though, just to demolish the houses around the tomb, as the Master Planners built a high-speed road passing between three historic churches previously buried among the houses. Because of this road, the churches of San Girolamo, San Rocco, and San Carlo were now exposed to view.64 The road was the agent of transformation that brought these churches to life, but also separated them from each other and left them isolated from the square surrounding them. The churches were now just as isolated and remote as the neighbouring Tomb of Augustus. Unlike the Piazza Montanara, the Piazzale Augusteo was located in a more affluent neighbourhood, and the changes wrought by the Master Plan elicited sharp complaints from residents. For many in the neighbourhood, the work of the Master Plan had rendered the square asymmetrical and too large. This argument was met with little sympathy at the technical office of the Master Plan, which pointed out that a wide-open square was desirable since it reconnected the tomb with the Tiber River:

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‘The creation of a grandiose backdrop on a wide space like the banks of the Tiber will give to the new square a grandeur that could never be achieved through a closed square.’65 The Piazzale Augusteo was no longer a piazzale, but a piazza similar to Piazza Venezia. Aerial photographs make the square appear as a massive crater in the cityscape of Rome. More vociferous and bitter complaints arose from the regime’s interventions in the Piazza Barberini, home of Bernini’s Palazzo Barberini and fountain. The plan’s intent of widening the square in order to allow a road linking it with Piazza San Bernardo raised the ire of some local residents, concerned that the historic symmetry of the piazza would be lost. Widening the square, the technical office pointed out to one resident, ‘would provide a complete visual of the palazzo from the square [and] create a wider zone’ around an important monument.66 Rendering a square asymmetrical offended conventional urban design, but in the fascist scheme it was perfectly acceptable. Marcello Piacentini would later declare the Piazza Barberini a truly great square because of its ‘fantastic irregularity created over time. One of those squares that is infinitely suggestive, more plastic, and more human.’67 Respect for the traditional order of a square had no place in fascist urban planning. This vision was also evident in the reworking of the Piazza San Bernardo, where the Moses Fountain was to be moved in order to make it visible from the widened Via XX Settembre. Moving the fountain destroyed the proportions of the square, claimed one letter to the governor’s office. The technical office responded that it did not matter where the fountain was in the square, as long as it was still there.68 The important issue was that it was now visible for someone travelling down the road. Perspective from the road mattered more than the actual location of the fountain. Such arguments demonstrated that, in the interests of transforming the landscape, fascism was unwilling to respect the historic dimensions of a square if other issues such as perspective were present. Changes in Piazza Barberini drew sharp criticisms from the Master Plan’s critics, who argued that the extent of demolitions far outweighed the utility of the road, and that the result would be a square no longer fit to hold Bernini’s fountain.69 Another critic decried the damage done to the square and also to the quaint Piazza Santi Apostoli near Piazza Venezia. The character of Piazza SS. Apostoli was found entirely in its intimate and closed setting, and this would be destroyed by a road designed for high-density traffic.70 Closed, intimate squares were not in keeping with fascist planning, however, which valued above all wideopen spaces.

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Piazza Venezia: The Landscape of War Piazza Venezia, located in the centre of the ancient city, became, in the words of Mussolini, the ‘heart’ of the city, especially after he had moved his offices there on 16 September 1929.71 Yet the move, from Piazza Colonna where the traditional residence of the prime minister was located, to the Palazzo Venezia, the imposing fortress-like building next to the Vittoriano, came with little fanfare.72 The move placed the centre of the fascist regime in a square that the liberal monarchy had made into the monumental centre of Rome, locating in it the Vittoriano and the Unknown Soldier. Once Mussolini installed himself in the Palazzo Venezia, the fascist planners made its reconfiguration a top priority. The regime’s appropriation of Piazza Venezia suggested that fascism represented continuity with the previous regime.73 But unlike the liberal monarchy, fascism did not have much enthusiasm for the Vittoriano, which had been inaugurated in 1911 on the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy. A massive, colonnaded structure replete with classical symbols, the Vittoriano provided a discordant note in the urban texture of Rome. The criticisms rained down on the Vittoriano even before it was completed. It was viewed by many as symbolic of the liberal monarchy’s failure to capture the hearts of Italians.74 After the war, leading art critic Ugo Ojetti resigned his seat on the Royal Commission of Vittoriano, as he no longer saw the monument as relevant after the experience of the war.75 Many fascists saw the Vittoriano as a vulgar monument to a corrupted regime, and condemned it as the ‘apotheosis of the rhetoric of Third Italy.’76 It represented in every way the values of liberal Italy with its columns, statues, and classical allusions. There were many who called for its demolition or removal. The futurist painter Ardengo Soffici called for the demolition of the ‘ridiculous and obscene’ Vittoriano in 1931.77 Others criticized the Master Plan’s exaltation of the Piazza Venezia precisely because of the presence of the Vittoriano. Even monarchists such as Leo Longanesi snubbed the monument to Italy’s first king. Longanesi rejected Marcello Piacentini’s claim that the square was the meeting place of all of Rome’s historical associations. For Longanesi, Piazza Venezia was a prime site of artistic decadence symbolized by the Vittoriano: ‘No love is ever born in Piazza Venezia; it is the place where one loses all contact with Rome … Piacentini’s plan will place Sacconi’s barracks in a squalid solitude.’78 Sacconi was the architect of the monument. Longanesi argued that clearing out Piazza Venezia would only serve to accentuate the ‘horrible’ Vittoriano.

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For the regime, the only saving grace of the Vittoriano was the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which lay in the open underneath the statue of Dea Roma and the equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II. The problem with the Unknown Soldier for the regime was that it identified the sacrifice of the war too closely with the image of liberal Italy, as it was intended to unite Italians around the liberal regime.79 When the Unknown Soldier was moved to Rome from Aquileia in 1921, the uncovered train car was greeted with solemn tribute by thousands of Italians lining the route. The minister of war in 1921, Luigi Gasparotto, proclaimed that, for the first time in its history, Italy was united ‘morally.’80 The fascist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia noted the ‘choked emotions’ of Italians when the body passed through Florence.81 Although the fascists tried to be enthusiastic about this symbol of the Great War, it was difficult to separate the Unknown Soldier from the hated liberal regime which organized the ceremony. Later, Mussolini claimed that the timing of the March on Rome for late October was established purposely to ensure that the next November 4th celebrations would take place under a fascist government.82 Taking the Unknown Soldier away from the liberal regime was central to the fascist cause. Even after the March on Rome, Mussolini remained uncomfortable about the imposing symbolism of the tomb. At the Fascist Party Congress of 1925, held in the Augusteo theatre, Mussolini urged his followers to forego the obligatory visit to the Unknown Soldier, a comment which drew murmurs from the crowd. Mussolini explained: ‘We should not give the impression that the Unknown Soldier has become an obligatory stop on the Roman itinerary. Nowadays, everyone goes there, even those responsible for sacrificing other unknown soldiers to the defeatism of the prewar, war, and postwar era.’83 Rendering homage to the Unknown Soldier meant, inevitably, paying tribute to the legacy of the liberal regime, as it sat atop the so-called Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland) underneath the equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II. The lingering echo of liberal Italy was made manifest by the tomb’s presence on the Vittoriano. Mussolini, like many other fascists, harboured a dislike of the Vittoriano in Piazza Venezia. For him, it was the colour of the marble that disturbed him most, as it was whiter than the surrounding marble.84 On the same day that the commission of the Master Plan was installed in 1930, Mussolini expressed to Marcello Piacentini a desire to repaint the monument.85 The delicate relationship between the tomb and the Vittoriano was raised in 1924 when a group of war mothers and widows requested that

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the body of the Unknown Soldier be moved inside the monument. Fearing that rain and time would damage the tomb, Mussolini considered the possibility of placing the body in a crypt located beneath the statue of Victor Emmanuel II.86 A combination of circumstances arose in March 1924 which brought the issue to the forefront. National elections were around the corner, and Mussolini was anxious not to appear insensitive to the requests of war widows. Also, the real statue of Dea Roma was finally erected behind the tomb, replacing the replica which had stood there since 1911. This work required the temporary removal of the body into the crypt. With the body already there, it was now possible to make this the final resting place of the Unknown Soldier, as noted by Primo Acciaresi in an interview given to Il Messaggero that spring. Acciaresi had worked with the Vittoriano’s architect, Giuseppe Sacconi, and was considered the custodian of the late architect’s wishes in all matters pertaining to the monument.87 Acciaresi argued that an interior crypt was better suited to the Unknown Soldier, not only because it was large enough to house the body and build a chapel around it, but also because an interior crypt was far more worthy of great men. No doubt, Acciaresi had in mind the example of the Italian kings who were buried in the Pantheon. In April Mussolini sent a clipping of the interview to the minister of public works, Carnazza, along with a note urging the minister to take the matter under serious consideration.88 In the end, Acciaresi’s argument was rejected by the government, nominally on technical grounds, although there were deeper reasons as well. Carnazza continued the vision of his predecessor in 1921 by arguing that leaving the body outdoors allowed ‘for direct contact between the glorious tomb and the public that venerates it.’89 In 1921, when the body was placed on the monument, the committee administering the monument had justified its decision for an outdoor tomb by stating that this ‘obscure soldier, anonymous personification of popular virtue, has to be in full view, illuminated by the sun of Rome, in perennial contact with the people.’90 Critics of the proposal noted the spectacular effect of thousands of people gathering in Piazza Venezia every November to render homage to the tomb, and argued that this would be lost if the body were moved indoors. Finally, the sight of people lining up to enter the crypt, wrote one critic, ‘would be embarrassing.’91 The spectacle of thousands kneeling before the Unknown Soldier foreshadowed the mass rallies of the future. Piazza Venezia now had a purpose, to provide the setting for mass worship of the tomb on the Vit-

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toriano. The surrounding buildings, noted one article, ‘grew new frames made up of spectators who had clambered onto every available spot, human crowds never imagined by the original builders. Every window had become a grandstand.’92 Exposed to the Roman sun, the tomb could now become the focus for the militarism fascism wished to introduce to the Roman cityscape, something that Acciaresi had feared in a letter written to one paper. The tomb, wrote Acciaresi, would only serve ‘cinematography, shouts, and flag-waving’ rather than the reverential silence that the Unknown Soldier deserved.93 Acciaresi clearly did not understand the fascist view of the Unknown Soldier. Reverential silence was the last thing the tomb needed in the eyes of the regime, and placing it inside the Vittoriano was out of the question. Part of the appeal of keeping the tomb exposed was that it would remain somewhat apart from the monument, whereas placing it inside would allow the monument to engulf it. Placing the tomb inside the crypt would mean losing the symbol of the Great War inside the ‘permanent scandal’ that was the Vittoriano.94 Silent reflection inside the neo-classical structure of the monument meant losing the tomb to the rhetoric of the nineteenth century. Rather, the tomb was to be exposed to the swirling traffic and noise of the city, and become part of a landscape that was more reminiscent of the war and suited the fascist landscape.95 After the demolitions of the Master Plan, the tomb was part of a landscape of broken rocks, ruins, and tree-lined roads which reminded fascists of the battle-scarred Veneto. Added to the landscape were some of the sounds of war. In 1923, during the first anniversary of the March on Rome, the regime had a squadron of four hundred warplanes fly over the tomb just as Mussolini was rendering homage to it.96 By keeping the tomb separate from the rhetorical architecture of the Vittoriano, the regime expressed a desire to immerse the Unknown Soldier into the implicit and explicit war associations presented by the Piazza Venezia. The Palazzo Venezia, into which Mussolini transferred his offices, had once been the home of the Austrian embassy before it was seized by the Italian government as a war trophy in 1916.97 Militarism oozed from the fortress-like palace’s architecture. The insurance building opposite the palace imitated its militarist architecture. On this building sat a giant image of St Mark’s lion, the symbol of Venice and the Veneto. Adding to this Venetian association was the Corso Umberto I, the major artery linking the Piazza Venezia and the Piazza del Popolo, which was an extension of the ancient Via Flaminia, the consular road linking Rome with Aquileia. On the Vittoriano, near the Unknown Sol-

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dier, sat several altars bearing the names of Italy’s ‘redeemed’ cities, and a plaque inscribed with the text of Armando Diaz’s ‘victory bulletin’ of 4 November 1918. Piazza Venezia resembled in many ways the landscape of that war. The confluence of the Via del Mare, the Via dell’Impero, and later the Via dei Trionfi, into Piazza Venezia and its surrounding area provided a landscape for the regime’s militarism. The Via dell’Impero especially became the regime’s preferred artery for military parades. The road, linking the Piazza Venezia and the Coliseum, crossed through a field of ruins which resembled the ruined landscape of the Veneto during the war. The ruins were not simply a backdrop for the marching legions, but a metaphor for the war experience. Adding to this effect was the newly exposed Tarpeian Rock on the Capitoline Hill, from which enemies of ancient Rome were usually thrown and which had become concealed over time by vegetation. Demolitions carried out to build the avenues had exposed the sheer rock face of the hill in a way that evoked the Carso. Antonio Muñoz, the man in charge of the archeological work around the hill, described it thus: ‘The Tarpeian rock [was rendered] otherworldly and picturesque by the dark caves carved out at its feet, and by the wild vegetation which had overgrown it.’98 The same caves which reminded Silvio Negri of prehistoric Rome were also a recreation of the Veneto battle zone of the First World War. Once again, primitivism and war were associated. Exedras built on either side of the Vittoriano added to the Veneto-like appearance of the area around Piazza Venezia. Marcello Piacentini had originally planned to build two monumental colonnades complimenting the Vittoriano, but this was greeted by a chorus of protests from critics who felt that the Piazza needed less, not more, neo-classicism.99 It was Corrado Ricci’s idea to place an exedra of cypresses next to the Vittoriano matching those that lined the Via del Mare. While the effect of the pine trees intermixed with ancient ruins excited classicists and archeologists, they also recalled the landscape of the war and the tree-lined routes of the Veneto, which had provided soldiers with relief from the rugged, scarred landscape of the Carso. After 1929, Piazza Venezia was transformed into the fascist square par excellence. It was pregnant with military symbols and suited the fascist desire for a massive, wide-open space unencumbered by any fountains or monuments in its centre. Even more appropriate to the fascist vision, Piazza Venezia had always been a traffic hub. Before the advent of the automobile, the square served as a terminus for the carriages of the

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Roman aristocracy promenading the Corso Umberto. The northern terminus, the Piazza del Popolo, had an obelisk and fountain at its centre, but the Piazza Venezia had nothing, and was therefore never rated as one of Rome’s picturesque squares. The Palazzo Venezia seemed more foreboding than appealing. With the opening of the Vittoriano in 1911, however, the square finally acquired some importance in the Roman landscape, but even then the square did not lose its character as a place of transience, especially when tramlines were laid out through the piazza. These tramlines were eventually torn up by the fascist regime when it built its roads in order to facilitate the passage of automobiles through the square. In the 1930s, the intensity of traffic had become such that Mussolini, half-jokingly, suggested the need for a study of the noise caused by traffic at a session of the National Research Council.100 The journal L’Urbe, normally an enthusiastic supporter of fascist urban planning, felt compelled to warn against taking the expansive square idea too far in the Piazza Venezia, noting that historic buildings such as the Palazzo Bonaparte were going to fall under the pickaxe. While it was important for Piazza Venezia to become an ‘uninterrupted traffic artery,’ certain buildings had to be preserved for artistic and historic reasons.101 Neither of these warnings were taken to heart by the master planners, however. The Master Plan of 1931 ensured that Piazza Venezia would not only be the symbolic heart of fascist Rome, but that it would remain a site of frenetic traffic. Fascist urban planning guaranteed that around the tomb of the Unknown Soldier would swirl incessant, motorized traffic instead of reverential silence. Those who framed the plan seemed aware and even enthusiastic about introducing traffic into the heart of the ancient city. One of the commission members, Gustavo Giovannoni, was genuinely excited about the role automobile traffic could play in fascist Rome, urging all Italians to buy automobiles so that this increased traffic could become a ‘lifeblood’ flowing through the old city.102 Piazza Venezia played a crucial role in breathing this new life into the city: ‘The great roads, which originate in the Piazza Venezia, at the foot of the Vittoriano and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, expand towards the sea and the mountains … uniting the ancient and the modern.’103 Giovannoni’s description of the role of the new roads and the traffic on them was reminiscent of war accounts which stressed the juxtaposition of the modern and the ancient and the search for the infinite. Piazza Venezia functioned literally as a heart, both receiving and pumping the lifeblood represented by traffic. Not only motorized traffic would find a home in the Piazza Venezia, but human traffic as well. The purpose

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the new roads was to link the outlying suburbs of the city with the centre, so that on special occasions, when the klaxon sounded, thousands of Roman fascists would swarm into the square to hear Mussolini speak from his balcony in the Palazzo Venezia. Beginning in 1929, the fascist regime choreographed spectacular party rallies in the vast space of the Piazza Venezia. Although much attention has been paid to the discursive content of Mussolini’s speeches, little has been written on the form of the rallies.104 The party rallies exemplified organized and focused movement from the newly populated borgate to the empty centre. Moving thousands of fascists from the suburbs to Piazza Venezia featured prominently in the Decennale celebrations in 1932 to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the March on Rome, which featured the inauguration of the Via dell’Impero. A month before the Decennale, on 23 September 1932, a major rally celebrating the entrance of the Bersaglieri into Rome in 1870 was held, placing on display the roads built by the regime. The focus of the celebration was the opening of a museum and the unveiling of a monument to the Bersaglieri at the Porta Pia, the Michelangelo-designed gate through which the Piedmontese army stormed in September 1870. Once the monument was unveiled, the Bersaglieri marched down the Via Nazionale to the Quirinal Palace, where they received a salute from the king. Until that moment, the rally was a celebration of the Risorgimento and the liberal monarchy. From the Quirinal, the rally then moved to Piazza Venezia, and it was here that people were met by a militarist spectacle, capped with a speech by Mussolini from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. In Piazza Venezia the Bersaglieri were met by thousands of Romans, who spilled into the square ‘like a river.’105 The LUCE newsreel depicting the event focused on the crowds rushing into the square following the Bersaglieri.106 Piazza Venezia was the culminating point of the rally, while the sites of the liberal monarchy, such as Porta Pia, Quirinal, and Via Nazionale, formed only stages, hurriedly bypassed by the crowd in order to reach apotheosis in the fascist square. Only the new monument to the Bersaglieri in the Port Pia received significant attention. Otherwise, the early part of the rally was virtually ignored in favour of the spectacle in Piazza Venezia. The rally for the Bersaglieri provided a model for future rallies in Piazza Venezia, showcasing roads, crowds, and militarism. Events such as the proclamation of war on Ethiopia in October 1935 provided occasions for the so-called adunate oceaniche (oceanic rallies), where these themes manifested themselves. ‘From the moment that the first sirens

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rang,’ wrote the fascist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia about the October 1935 meeting, ‘on every street of the centre and the suburbs … there occurred an extraordinary movement of citizens, of vehicles of every type … which transformed the face of Rome.’107 Il Popolo’s report was typical of the accounts of mass rallies. The content of the rallies was less important than the form of those rallies. The streaming crowds were praised for their orderly procession through the streets of the city, while loudspeakers played the fascist anthem Giovinezza, all accompanied by a squadron of planes flying low over the city. Sirens, trumpets, cheering, and drums filled the streets of Rome as the roads built by the regime carried the crowds towards Piazza Venezia. Memories of the March on Rome and of the war experience resounded in these spectacles. Il Popolo wrote of old arditi songs filling the air. Asvero Gravelli, editor of Ottobre, a journal which celebrated the memory of squadrismo, described the plebiscitary elections of March 1934 as if they were comparable to the March on Rome: ‘A special car equipped with a megaphone rallied fascist who lived in outlying districts of the city to vote in sections far away from their residences.’108 Just as the March on Rome had brought fascists to Rome, so the party rallies brought fascists, in their trucks, to Piazza Venezia. The squares of Rome, many of which had been distorted out of all recognition by fascist urban planning, served as nothing more than rendezvous points for fascists moving towards Piazza Venezia. Romans streamed through these squares as if they were an invading army pillaging a city. The controlled chaos of these rallies evoked fond memories for some. One old-guard fascist recalled fondly the rally held to announce the founding of the Italian Empire in May 1936: It was a moment of exaltation from which I could not remove myself. I recall the squares with the megaphones, the streets full of flags. Mussolini’s speech was constantly interrupted by a hurricane of applause. When it was finished I witnessed a spectacle never since repeated: Via IV Novembre, Via del Plebiscito, Via del Corso, Corso Vittorio Emanuele, Largo Argentina were flooded by a sea of people drunken with enthusiasm.109

Elemental forces of fire and water awaited the crowds in Piazza Venezia, who were like ‘rivers’ emptying into the ‘sea of fire which cannot be put out, a single flame which extends upwards into the sky.’110 Into this sea of self-immolation came the fascists, into crowds that were frequently described in the press as infinite and uncountable. ‘How many

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are there?’ asked La Stampa in its report of the rally of 10 June 1940, when Mussolini, clad in black cap and uniform, announced Italy’s entry into the Second World War: ‘We cannot even try to determine a number. In the square there is no empty corner, and the crowd is crammed in the mouth of the Via Battisti, the Via dell’Impero, and the Via del Mare.’111 The comparison of the crowds to the ‘sea’ was typical of fascist rhetoric. The roads of Rome promised the opportunity to lose oneself in the infinity of the adunate oceaniche underneath the Duce’s balcony. Empire and the sea suggested infinite expansion. In this way, the Via del Mare linked two seas, the crowd in Piazza Venezia and the sea at Ostia. Thus, fascist urban planning had created a city where the infinite, that great desire of those who fought the Great War, was built into the heart of the ancient city. Critics of the Master Plan generally misunderstood the purpose of fascism’s remaking of the Roman landscape. Those who hoped that the Master Plan of 1931 would create a city in which traffic could move swiftly, and unobtrusively, through the historic centre, were left disappointed by the volume of congestion witnessed in Rome in the late 1930s. Of the plan’s critics, only Leo Longanesi, writing in the pages of Il Selvaggio (which had supported demolitions in the 1920s but became critical of them in the subsequent decade because of the presence of ‘rationalists’ on the planning commission), understood the true impulse behind the Master Plan. As part of a general attack on non-Italian architecture and urban planning, Longanesi accused Piacentini of transforming Rome into a military city. Architecture in Italy, according to Longanesi, ‘has never been militaristic. Squares and streets have never been intended to be piazze d’armi (parade grounds). The military parade does not figure in our history as our culture has never been militaristic. For Piacentini, history does not seem to matter.’112 Not only was Piacentini ignorant of Italian tradition, railed Longanesi, but his insistence on using the term grandiose in the Master Plan committee’s report betrayed his Germanness: ‘For the Germans, grandiose is colossal; it’s the same spirit!’113 Italians such as Bernini would have spoken only of harmony, not grandiosity. The title of Longanesi’s polemic, ‘The Sack of Rome,’ purposely recalled the barbarian invasion of the Roman Empire, as well as the Austrian sack of Rome in 1527. Unwittingly, Longanesi grasped the true significance of fascism’s approach to the Eternal City. Taking its cue from the war and the March on Rome, fascism under the guise of urban planning, reshaped the Roman landscape into one of war and plunder. The Master Plan’s roads

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were conceived as vectors slicing into and disfiguring the landscape. The centre of Rome, rather than a place for living, became a vast, empty amphitheatre, home to the transience of traffic and frenetic party rallies. In the midst of this transience lay the Unknown Soldier, whom the liberal regime had brought to Rome in order to heal the wounds of the war. Under fascism, the Unknown Soldier became the foundation stone for the recreation of the war experience found in the party rallies. No longer a symbol of reconciliation, the Milite Ignoto became a means of making present the experience of the war in the new Rome.114 This project was furthered by the clamour and confusion created by traffic and rallies. Far from being a silent place of contemplation, which the liberal regime had hoped for, Piazza Venezia became an empty space filled with the ‘aesthetics of disturbance.’115 Whereas liberal Italy sought to contribute to the monumentalized landscape of Rome, fascist Italy sought to disrupt it. The emptiness of Piazza Venezia was not only necessary for party rallies and traffic; it also suggested fascism’s modernist approach to the city in opposition to the nineteenth century’s neo-classicism. Whereas the liberal monarchy preferred the monumental by placing the Vittoriano in the Piazza Venezia, the fascist regime introduced an aesthetics of emptiness and transience in opposition to the previous century’s solidity. The meaning of Piazza Venezia came to be associated in the fleeting movement provided by the roads and the empty space. The most solid symbol was itself a symbol of emptiness: the Unknown Soldier. Fascism sought empty space in the historic centre, where meaning was created and improvised according to the changing priorities of the regime. Rather than constructing, the regime deconstructed, the ancient centre around Piazza Venezia, using roads as its instruments. While cultural historians have focused on the rhetoric of the regime in making meaning, the architectonic spaces were also effective. The centre of Rome needed to be empty, devoid of uncomfortable historic associations. Roads such as the Via dell’Impero and Via del Mare were the key features in the new Rome. This was the point made by Corrado Alvaro when he saw fascist Rome in 1933. Rome was ‘once a long Sunday in the provinces of Italy,’ exclaimed Alvaro, now ‘this city has become a capital.’116 What struck Alvaro the most were the roads, specifically the black tarmac that was used by the regime, which differed greatly from the old bluish paving of Roman streets. The effect of this, he pointed out, was to accentuate in sharp relief the ancient monuments: ‘They [the roads and the ruins] are two different worlds; yesterday’s world seems

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more remote on the shiny black surface … The familiar city has been detached and estranged.’117 It was the new roads, therefore, that acted as agents of transformation; they were the main protagonists of the fascist cityscape and their purpose was not only to move traffic and provide surprising views of the city, but also to transform Italians. Consider the following passage on the Via dell’Impero from the pages of Capitolium. Two years after the road was opened, the journal of the Roman municipal government praised it for being more than just a conduit for traffic: ‘It traces a wider path for our thoughts, it comforts our spirit, brightens our vistas; opens – amidst visions of real beauty and ideals – our mind and soul to less material and egoistic concepts of life; it comforts and exalts us; it refreshes and prods us towards new goals and greater destinies.’118 The Via dell’Impero was not simply ‘a point of arrival for sterile contemplation of a great past, but a gathering place and start-off point towards new horizons.’119 The caption of a photograph in the same article shows the classic photograph of the Via dell’Impero through an arch of the Coliseum: ‘In its short distance lies a route to the infinite.’120 Although the road was constructed by the regime, archaeological evidence suggested that a prehistoric road once went through the same area. Thus, the Via dell’Impero was itself revealed from the detritus of previous centuries: ‘In it, and through it, we see again, along with the rest of Rome, its most remote origins.’121 Even foreigners began to picture the Via dell’Impero in mythical ways. French writer and member of the Académie Française Jacques de Lacretelle exclaimed that the fascist New Man was forged out of the ‘moral victory’ that was the Via dell’Impero: ‘A great space has been opened between the Coliseum and the Palazzo Venezia.’122 This kind of veneration of roads was central to the image of fascist Rome, and it can be traced back to the origins of the movement. The road was a moral and mythological symbol before it was functional. Yet, these roads were also required to shuttle increasing traffic through the centre of the city. Myth and technology, the moral and the functional, could not be separated in fascist Rome. The roads created new spaces and new ways of seeing the city, and thus anything constructed on or near the roads needed to respect their purpose. This included the construction of the fascist party headquarters, the Palazzo Littorio. In 1934 the regime announced a competition to build this palace on the Via dell’Impero, which raised unexpected controversy.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Palazzo and the Boulevard

In December of 1933, as large swaths of Rome fell to the pickaxe in the demolitions for the Master Plan, the fascist regime announced a competition for the Palazzo Littorio, or fascist party headquarters. Still basking in the glow of the Decennale (tenth-year anniversary of the March on Rome) and enjoying some degree of consensus at home, the party believed that now was the time to construct a monument to itself in the heart of the Eternal City. This desire was increased by the great success of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on the Via Nazionale.1 Owing to the massive crowds which continued to flow through the exhibition, the regime was confident that a permanent exhibition was needed as well as an adequate office to house the ever-expanding bureaucracy of the Fascist Party (PNF). The decision to build the Palazzo Littorio also celebrated that other work of the regime inaugurated during the Decennale: the Via dell’Impero. The competition announced that the Palazzo was to be constructed on the Via dell’Impero next to the Coliseum, and across from the hulking ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius. The decision was, for supporters of the regime long overdue, as Mussolini had yet to build an imposing monument to fascism inside the historic centre despite the massive interventions on the Roman landscape since the late 1920s. To date, the only significant building project undertaken by the regime had been the construction of the Foro Mussolini, but this was outside the Aurelian Walls at the foot of Monte Mario, north of the city. With respect to the ancient centre, the fascist regime had demolished aplenty but constructed mostly roads and a few modest buildings. The Palazzo Littorio, therefore, was to be the first fascist monument built inside the old city. In this period, the PNF’s local headquarters, known as Case del Fas-

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cio, were sprouting up all over Italy, and in many a small town the massive party structure rivalled the local church for prominence. Some were even considered architectural masterpieces, for example, Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in his hometown of Como, north of Milan. Ironically, only Rome was lacking a purpose-built headquarters. The choice of location was obvious, since it placed fascism in the context of the splendours of ancient Rome, a legacy that the regime was eager to exploit for its policy of romanità.2 The question of what style was appropriate for a building in the midst of antiquity inflamed public debate in 1934. Such was the intensity of the debate that the competition committee could find no outright winner. As a result, fourteen of the over seventy finalists were sent to a second competition that was not held until July 1937. By then the regime had changed the location of the building, deciding not to build next to the Coliseum but out near St Paul’s Gate, near the Via del Mare. By the time construction on the palazzo began, the location had changed a third time, to the Foro Mussolini.3 The change of location has elicited no comment from the scholarship on the Palazzo Littorio competition. Rather, the emphasis has generally centred on the architectural debate surrounding the project.4 This debate was fought between classicists and modernists, or Rationalists, which included internationally renowned architects such as Giuseppe Terragni and Giuseppe Pagano. Of the many scholars who have studied this debate, only Emilio Gentile has considered the wider symbolic implications of the project, noting that the palazzo was very much a part of the regime’s ideological self-definition as a political religion.5 For Gentile, the shrine to the fallen fascists was emblematic of the structure’s religious function and hence representative of fascist ideology, which aimed at sacralizing politics. Gentile, however, fails to consider the palazzo and its relationship to the surrounding landscape, which was at the heart of the controversy. This chapter will focus on the place that the Palazzo Littorio had in the overall fascist plan to remake the Eternal City. In doing so, it will emphasize a key feature of the controversy which the scholarship has generally ignored, although it was present in the debates of 1934: how should the palazzo fit into the surrounding area? Specifically, how was an architect to design a structure that could sit next to monuments of antiquity such as the Coliseum and the Basilica of Maxentius? Even more importantly, where did the palazzo fit with respect to the landscape created by the demolitions of the Master Plan, and with the Via dell’Impero? As we shall see, the trajectory of the road seriously complicated thinking on

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the palazzo from both a technical and an aesthetic perspective. The palazzo’s uneasy place on this boulevard provided what one architect called a ‘fascinating problem’ for aspiring architects, not only because of the ancient monuments surrounding it, but also because of the properties and functions of the road itself. This chapter will look at the Palazzo Littorio competition as a moment in the regime’s encounter with the Eternal City and with its own aspirations in remaking Rome in its own image. What the following analysis will show is that the controversy over the palazzo, and the subsequent moving of the project to the Foro Mussolini, revealed that the palazzo had no place on the Via dell’Impero and did not belong in fascism’s imagining of the Roman cityscape. The Palazzo Littorio competition forced the fascist regime to confront its true vision of the new Rome which ultimately forced it to abandon the original site. The Competition Placing the palazzo in the midst of ancient Rome’s ruins made sense for a variety of reasons. The current Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution was very popular, but it was located in the wrong part of the city for the fascist regime. The gallery was on the Via Nazionale, the broad avenue built by the liberal monarchy after the taking of the city in 1870. The Via Nazionale was the anti–Via dell’Impero. Although it too was straight and relatively wide (yet nowhere near the Via dell’Impero in this regard), the Via Nazionale embodied the hated nineteenth century. The street was lined with fancy shops, with residences and hotels above them. It was a street for the haute bourgeoisie and the flâneur, a place close to the Quirinal Palace, where the pomp and ceremony of the king’s court could be admired on a daily basis. Worse still, the Via Nazionale was filled with hotels catering to the forestieri (tourists) who descended on Rome every year. It was in one of those hotels that the symbol of nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism, Giuseppe Verdi, died in 1900. In other words, the Via Nazionale represented everything that the iconoclastic squadristi had despised about liberal Italy. Memories of ancient Rome were rare. What’s worse, the Via Nazionale was bookended by two monuments that characterized liberal Rome: the fountain in Piazza Esedra and the Vittoriano, which was visible as the traveller moved down the road. Furthermore, it was the link between the centre of Rome and the Termini Station, which was particularly hated by many fascists. The Via Nazionale formed the heart of liberal Italy’s Rome, an area

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that was mostly farmland when the Bersaglieri breached the Porta Pia in 1870; it was a place where the new Italian state could build without much demolition. It could also build the archetypal liberal, nineteenth-century city in the manner of Haussmann’s Paris and Vienna, cities characterized by their broad, straight avenues lined by an unbroken façade of sturdy, stone neo-classical buildings. The Palazzo delle Esposizioni was one such building which included massive columns and elaborate decorations. On the occasion of the Exhibition, the regime went to great lengths to hide this façade with a modernist style using three massive lictors. The result was a building that was completely incongruous with its surroundings. The lictors stood twenty-five metres high, with axes that were six feet tall. The façade was an important part of the Exhibition itself and was designed by two leading modernist architects, Mario De Renzi and Adalberto Libera. There was little doubt that the façade was designed to challenge and insult the surroundings, and also to inspire the creation of a fascist-style architecture. Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s biographer and mistress, encouraged architects to learn the lessons of the Exhibition when submitting projects for the Palazzo Littorio. She prayed that the competition would not result in a ‘sea of false altars made of parchment, or of a new false temple like the Sacconi’s monument, the Vittoriano.’6 The regime, specifically the PNF, wanted its monument to be in the ancient centre, where much of fascist propaganda was focused and the revelation of which had been the crown jewel of fascism’s Master Plan. Also, the PNF desired to leave its own, uncomfortable headquarters, which had become too small and was also located in a part of the city not exalted by fascist propaganda. The PNF offices were housed in an eighteenth-century palace on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele in the Renaissance quarter of the city, just a few blocks from Mussolini’s office in the sixteenth-century Palazzo Venezia. Although physically close, it was symbolically very distant from the piazza that had already become the gathering place for fascist rallies. A central edifice dedicated to the regime was, therefore, noticeably lacking in the symbolic city of the new empire. The Palazzo Littorio was to house the permanent exhibition, Mussolini’s office (complete with balcony for speeches), the PNF offices, and a shrine to fallen fascists. In the spirit of the Master Plan of 1931, the palazzo would be both functional and symbolic. It was to be a place of both daily routine and spectacular rallies, a place for spiritual meditation and frenetic pace. The first task was to find an appropriate spot on the Via dell’Impero

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that would allow for the palazzo to be a fitting monument while at the same time respecting the archaeological integrity of the zone. For this reason, not everyone greeted the announcement with enthusiasm, least of all archaeologists and classicists such as Corrado Ricci who hoped that the area would remain untouched once it was excavated. The Via dell’Impero had already caused some consternation because it tampered with the archaeological importance of the zone. The competition for the palazzo was a significant stage in fascism’s identification with the Eternal City. The importance of the project was illustrated by the composition of the competition committee, presided over by the secretary of the PNF, Achille Starace. It included the Roman governor, Boncompagni-Ludovisi, Corrado Ricci, and two of Italy’s most prominent architects, Marcello Piacentini and Armando Brasini. The 76-year-old Ricci, an expert on the site of the palazzo, had been the most ardent promoter of the excavations of the Imperial Fora.7 By 1934, Piacentini was the leading architect in Italy, an important member of the committee of the Master Plan and several other commissions, while Brasini had also participated in the 1931 plan.8 These links to the Master Plan of 1931 suggested that the palazzo was not simply an isolated monument to fascism, but was to be integrated into the work of the Master Plan and hence into the general vision of Rome held by the fascist regime. It was to be a central part of the fascist landscape. Hence, its precise location was crucial to the success of the palazzo within the broader framework of the plan. With this in mind, article 1 of the competition rules fixed the site in a triangular lot on the Via dell’Impero next to the Coliseum, directly across from the imposing ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius. In order not to be restricted by this lot, the competition called for a part of the palazzo to extend over the Via Cavour where it intersected with the Via dell’Impero. This overpass created a portal giving a ‘limited’ view of the Imperial Fora while at the same time not ‘compromising’ the flow of traffic in the area.9 Rationalists versus Traditionalists Once the location was determined and the conditions for the competition released, the question of style emerged as the predominant issue. The rules of the competition refused to specify the style of architecture or the materials used, decreeing only that the colour of the palazzo harmonize with its surroundings. The rest was left to the imagination of the architects. This lack of direction on style, consistent with the regime’s

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policy of ‘aesthetic pluralism’ in the early 1930s, gave rise to a heated debate in the press and specialized journals over what style suited this important project.10 Those who advocated the modernist style, known as Rationalism in Italy, immediately saw this competition as an opportunity to demonstrate their style, viewing it as a chance to apply a modernist style to a building that would be central in the fascist landscape. They took as their cue words from Mussolini himself, who had declared that the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution had to be housed in a ‘modern, monumental construction.’11 Pietro Maria Bardi, a leading art critic, journalist, co-editor of the journal Quadrante, and sympathetic to the Rationalists, enthused in a lead editorial: ‘We are faced with a great moment in the history of Mussolini: He needs to have a building worthy of himself and the Revolution.’12 Mussolini was seen as a supporter of Rationalism. Istrian architect Giuseppe Pagano hailed Mussolini as the ‘saviour’ of modern architecture after Mussolini had received the architects of Sabaudia, one of the new towns built on the reclaimed Pontine Marshes, at Palazzo Venezia.13 Furthermore, the predominantly rationalist style of the new cities and of the winning project for the new train station in Florence gave modernists reason to be hopeful that the new palazzo would belong to them. Another sympathizer of the Rationalists, Carlo Belli, also in the pages of Quadrante, reminded readers of the above-mentioned examples of modernist architecture and proclaimed ‘rationalist architecture as the only style which can express the streamlined, profound, agile and powerful spirit of fascism.’14 For Bardi, the Palazzo Littorio competition heralded the ‘birth of fascist architecture.’15 Rationalism, exclaimed Bardi, reflected the hidden desires of important sections of the fascist party, whom he called ‘the tendency within the tendency.’16 Whatever ebullience the Rationalists experienced was tempered by the restrictions imposed on the dimensions of the palazzo. Owing to the historical associations of the zone, the committee saw fit to decree that the palazzo had to be at least twenty-five metres from the Via dell’Impero in order not to impede the view of the Coliseum from Piazza Venezia. Furthermore, the palazzo could be no taller than the Coliseum or the Basilica of Maxentius across the road. Although the competition called upon architects to take into account the ‘greatness and power that fascism has impressed on the national life of Italy,’ these restrictions created problems for some aspiring architects.17 This was especially problematic for the Rationalists, as they were accustomed to projects which stood on their own merits regardless of surrounding structures. A hallmark of the Internationalist style, with which the Rationalists were associated, was a

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lack of concern for adapting to place. In the project promoted by Quadrante submitted by the architects Banfi and Belgiojoso, the architects pointed out that the ‘essential problem of the competition was building a monumental palazzo on the Via dell’Impero, between the Basilica of Massenzio and the Coliseum … making this the most challenging competition in world architecture since the war.’18 For some modernists such as Giuseppe Pagano, the challenges were too difficult and, although enthusiastic about the project in the beginning, he declined to submit a proposal. For the palazzo to be truly representative of the fascist era, argued Pagano, it had to dominate its surroundings, but the rules of the competition made this impossible. In the end, he contended, the Coliseum remained the dominant structure in the neighbourhood, and this prevented the palazzo from having any significant impact.19 Despite these obstacles, and Pagano’s refusal to participate, many Rationalists did submit designs, and when the seventy finalists were announced in May 1934, the ire of traditionalists was raised owing to the predominantly modernist tone of many of the submissions. A celebrated debate in the Chamber of Deputies ensued on the night of the 26th before a ‘crowded gallery.’20 The debate pitted the notorious squadrista Roberto Farinacci in defence of classicism against the architect Alberto Calza-Bini, one of the few supporters of the Rationalists in the chamber. The debate prompted Giuseppe Pagano to remark on the irony of so-called ‘revolutionary’ fascists like Farinacci opposing revolutionary architecture. For Pagano, Farinacci was an example of those who ‘live incompletely’ between the ‘inert masses’ and the intellectual elites.21 A common argument made by proponents of the modernist style was that the competition should reflect fascism’s cult of youth. Bardi remembered that Giuseppe Bottai had viewed the competition as an opportunity for ‘polemical youth’ who were a part of the Rationalist wars.22 The desire for youth echoed in the pages of Roma Fascista, which promoted the project submitted by the Gruppo Universitari Fascisti (GUF) because it represented the future fascists in the university.23 Despite this exaltation of youth, the Rationalists were not entirely satisfied with the results of the competition. Pagano’s idea that some lived incompletely proved prophetic. The omnipresence of decaying ruins made it difficult for ‘youthful’ participation, since the site placed limits on what could be done. The palazzo had to negotiate this tension between the traditional and the modern found in the archaeological zone. Pietro Bardi bitterly commented in Quadrante that the results of the competition only proved that the ‘architecture of Giolitti,’ the former prime minister who embodied, for the fascists, the corruption

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of the old liberal regime, was still alive and well in Italy: ‘The public was given a reheated architecture of Giolitti at the same time that Mussolini was telling the architects of Sabaudia and the train station at Florence that he no longer wanted to see that.’24 Only Calza-Bini found the results of the competition satisfying, while the other proponents of Rationalism shared Bardi’s disillusionment. For some, youth was distinctly lacking in the final results. Pagano noted that the reason for this was the presence on the commission of old men with old ideas, Piacentini being the exception. In an act of brazen audacity, Pagano argued that the commission served the purposes of patronage rather than art. The Rationalists found it difficult, if not impossible, to harmonize their designs with the surroundings and the competition rules did not help matters. While the guidelines called for a palazzo which had to ‘correspond to the greatness and power which fascism has impressed on the renewal of national life,’ they also insisted that the proportions had to be limited so as not to block the view of the Coliseum from Piazza Venezia.25 In other words, the palazzo had to be both imposing and invisible. The dilemma of creating a building that rested on its own merits while at the same time respecting its environment proved impossible to solve for many aspiring entrants to the competition. For some, such as the engineer Massimo del Fante, there was no doubt that the location should be made to conform to the palazzo. In a letter to the PNF, Del Fante encouraged the commission to knock down a hill or two if required.26 The importance of the monument superseded the demands of the location and Del Fante suggested that the lot be made rectangular rather than its current triangular shape. That the location was too ‘preponderant’ was noted by many.27 Urbanist Francesco Fariello, in his encouragement of architecture for youth, noted that the palazzo had to be a focal point for the ‘anarchy’ of the site, and urged young architects not to be intimidated by the surroundings.28 It was the palazzo that would bring order to the zone, just as fascism brought order to Italy. Gastone Pesce, an architect based in Milan, suggested a change of location since the site discouraged the erection of a modernist structure.29 A letter published by the Popolo d’Italia, the official PNF newspaper, stated the obvious when it argued that a monument must speak for itself and that the restrictions placed on the project by its locations were obstacles to full realization.30 Those who believed that fascism was a revolt of youth argued that the palazzo, like fascist ideology, had to break from the restrictions of the past. Despite this, some modernist architects such as Giuseppe Terragni attempted to harmonize Rationalist architecture

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with the ‘talking ruins’ surrounding the palazzo.31 Terragni was part of a group of Milanese architects who called their design for the competition a ‘wall project’ because its façade was dominated by a massive wall which resembled the ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius. The wall served as a visual aid by creating a funnel pointing towards the Coliseum as one looked from the Piazza Venezia.32 This solution used invisibility to emphasize the surrounding ruins while at the same time giving the palazzo a striking architecture of its own. Terragni, however, was one of the few modernists who attempted this harmonization of past and present. Others such as Giuseppe Pagano simply rejected the possibility of such a solution. In a 1934 article Pagano explained to his readers why he had refused to submit a proposal. After making several visits to the proposed site, Pagano realized that nothing modern could be constructed among ‘illustrious cadavers.’ Ironically, as Pagano tells it, ‘when I had some clear ideas, I had to quit.’33 Pagano’s moment of clarity told him that any modernist style would open a ‘polemical relationship with the ruins.’ The problem for the Istrian architect was that the rules of the competition did not provide for a frontal view of the palazzo from the Via dell’Impero, and he expressed great surprise that many of the entrants did not recognize this problem, instead submitting symmetrical designs which further rendered invisible the façade from the street. Pagano did not share his younger colleagues’ indifference to the surrounding ruins. Environment in this case was too powerful for a truly modernist and fascist building to succeed on its own merits. The traditionalists in the palazzo debate were almost invariably concerned with the location rather than the monument itself. This concern for environment was most clearly elucidated on the night of May 30, 1934, when the Senate debated the selections of the committee. For Senators Gallenga, Cippico, and Colonna, the palazzo had to be traditional in design since it needed to harmonize with its surroundings. Gallenga echoed the sentiments of many traditionalists when he argued that modernist architecture was not terrible per se, only that it represented a foreign style which had no place on Italian soil.34 If anything, modernist architecture belonged in the suburbs, not the centre of Rome. Colonna went further in his criticism, suggesting that the ‘Bolshevik’ style of modernism had no place amidst the monuments of ancient Rome. The Site How did the seventy finalists solve the problems of ambientazione? The rest

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of this chapter will analyse closely the challenges raised by the site and how the entrants in the competition dealt with them. The future site of the Palazzo Littorio was in the midst of the densest and most prominent remains of the ancient city, but also, in typical Roman manner, included significant vestiges of all of Rome’s history. The ancient, medieval, and modern nestled against each other in an irregular pattern. Surrounding the area were several medieval and baroque churches, and not far off, on the Capitoline Hill, stood Michaelangelo’s Piazza Campidoglio and the massive monument to Victor Emmanuel II which celebrated the Risorgimento. The palazzo would stand at the intersection of the Via Cavour and the Via dell’Impero, the former a product of liberal Italy’s urban planning. With respect to the ancient ruins, imperial and republican ruins intermingled. Flanking the palazzo along the Via dell’Impero were the Imperial Fora, while the Republican Fora stood behind the Basilica of Maxentius. This bewildering patchwork of ruins and modern monuments formed the context into which the Palazzo Littorio had to fit. Of all these relics, the most prominent were the Coliseum, the Basilica of Maxentius, and the Tor dei Conti. Each represented a different era of Roman history, and all three were charged with historical associations with which the architects had to contend. The Coliseum represented Imperial Rome at its zenith under the Emperor Flavius, while the basilica was completed by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, contemporaneous with the official recognition of Christianity. Like the Coliseum, the basilica’s ruins were massive and presented a daunting challenge to the future palazzo. The Tor dei Conti was less impressive in stature, but represented a challenge because it stood on the future site of the palazzo and would somehow have to be integrated into the project. Of the three landmarks the most famous and most important was the Coliseum, whose sheer size was enough to discourage Pagano from entering the competition. The Coliseum was not only the best-known relic of the ancient empire; it was also a perfect metaphor for fascism itself. Party rallies commemorating the March on Rome had been held there, and its value as a place of spectacle resonated with the regime’s own politics of spectacle. One of the Palazzo Littorio’s main functions was to serve as a site for party rallies, and the Via dell’Impero had already seen many military parades since its opening in 1932. Incorporating the Coliseum into the Palazzo Littorio project, though, proved a difficult challenge. The question was how to integrate the two structures without hindering the visibility of either. Some followed Terragni’s lead by using

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the triangular lot to create a kind of arrow pointing at the Coliseum. Giuseppe Vaccaro provided a variation of this theme with the idea of tilting the part of the palazzo that faced the Coliseum, ‘thus providing a vista towards the monument.’35 The problem with this, though, was that it put the Palazzo Littorio at the service of the Coliseum.36 De Renzi’s project hoped to rectify this by using the arrow as a means of contrasting the ‘finite linear’ structure of the palazzo with the ‘indefinite circular’ form of the Coliseum.37 One architect even conceived the palazzo as a kind of wall which linked the Flavian Amphitheatre with the Markets of Trajan. Probably the most fascist solution was the one proposed by Del Debbio and Morpurgo, which incorporated a massive window in Mussolini’s office through which the Duce could gaze out at the Coliseum. The diagrams for this project included an illustration of the Duce himself, arms folded, contemplating the massive ruin which fills his window. The Basilica of Maxentius was the second major landmark with which the architects had to deal. The basilica had been excavated during fascism’s archaeological digs in the Roman Forum, with the revelation of cavernous ruins used subsequently for concerts and political rallies. Many of the architects used the basilica’s tall ceilings and massive arches as a model for the palazzo. As with the Coliseum, both classicists and modernists found inspiration in the basilica, yet its sheer bulk and height proved difficult to match. The best that some architects could do was to provide a mirror image of it in the palazzo similar to Terragni’s design. The third ruin which formed an integral part of the site was the Tor dei Conti. Of the three ruins, it was the least famous, yet it was the one closest to the palazzo, sitting as it did on the actual site of construction. Only one project used the style of the tower to fashion turret-like features on the palazzo.38 The project submitted by the architect Fasolo used the tower as a link between the palazzo and the adjacent Fora of Augustus and Trajan.39 Both this and Brunati’s project were exceptions, however, as most projects paid little attention to the medieval structure, a fact noticed by the journal Il Selvaggio when it remarked that the architects ‘tried their best to ignore’ the Tor dei Conti.40 One architect even suggested demolishing the tower since it was a symbol of an ‘obscure era’ in Italian history.41 Thus, the ruins of antiquity posed difficult challenges to the entrants of the competition and also to the regime, which could not decide what style was appropriate for a zone that was full of historical significance. One solution to this problem was to conceive the palazzo as a viewing platform for the surrounding ruins. Some architects called for a light

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tower to illuminate the area, while others designed observation decks. Mussolini’s reviewing stand was emphasized by many, as if to argue that the purpose of the palazzo was to direct the gaze of Mussolini at legions passing on the Via dell’Impero. Some architects put the reviewing stand prominently on the street, disassociated from the palazzo itself. The potential of having the palazzo as a window on the past was reinforced when, in 1936, marble murals depicting the various phases of the Roman Empire (including the present fascist empire) were erected on the wall of the Basilica of Maxentius directly opposite the site.42 Observers could use these maps as guides to the panorama of ancient ruins lying before them. Converting the palazzo into a functional building used to contemplate antiquity thus seemed a plausible solution for integrating the PNF’s headquarters into the fabric of the ancient centre, but there was another landmark which posed a particularly difficult challenge. The Via dell’Impero Of all the monuments created by the regime in Rome, the one which achieved the most celebrity was the Via dell’Impero. Its inauguration was a central feature of the Decennale, with Mussolini cutting the ribbon and riding down the road on his white horse. The intense propaganda surrounding the Via dell’Impero made it a factor in the designs for the Palazzo Littorio. Although much of the attention focused on the palazzo’s historic surroundings, most of the entrants in the competition were conscious of the importance of the Via dell’Impero. The success of the palazzo depended greatly on its relationship to this monument of fascist planning, and many of the architects found the Via dell’Impero just as challenging as the ancient ruins. Indeed, in many ways, the boulevard and the palazzo clashed in their essential functions. While the road was designed to move traffic rapidly through the archaeological zone, the competition required that the palazzo provide space for political rallies. Since the Via dell’Impero was inadequate for the purpose, the palazzo was required to be at least twenty-five metres behind the road to accommodate a small piazza. As the site was already limited by its triangular configuration, this requirement made the site even more constraining. Another difficulty was the solidity and monumentality of the palazzo in the face of a zone that had become a place of constant movement. With the road moving traffic at a rapid rate, the palazzo seemed out of place. Unlike the Coliseum, around which the traffic swirled, or the Arch of Constantine, which cars could pass around and through, the palazzo

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seemed shunted off to the side. Traffic would only pass it by on its way to either the Coliseum or the Piazza Venezia. Photographs of the road always showed the street full of automobiles, cyclists, pedestrians, and horse-drawn carriages when it was not holding a military parade. This symphony of movement corresponded to the modernist impulses in fascism. That the palazzo’s rallying point had to be off the road showed the importance of not shutting down the Via dell’Impero for any occasion; the symphony of the street had to keep playing even when the Duce was addressing the crowds. This dichotomy between the palazzo and the road seemed to reflect a tension within fascism itself which Mussolini fondly described as an ideology of movement which often seemed mired in bureaucracy. Reconciling the constant movement of the Via dell’Impero with the static monumentality of the palazzo proved the most difficult problem for the architects who submitted designs for the competition in 1934. Nonetheless, many of the submissions came up with novel solutions to get around the restrictions imposed by the road. The most successful solution, according to Pagano, who reviewed the results for his journal, was the convex or concave façade which allowed for more space for political rallies. Some projects designed a courtyard for the party rallies, while some had the future palazzo facing the Piazzale Colosseo, with Mussolini’s balcony facing the Coliseum. One project placed the piazza at the intersection of the Via Cavour and Via dell’Impero as a means of providing more space.43 Other projects designed the piazza around the road. One architect erected arched walls crossing the via at right angles and closing off the part of the boulevard that passed in front of the palazzo, while another created a virtual square by placing four statues of Roman emperors around a massive fountain on the edge of the road.44 Both projects, however, required the Via dell’Impero to be obstructed and interfered with its function as a conduit for traffic. The importance of the Via dell’Impero was recognized by those architects who tried to use the boulevard as the window for viewing the palazzo. Calling to mind the reason for the road’s construction, that one should be able to see the Coliseum unobstructed from Piazza Venezia, many architects designed the palazzo according to the perspective of a moving gaze on the road. In this way, the solidity of the palazzo would be seen in passing rather than from a fixed position. This presented a challenge for architects, as the palazzo was meant to represent eternal, fixed values that would stand for future generations.45 This sense of the eternal immediately put the palazzo in counterpoint

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to the Via dell’Impero and to the surrounding ruins. While the boulevard was about movement, the ruins attested to the transient character of the zone. Furthermore, since the 1920s the neighbourhood had been undergoing constant transformation which created an atmosphere of the provisional. This characteristic of the zone around the palazzo was attested to by the governor of Rome who, on an unrelated matter, remarked on the value of using temporary billboards to masquerade the public washrooms made visible by the demolitions. For the governor, the provisional nature of the area would suit the billboards and not make them too conspicuous.46 Added to this lack of order was emptiness caused by the demolitions that isolated the ruins in the midst of wide open spaces of detritus. The Via dell’Impero’s dimensions only added to this sense of openness – a fact noted by Corrado Ricci, who was one of the few opposed to the construction of the grand boulevards.47 In its celebration of the Via dell’Impero, Quadrante praised the road for passing over an area that had once been filled with ‘lurid and pest-ridden’ houses and which was now filled with ‘air and light.’48 Into this zone of open spaces, scattered ruins, and fast-moving traffic would fit the Palazzo Littorio, which spoke of permanence. The components of the palazzo reinforced this monumental solidity by housing the permanent exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, the offices of the highly bureaucratic PNF, and a shrine to fascist martyrs. All spoke of solidity. The shrine completed this monument to permanence by displaying the names of martyred squadristi. That many of the architects included Christian symbols in the shrine served to reinforce the notion of the eternal.49 Thus, in a place defined by the passing of time, typical of the Roman landscape, fascism hoped to build something that would resist time. This monument, it was hoped, would not become just another ruin in some distant future. Placing a monument to the eternal in a place of change proved a great challenge to the architects who submitted designs in 1934. Many of the designs included scenes of swirling traffic and ruins as a means of accentuating the solidity of the palazzo. Plastic models which showed the palazzo in great detail but displayed the ruins in generic forms had the effect of emphasizing the palazzo as the focal point of a neighbourhood filled with shapeless relics. The architects Ridolfi-Cafeiro-La PadulaRossi described their palazzo as ‘one solid, granite block’ based on a style of ‘clarity and sobriety.’50 Those who viewed their projects as counterweights to the anarchy of the zone were invariably the classicists in the architectural dispute noted earlier. Del Debbio’s project (a version of

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which would ultimately win the competition in 1937) called for a gate to separate the ‘sacred’ (the shrine) from the ‘profane’ found in the streets surrounding the palazzo.51 The Rationalists had a more nuanced view of the problem. While the traditionalists saw the palazzo as a statement in opposition to the site, modernists attempted to incorporate ideas of transience and movement in their designs so as to create what Terragni called a dialogue between the palazzo and its surroundings. Analysis of the designs shows that three general solutions were used to put the palazzo in harmony with the road: the conduit, the straight-line façade, and the historical march. The ruler-straight façade was a popular choice for many of the architects, not simply because it typified the Rationalist style of architecture but also because it suited the direction of the Via dell’Impero. Giuseppe Vaccaro pointed out that a straight-line façade was crucial because the palazzo would be the only structure on the Via dell’Impero to possess it, thus conforming to the boulevard.52 For some, the ‘rhythm’ of the via could only be guaranteed by a flat surface, because it did not act as a distraction like the arch over the intersection of the Via Cavour and Via dell’Impero.53 Those architects who pushed for this solution saw the boulevard as the key feature of the site and not the ruins. The palazzo thus served to emphasize the movement of traffic on the street. Giuseppe Pagano rejected this solution, arguing that it prevented one from getting a fully frontal view of the palazzo from the Via dell’Impero, but he may have been missing the point. The key idea for these architects was to view the palazzo, not standing from a stationary point across the street, but sitting in the seat of a passing automobile. Creating a flat façade not only conformed the palazzo to the rhythm of the Via dell’Impero, but for many of the submissions the Palazzo Littorio was conceived as a kind of conduit like the road itself. An example of this was the arrow shape which conformed to the dimensions of the site. It was used by several architects to act as a pointer to the Coliseum, thus directing traffic towards the area’s most imposing monument.54 Another idea that two architects proposed for the palazzo as a conduit was to conceive the PNF headquarters as a ship. The architect Palanti called his proposal La Nave (the ship), shaping the building to resemble an ocean liner.55 He even gave it a motto, navigare necesse. Likening the palazzo to a mode of transportation informed the designs for the project, which included traffic and planes flying in formation. In this way, the palazzo would be an integral part of modern transport and not an immobile structure; the PNF headquarters in Palanti’s vision would embody speed

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and motion. The ship motif was also adopted by the architect Liani, who called his palazzo the ‘Duce’s anchored ship’ in the Imperial Fora.56 In doing so, Liani may have found the perfect metaphor for the palazzo. Not only was it a form of transport, but it was anchored as well, embodying motion and concreteness. While life and history moved around it, this ship would remain at anchor, a rock of stability that was also a powerful mode of movement in the stormy seas of the history of Rome. The third means of incorporating transience in the permanence of the Palazzo Littorio was through the depiction of history on the building. Several projects called for historical adornments around the palazzo. Some placed statues of Roman emperors around the site, while one even used saints as a means of linking the fascist present with Rome’s Christian past.57 The more innovative projects, however, called for the march of fascism to be depicted on friezes or murals along the length of the palazzo. The Ridolfi project planned for the straight-line façade to have a frieze, 100 metres long, depicting Italian history from the Great War to the March on Rome.58 Vaccaro’s project placed massive murals next to the windows of Mussolini’s office, while Mario Baratto hoped that a series of bas-reliefs on the Via dell’Impero depicting Italian history would lead to ‘unity among Italians.’59 Enrico Rinaldi’s project took as inspiration the surrounding zone by planning for a series of bas-reliefs showing Italian history from the ancient empire to the present. Although all these projects included the permanent Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, these architects used the exterior of the palazzo as a kind of canvas in order to present a teleological unfolding of Italian history which had an appropriately fascist conclusion. The placing of bas-reliefs, friezes, and murals along the façade allowed passing motorists to view history as a film-strip as they moved along the Via dell’Impero towards the Coliseum. The motorist could now march with fascism. This was the same direction that military parades took, thus allowing history to move along with the columns of marching troops. In these proposals, the Palazzo Littorio became a metaphor for the Eternal City, a rock which witnessed the movement of history and the passing of civilizations while remaining eternal. The fascist revolution was presented as a dynamic movement, offsetting the static implications of the palazzo itself and making the palazzo a spiritual counterpart to the history around it. The most innovative of solutions, and the one that most suited the spirit of fascism’s passion for the road, were those that integrated the palazzo with traffic. The competition rules called for a parking garage

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to be included in the palazzo, and several of the projects used this as an opportunity to integrate the palazzo and the Via dell’Impero. Some used roads within the complex to move traffic, while others created massive, ground-level entrances that allowed cars to turn in directly from the via.60 One project extended the boulevard via a ramp that led directly into the palazzo, thus making it possible to have a military parade march directly into the PNF headquarters. Road and party would therefore be in perfect symbiosis.61 Despite these varied attempts to reconcile the Palazzo Littorio project with the challenges of the site, when the second competition was held in July 1937 the fascist regime changed the location, not once, but twice. At first, it was decided to put the palazzo near the St Paul’s Gate at the edge of the old city, but ultimately the winning project by Del Debbio was moved to the Foro Mussolini. Why the change? In the three years which elapsed between competitions, the regime’s views towards Rome and its place in it had changed. Since 1935, the regime had fought and won a war in Ethiopia, and the area around the St Paul’s Gate reflected this new reality more than the zone around the Via dell’Impero. The Ministry of Italian East Africa was built here and the Obelisk of Axium, war booty taken from Addis Ababa, had been erected in front of it. By 1937, the symbols of the new fascist empire seemed more current than those of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, since the Ethiopian conquest, the regime had become more strident and ideological, moving closer to Nazi Germany and intervening in the Spanish Civil War. This new militancy made the vestiges of the Roman past stifling, and the restrictions placed on the Palazzo Littorio no longer suited the new confidence of the regime. Rather than please the older establishment, which preferred the Roman heritage, the new site fit the style of the new context. There were practical reasons for the changes as well. The policy of autarchy, compounded by the stagnation of the Italian economy in the Depression, made it less feasible to undertake the massive demolitions required to construct the palazzo next to the Coliseum. Ultimately, though, not even this site was maintained, as the regime put the final product at the Foro Mussolini, at the foot of the Monte Mario. This decision suited the new orientation towards city planning taken by the regime around 1936. That year, the Master Plan of 1931 had effectively come to an end when the decision was made to construct the new Rome out in the Tre Fontane area southwest of the city, towards the sea. Building inside the historic centre posed too many obstacles and the

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regime now wanted to build cities, like those in the Pontine Marshes, on virgin land.62 The Foro Mussolini represented an early attempt to build a fascist space on virgin land. Its location was close to the Ponte Milvio and the Porta del Popolo, where the fascist squads had entered the city in 1922. The Foro Mussolini, which included two stadiums and headquarters of the Balilla movement, was associated with sport and youth, features missing in the original location of the Palazzo Littorio. Constructing the Palazzo Littorio in the Foro Mussolini gave the regime a greater control over the immediate surroundings for its own symbols and myths. The decrepit state of the ruins in the original location added a touch of temporality and mortality that no longer suited the millennial ambitions of fascism by the late 1930s. It also pointed to an increasing self-referentiality of fascist ideology, no longer content to gain legitimacy from Rome’s historical antecedents. Thus, it appears that the Rationalists’ aim of constructing a palazzo without reference to the ‘cadavers’ that surrounded it had won the day, as now the PNF headquarters could sit nestled within a fascist, triumphalist space. More importantly, the Foro Mussolini allowed the regime to build what Sigfried Giedion called the architecture of ‘volumes in space,’ a salient feature of modern architecture.63 Significantly, this modernist feature resurrected the ancient method of building. The Palazzo Littorio, on its own surrounded by ruins and the open spaces of the forum, would have represented too closely a nineteenth-century style of monument. Better that it be placed within a space surrounded by other fascist-style buildings where it could create a new forum based on ancient principles. To construct such an imposing monument in its original location also obscured the significance of the Via dell’Impero. Although the ruins were imposing and intimidating for any architect, it was the road that mattered most. The fascist road could not have any imposing building built alongside it for fear of imitating the hated nineteenth century. Concerns about falling into the bad architectonic habits of liberal Italy affected any major projects planned for the new boulevards of fascism. After the winners of the first round were announced, Rationalist Carlo Belli, in the pages of Quadrante, was concerned that another ‘monster like the Palazzo della Giustizia’ could find itself on the Via dell’Impero.64 Edmondo Del Bufalo, the man responsible for designing the Via Imperiale, the major boulevard which linked Rome with the E42 and the sea, had to reassure critics that his road would not become the home of ‘mastadonic nineteenth-century style buildings.’65 More than any other monument, the Via dell’Impero was fascism’s statement in the historic centre.

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The real debate had not been between modernism and classicism, but between movement and stasis, embodied in the Via dell’Impero and the Palazzo Littorio. Fascism’s dialogue with the ruins of antiquity was better served by the road, not the palace. The sense of movement and transience and the regime’s control over the meaning of the ruins worked from the perspective of the Via dell’Impero. Constructing a monumental party headquarters and its symbols of immobility – shrine, bureaucracy, and permanent exhibition – sounded a discordant note in a zone noted for its constantly changing character. Furthermore, it seemed to hint at the traditional Roman habit of living alongside ruins rather than the fascist impulse of moving traffic through them. In 1937 Gustavo Giovannoni had written about how the flow of traffic would give new life to the ancient centre.66 Del Bufalo was convinced that his Via Imperiale, ‘a road; a simple road, without sidewalks, flanked by hiking trails, crossing the archaeological park with intense traffic, would transform the ruins in the manner desired by the regime; transforming the area from an archaeological museum to something pulsing with life.’67 A palazzo, by contrast, would reintroduce the static contemplation of antiquity dear to the Romantics of the nineteenth century; better that it stand in a fascist forum rather than amidst the ruins of antiquity. The very word palazzo reminded Italians of the past, not the future: ‘The word “palazzo” brings us back four centuries, reminding us of a conventional world, which is very distant from the great energy of our own time.’68 According to Pietro Bardi, it did not help matters that the rules of the competition placed too many restrictions on the project beginning with the site itself: ‘It seemed Giolittian this idea of placing Mussolini’s Palazzo in an awkward triangle (triangolaccio) … The plans were bureaucratic, worried only about keeping the Palazzo confined to Procustes’ Bed designed for “reasons of environment.”’69 A road, on the other hand, could be kept alive by the increasing amount of traffic that the future would bring. The Via dell’Impero acted, therefore, as the true monument of fascism in the shaping the space around it. The Touring Club Italiano called it the ‘master road and heart’ of the city’s renewal.70 Massimo Bontempelli, writer and co-editor of Quadrante, called himself a ‘fanatic of the Via dell’Impero,’ and claimed that it was the ‘centre of the world’; he argued that the Coliseum had now come to life, whereas previously it had been hidden way.71 Bontempelli too feared that one day replicas of ancient statues would be placed on the road, ruining its profound impact. The Via dell’Impero was the new Via Sacra and would act as the stage for

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triumphant military marches in the same way that its ancient predecessor had served the Romans. It was the Del Debbio project, eventually triumphant in the competition, which stated in its 1934 proposal that the Imperial zone contained no ‘traditional environment,’ but one that was created ‘yesterday, via a fascist stamp.’72 The proposal was referring to the Via dell’Impero, which had been fascism’s true stamp on Roman’s ancient urban text. It accentuated the vast open spaces created by the Master Plan, while the palazzo would have rested in a restricted space. ‘After slicing the Via dell’Impero through we can’t stop at the side of the road,’ argued one Rationalist critic of the competition, ‘in order to construct, brick by brick, a wall against the arid pavement of the road.’73 Keeping the palazzo away from the zone around the Via dell’Impero also allowed the regime to remain faithful to its impulse to reveal the ruins of antiquity unobstructed. This landscape of resurrection was to be preserved especially as the regime increasingly engaged in a struggle with that other custodian of the Roman cityscape: the Catholic Church.

CHAPTER SIX

Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape

‘Could fascism be the principle of the anti-European restoration?’ Thus began Julius Evola’s short book Imperialismo pagano, published in 1928 by the obscure Ar publishing house.1 The Sicilian, Roman-born aristocrat had been hovering around the margins of fascism since it came to power in 1922, contributing articles to such leading fascist journals as Bottai’s Critica Fascista, but he never joined the party out of disappointment at the regime’s compromises, the most important being the impending agreement with the Vatican in the Lateran Accords. Evola belonged to a group of intellectuals and artists who called themselves ‘traditionalists,’ inspired by the French thinker Rene Guenon.2 These men hoped that Italy, under fascism, would return to the pagan ideals of Imperial Rome, ideals that had been lost since the advent of Christianity. Thus far, Evola had been disillusioned by the fascist regime: ‘Fascism was born out of the depths, out of confused exigencies and brutal forces unleashed by the war. Since then, fascism has fed on compromises, rhetoric, and small men and things … For better or for worse, fascism has created a body but one without a soul.’3 Yet, fascism remained a possibility for the traditionalist renewal despite its failures: ‘Fascism came essentially from the forces of youth, decisive, ready for anything, alien to abstract doctrines, alien to the “malady” of culture. This is the living nucleus of fascism.’4 Intellectual historians such as A. James Gregor have minimized the importance of Evola in fascist Italy, arguing that the esoteric religion of traditionalism never found favour with the fascist regime.5 To be sure, the regime remained sceptical of any kind of esoteric mysticism and Evola never joined the Fascist Party, yet he did find potential in fascism.6 He did see, in Mussolini’s exaltation of ancient Rome, the chance of

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a return to the primitive, pagan ideals of Italy.7 Although the regime signed the Lateran Accords with the Vatican in 1929, much to Evola’s disgust, the following decade witnessed a subtle but growing fascination with pre-Christian Rome, especially in the regime’s urban interventions. This chapter will demonstrate how the transformation of Rome under the Master Plan contributed to a revival of the pagan landscape after centuries of Christianity, a fact which coincided with the Vatican’s increasing use of the words pagan and neo-pagan to describe the ideology of fascism. Throughout the 1930s, Mussolini and his counterpart in the Vatican, Pius XI, would engage in a tense struggle to win the souls of Italians. While at times friendly and working in harmony, the fascist regime and the Vatican would often be in direct opposition over such issues as Catholic Action, the Racial Laws of 1938, and fascism’s evolving friendship with Nazi Germany. Underlying these periodic clashes, however, was a growing conflict over the meaning of the Roman landscape. While the Master Plan transformed the Eternal City, the church and the state clashed over the archaeological and historical understandings of Rome. Clashing Religions It was only inevitable that fascism’s remaking of the Roman landscape would lead to a conflict with the Vatican. In previous chapters we have seen how the Master Plan was often directed at the legacy of liberal Italy. The church’s Rome was also a target but in a more careful, and subtle, fashion. Very few people would have lamented the destruction of liberal Rome; not so with papal Rome, which had a longer and more profound history behind it. The Roman cityscape was largely the work of the popes who had ruled the city for over a thousand years. Mussolini was often compared to Pope Sixtus V, who, in the late sixteenth century, had been a road builder connecting the major shrines of Rome with wide boulevards. The popes, like the fascist regime, had not been averse to dismantling and destroying parts of the city in order to remake it. By the twentieth century, the papacy, especially Pius XI, who was elected to the papal throne in February 1922, was more concerned with preserving ecclesiastical Rome from the pretensions of the secular Italian state, which had seized the Eternal City in 1870. The construction of the Vittoriano by the liberal monarchy, completed in 1911, raised the possibility of the secular state ‘sacralizing’ itself by calling the monument the Altar of the Fatherland. This tendency towards political religion has become a leading thread of scholarship on fascism. Leading the way is

Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape 123 Emilio Gentile’s Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, which argues that fascism constructed a political religion, borrowing its rituals, ceremonies, and liturgies from Catholicism.8 The result was a political ideology that presented itself as a new religion to rival the old. The essentially religious nature of fascism has garnered increasing attention in the last decade as a result of Gentile’s work.9 Some historians, such as Michael Burleigh, have gone so far as to claim that fascism and Nazism attempted to eliminate Christianity, aiming to replace the values of ‘obsolescent Christianity … whatever their tactical accommodations with the Churches.’10 Although this may be an exaggeration for the Italian case, as Mussolini could never seriously have hoped to eliminate the church’s influence and, in fact, came to depend upon the church for social peace, he no doubt resented it. Whether the regime was positioning itself as a rival religion or not falls outside the scope of this book, although it is clear that fascism was attempting to revive the mythological potential of the Roman cityscape. It was Pius XI, though, who increasingly began to refer to fascism as pagan. In the midst of the dispute over Catholic Action, which frequently erupted into violent clashes between the blackshirts and Catholic Action members in the spring of 1931, Pius released the encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno (We have no need), which denounced the level of violence and the actions of the fascist regime in attempting to suppress Catholic Action. Although not an unequivocal condemnation of fascism or its leader, Pius did condemn the growing tendency to worship the state in fascist Italy: ‘And here We find Ourselves confronted by a mass of authentic affirmations … which reveal beyond the slightest possibility of doubt the resolve to monopolize completely the young … for the exclusive advantage of a party and of a regime based on an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the State – or “Statolatry.”’11 This was the first time that Pius used the word pagan to describe the politics of the fascist regime. He would use the term on many occasions to define Nazi Germany in subsequent years. Although the conflict over Catholic Action was settled, an uneasy peace descended on Vatican–Italian relations in the 1930s. Despite areas of common interest, such as the Ethiopian War, Pius continued to view the developments in Italy and Germany as pagan, especially in the summer of 1938 when the Italian regime, basking in the glow of the new-found friendship with Hitler’s Germany, promulgated the Racial Laws. It was the work of the Master Plan in Rome, however, that kept relations between the church and the fascist state in a state of constant tension. Although diplomacy could

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often be cordial, the ‘battle’ waged on the cityscape of Rome demonstrated that the two powers had very different interpretations of Rome and its meaning. For the Vatican, fascism’s interventions in the Roman cityscape confirmed its pagan tendencies. In labelling fascism (and Nazism) as pagan, Pius was echoing the views of several other religious and non-religious thinkers of the 1930s. A sociological study of civic education by the University of Chicago in 1929, for example, argued that the fascist regime was inventing itself as a pagan religion, complete with pagan-like festivals such as the burning of debts in October 1927.12 Arnold Toynbee, in a 1937 article in the Christian Century, declared fascism as a ‘rival religion’ that was essentially pagan in its exaltation of human organization and power.13 Catholic thinkers such as Christopher Dawson and Aurel Kolnai also had little doubt that the emphasis on the supremacy of the state in Germany and Italy was pagan in inspiration.14 What did paganism mean in this context? In several allocutions and speeches, Pius XI used the term paganism to denote three essential features of the policies of Italian fascism and Nazism. The first was the rejection of universalism in favour of ideologies which exalted either a particular race or a nation above all others.15 The Roman pontiff had established this theme in his first encyclical, promulgated in December 1922, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio (On the Peace of Christ in His Kingdom), where he identified nationalism and ultra-patriotism as a source for instability in international affairs.16 Not only did they threaten international stability, but these beliefs could also lead to a cult of the state.17 A second feature of paganism, according to Pius XI, was the exaltation of the material world, especially the sacralization of the built environment. In the 1930s Pius specifically identified as pagan the desire to build marvellous works, a sly reference to fascism’s vast public works projects such as those found in the Master Plan of 1931. A third feature of paganism was a specific view of history which differed from Christianity’s interpretation of the past. The rivalry between Pius XI and Mussolini would revolve mainly around this feature of paganism. The Roman landscape became the site on which the fascist and Christian conceptions of history would be defined, especially in the wake of the Master Plan. It was the latter two characteristics of paganism, as defined by Pius XI, that directly related to the emergence of the fascist landscape in Rome. The Two Romes Pius XI and Benito Mussolini both took possession of Rome in the year

Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape 125 1922. Cardinal Achille Ratti became Pope Pius XI in February, just eight months before Mussolini’s blackshirts marched on the city. When Ratti was elected pope, fascist violence was gripping the city, especially in the working-class San Lorenzo quarter, where fascists and socialists often engaged in bloody battles. Pope Pius XI placed the city of Rome at the top of his agenda from the moment he was elected by the College of Cardinals. From the beginning, Pius XI had taken seriously his position as the Bishop of Rome.18 For Ratti, the city was central to the mission of the Catholic Church, and he made this known when he became the first pope in over fifty years to venture out of the Vatican after the signing of the Lateran Accords in 1929. On that occasion, he was greeted by thousands of Romans on the streets of the city.19 On his election Pius XI also revived the tradition of the Urbe et Orbi blessing, a ceremony which required him to appear on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, serving notice that Rome belonged to the church.20 At the heart of Pius XI’s renewal of the Roman mission was nostalgia for the ecclesial Rome he had first seen in 1879, and which was quickly disappearing under the heels of modernity and as capital of the Italian state.21 Pius XI’s biographers often compare him to Pope Sixtus V.22 Like Sixtus, but on a smaller scale as he only had jurisdiction over the Vatican and not all of Rome, Pius became deeply involved in restructuring the papal city, giving it a new train station and modern means of communication, such as the founding of Vatican Radio.23 Outside the Vatican he presided over the refurbishing of several basilicas and churches, as well as the building of new seminaries and colleges. Restoration work was often done with the assistance of the Italian government, as in the case of the Basilica of St Paul-outside-the-Walls, which was in the care of the monarchy until 1929.24 Despite this example of collaboration, Pius XI continued the policy of Pius IX, the self-proclaimed ‘prisoner of the Vatican,’ who had called for the building up of ecclesial Rome as a means of defying the liberal state. If the Vatican could not retake Rome by force, then it could build an alternative city within the Italian capital.25 Pius’s concern for ecclesial Rome found its way into the Lateran Accords of 1929, which emphasized the ‘sacred character of the city.’ Article 10 stated: ‘No building open to worship can be demolished for any reason, unless previously agreed upon with the competent ecclesiastical authority.’ Article 33 claimed the catacombs or ‘subsoil’ of Rome as Vatican patrimony.26 The protection of ecclesiastical property was one of Pius XI’s strongest motives for signing the Concordat owing to a fear of violence against church property – a fear which was realized in 1931 at the height of the conflict between the Vatican and the regime over

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Catholic Action, when blackshirts often attacked churches. In May 1931 the Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano dedicated most of its front page to reporting incidents of these attacks throughout Italy, especially in Rome.27 The protection of church property became especially important in the 1930s, when the fascist regime embarked on its ambitious scheme to remake the Roman landscape. The demolitions required by the Master Plan at times threatened the religious patrimony of the city. To be sure, the Vatican actively collaborated with some of the fascist schemes, including the construction of the Via della Conciliazione, the wide boulevard linking St Peter’s with the Tiber River. Other parts of the sprawling Master Plan, however, caused friction. Several pontifical institutes, churches, and colleges wrote to the Roman municipal government and Mussolini claiming that some provisions of the plan directly threatened the pastoral mission of the church in Rome. The planned demolition of some churches also raised objections. The director of the San Lorenzo Choir, for example, protested that his choir would cease to exist without even a ‘piece of bread’ left if their church was demolished.28 The rector of the Conservatory of St Eufemia, an orphanage run by the church, demanded financial compensation for the fifteen to twenty orphans under its care, claiming that the state was demolishing four hundred years of social assistance carried out by the conservatory.29 Meanwhile, the rector of the Germanic-Hungarian Pontifical College openly accused the regime of violating the concordat by demolishing its church in order to widen a road.30 Violation of the concordat had possible international repercussions in the case of the Armenian Pontifical College, which served as a place of asylum for Armenians. The delicacy of the situation forced the Italian foreign minister, Dino Grandi, to intervene in the matter. Not only was the church a refuge, according to the vicar general of the Armenian patriarchate, but it was also a place where Armenian culture was preserved.31 Another pontifical college that was threatened by the Master Plan was that of St Jerome in the Piazzale Augusteo. The sacristy of the church was slated for demolition during the excavations around Augustus’s tomb. The exchange of words between the Apostolic Nuncio to Italy, Borgongini Duca, and the Italian foreign minister, Grandi, is revelatory of the antithetical views of the Roman landscape held by both sides. In a letter dated 21 January 1932 to Grandi, Borgongni Duca wrote: ‘The Honourable Commission responsible for this project, while concerned with traffic and the imperial monuments of the area, has

Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape 127 ignored other structures of equally important artistic and historic associations.’32 According to Borgongini Duca, the college was one of the most important monuments of Christianity, a fact recognized by international agreements. It was not enough to preserve just the church: To remove from a temple its annexed buildings, reducing it to the four walls of the church, means to deprive the church of an essential and integral part of its functioning. The sacristy is important not only as a gathering place for the celebrants, but also as safe place to store the sacred vessels, which are often of great value and necessary for the Mass. It is also an artistic crime, as the sacristy is designed by architects to be part of the whole church … A church without a sacristy, therefore, is a mutilated body.33

Grandi responded to this by demonstrating that only a few rooms of the building were used by the church, while the rest were rented apartments and shops on the ground floor.34 Clearly, both sides had different opinions as to what constituted the sacred. Controversies over the pontifical colleges added another important dimension to the struggle over Rome: the involvement of foreign governments. St Jerome’s College was actively supported by the Yugoslav legation to the Holy See.35 Similarly, the French ambassador sent a note enquiring about the French College, which also faced expropriation.36 Pius XI made it a point during his pontificate to restore and build foreign colleges, not only because of the importance of missionary work, but also because it gave him a semblance of international support, as opposed to the nationalistic projects of fascism. The foreign dimensions of these colleges were also important for Pius in reaffirming the role of Catholic Rome in spreading the faith throughout the world. For Pius, Rome was caput mundi, and these colleges were central to that identity. Borgongini Duca emphasized the role of St Jerome’s College in spreading the faith beyond the Adriatic.37 The fact that many of the provisions of the Master Plan affected international colleges sharpened the belief that two Romes were emerging in the 1930s: one was dedicated to an international church, while the other wanted to establish Italian primacy. Other pontifical institutions were affected by the Master Plan as well. The most prestigious was the Pontifical Agricultural Institute at Vigna Pia. Located on the Via Portuense, near the St Paul’s Gate, the land on which the institute stood was slated to become a public park in keeping with Mussolini’s dictum to open up Rome to air and sunlight. Founded

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by Pope Pius IX, the Institute’s mission was to train poor Roman youths in the art of agriculture. The superior general of the Order of the Holy Family, which ran the facility, wrote an impassioned plea to Mussolini in 1930, arguing that the institute did not need to be replaced by a park since it was already providing the ‘healthy fresh air’ which the Duce had called for in his installation of the Master Plan.38 The institute’s case was also pleaded by the vicar general of the Roman archdiocese, Cardinal Pompili, to the Roman governor, Boncompagni-Ludovisi. After giving a brief history of the institute and the order which administered it, the cardinal proceeded to remind the governor that the subsoil of the institute contained catacombs. Not only was this an efficient and modern institution tracing its heritage to the scientific advancements of the nineteenth century, but the zone provided an important historical connection to the early Christian martyrs. For this reason, argued Pompili, the institute should not become the victim of demolition, but rather be seen as a site that could be preserved and built upon: ‘Here is not the place to demolish, but to amplify and perfect.’39 The institute, according to the cardinal, had produced great works of civic education, both moral and intellectual, and was now threatened by the Master Plan. Pompili’s support for amplifying and perfecting expressed succinctly the Catholic approach to the Roman landscape. The ideal was to build upon past eras, or progress to a more perfect order, not subvert and destroy what had come before. This too, as we shall see, was the basis for the Christian approach to history. The potential danger to the catacombs was an especially sensitive issue between the two sides. The Lateran Accords had assured the Vatican that the catacombs would be respected, but the regime’s projects such as the Via Imperiale threatened to undermine the arrangement. This road, designed to link Rome with the E42, was to pass near the Catacombs of San Callisto. Its chief architect, Edmondo del Bufalo, had argued that the route could not be avoided, as any other option would have forced the road through densely populated suburbs – the same suburbs populated by those Romans who had lost their homes to the Via dell’Impero.40 Designed to be a city road with highway qualities, the Via Imperiale was a total of 25 kilometres in length, with an average width of 50 metres.41 As with all the fascist roads, the Via Imperiale was designed to move traffic quickly, link Rome with the sea, and provide panoramic views of ancient Rome. Part of the road had been modified slightly to respect the archaeological zone in the south end of the city near the Caracalla baths.42 As soon as the plans for the Via Imperiale were released, the Vatican

Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape 129 through its Apostolic Nunzio protested the road and asked for deviations to respect the catacombs. It was the Commission for Sacred Archaeology that first alerted the Secretary of State to the possible vandalism to the catacombs, urging the Vatican to make an ‘energetic and resolute’ protest.43 In order to sway the regime, Borgongini Duca tried to convince the undersecretary of foreign affairs, Buffarini Guidi, that the ancient Romans had often made new roads bend to respect important tombs, and these tombs of San Callisto contained the bodies of martyrs and popes.44 The response of Buffarini Guidi was to simply deny that any problem existed. The controversy came at a difficult time in Italian–Vatican relations, as the Hitler visit was only days away and the pope was angered by the elaborate ceremony that awaited the German leader. The angry reaction of the Commission on Sacred Archaeology came at a time when the Vatican and the fascist regime were developing two very different approaches to archaeology. Pius XI was increasingly concerned throughout the 1930s that fascist archaeology was attempting to resurrect the long-buried pagan past of Rome. Speaking to a congress of doctors in 1935, Pius expressed the concern that topics in the congress included eugenics and sterilization, blaming the popularity of these topics on the rise of the Third Reich and its attempts to restore ‘full paganism’ in the lives of both individuals and the community.45 A key element of the pagan view of history, and one which Pius XI returned to in his various addresses, was the retrieval of an ideal past and its re-creation in a modern form.46 Addressing Catholic Action members in 1933, Pius warned of a new paganism ‘with its horrors and errors,’ accompanied by ‘material splendour’ like that of ancient Athens and Rome.47 This veiled reference to the fascist regime’s attempts to revive the grandeur of ancient Rome was further alluded to in another address to university students, wherein he condemned scientists who shed too much light on the ‘creature rather than the creator.’48 This was a form of archaeology which ignored the intervening centuries. Addressing a congress of Christian archaeologists in October 1938, five months after Hitler’s visit to Rome, Pius XI warned of an ‘erroneous archaeology’ which digs only for ‘what is ancient and not what is sacred.’49 Rather than explore the divine ways of God in history, argued Pius XI, the modern archaeologist looks for the lost paganism and its heroes, such as Adolf Hitler’s idol, Julian the Apostate.50 Mussolini’s vision of archaeology was diametrically opposed to that of the pope. Speaking to the Royal Society of National History in 1927, Mussolini called for the ruins of antiquity to be liberated from the ‘accu-

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mulated ugliness of the centuries of abandonment.’51 Only when the monuments of antiquity are uncovered, argued the fascist dictator, can one kneel before them in reverence. Mussolini’s ‘pagan’ view of history was revealed in this desire to retrieve what had been lost in the intervening centuries. The past could be elusive and forever lost, claimed Mussolini, who called for discoveries to be photographed immediately since they could disappear in the light of day.52 Mussolini did not hide the fact that this archaeological vision was an attack on the Christian heritage of the city. During the work on the Master Plan, the fascist dictator had shown impatience at the discovery of lost Christian churches, brushing them off as irrelevant.53 He also joked to a local priest that he would lose parishioners as a result of the demolitions and the forced eviction of thousands of Romans from the city’s centre.54 During his feud with Pius XI over the Racial Laws of 1938, Mussolini often used an archaeological motif to threaten that he would ‘scrape away the crust that envelops Italians and return [them] to their anticlericalism. The Vatican is composed of men who are mummified and out of touch.’55 Mussolini’s brother, Arnaldo, had already served notice to the Vatican in 1927 that the pope would have to get used to a new Rome ‘which reveals the ancient Roman temples to the admiration of the world and shows a Rome that will be the centre of new doctrines appropriate to modern states.’56 Discovering pre-Christian temples was a goal of fascism’s archaeological excavations in Rome. Speaking in 1928 to an audience of war invalids visiting from Bolzano who had stopped at the Palazzo Venezia (Mussolini’s headquarters in Rome) before going to St Peter’s, Mussolini urged them to visit the pagan temples discovered in the Largo Argentina near the Vatican.57 After all, in the Roman landscape, St Peter’s was just one temple among many. History At the heart of the dispute between archaeological visions were two different ways of interpreting history through the Roman cityscape. Pius XI’s well-known love of history was a product of the Romantic nineteenth century. Not only was he a great lover of Manzoni’s historical fiction, his understanding of history was also informed by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a work that was ignored until the Romantic nationalists of the 1800s.58 Long before he became pope, when he ran the Ambrosian Library in Milan, he had also published several papers on historical topics.59 Pius XI’s view of history was that of a Romantic but also, naturally,

Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape 131 a Christian one, seeing the Incarnation as the moment which abolished the ‘life without grace’ associated with the pagan world.60 Rome stood at the heart of this Christian view of history. Rome’s history, as the centre of Christianity, was one marked by continuity. In 1925, a year Pius XI had declared as a Holy Year, the pope had told a group of pilgrims from Cremona that Rome was the ‘motherly home’ of all Christians, a site which offered a chain of monuments leading back to Christ through the Apostles, who had made Rome a ‘sacred soil’ of catacombs on whose foundations were built the great basilicas.61 In Pius XI’s view, the most important moment in that history was the arrival of the Apostles, especially St Paul, whose work had transformed Rome from a ‘temporal to a spiritual power.’62 With the arrival of the Apostles came the transformation of paganism into Christianity. What was lost in this transformation was, and should be, lost forever in the face of the transforming power of the Apostles and the martyrs. Pius had no regrets about the loss of that pagan world, which he described as a ‘miserably degraded society based on the domination by a powerful minority of the slave-like majority’ that was swept away by the efforts of the Apostles, such as St Paul.63 In other words, what was buried should remain buried unless it testified to the transforming power of Christianity. The fear that fascism was attempting to resurrect paganism was confirmed by the various letters which came into the Vatican’s Secretariat of State during the 1930s. As part of the Master Plan, the regime aimed to restore the ancient Curia Julia in the Roman Forum, which served as the Senate House for the Roman Republic. Excavating and restoring the Curia entailed the demolition of the church of San Adriano, which rested on top of it. The Bishop of Luni, Giovanni Costantini, wrote the Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, in 1933, recounting how he had tried to convince the Ministry of National Education that the church symbolized the victory of Christian thought over paganism.64 The demolitions in and around the Roman Forum, especially during the building of the Via dell’Impero, had raised fears that the regime would destroy all the churches and convents in the area, either by outright demolition or by forcing nearby churches to stay closed during the work. One priest was concerned that if churches were closed for a period of time, the congregation would not return once they were reopened: ‘We must remain firm in demanding respect for historic churches … These noble churches have marked the glorious pages of the history of Papal Rome … Historic churches must be preserved; the rights of the Church and the Concordat must be respected.’65

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On the occasion of the signing of the Lateran Accords, Mussolini made it clear where he stood on the position of Rome and Christianity, announcing that it was Rome that transformed an obscure Jewish sect into a universal religion, and not Christianity that sanctified Rome – a claim which provoked an angry response from the pope.66 Mussolini’s interpretation of history closely resembled that of Hitler in that he saw the grandeur of Rome as independent of Christianity.67 For Hitler, Christianity was an intrusion that ‘set itself systematically to destroy ancient culture.’68 Hitler compared Christianity to Bolshevism in its role as destroyer of culture, an opinion he would express during his visit to the Diocletian Baths Museum during his Roman tour in May 1938.69 Hitler was convinced that the Catholic Church would eventually die out through the force of evolution. History, in this sense, was nothing more than the story of civilizations and epochs which rise and fall, a view contrary to the Christian, teleological notion of history. Hitler claimed that Christianity’s destructiveness was mainly due to a ‘Jew,’ Saul of Tarsus, or St Paul, who had distorted Christianity by denying the ‘Aryan Jesus.’70 It was precisely over the role of St Paul that Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, and Pius XI’s views of history clashed in the days of the Hitler visit. Whereas Hitler denounced St Paul as the first religious propagandist, Pius XI saw the apostle as the one responsible for converting the pagan Romans. Both Hitler and Pius XI agreed that St Paul was the central figure in transforming ancient Rome, but they disagreed on the meaning of that transformation. These interpretations of St Paul were set against the backdrop of a renewed interest in the apostle in pilgrimages made by the faithful to the Eternal City in the 1930s. The Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica ran a series of articles on the apostle, noting in one case how the tombs of Saints Paul and Peter had become major attractions for modern pilgrims. The Catholic journal thought this significant as the tombs were not ordinary monuments, appealing simply to curiosity, nor were they only shrines attracting Catholic devotion. Instead, the tombs ‘attested to the primacy of Rome’ in turbulent times.71 In 1940, Pius XI’s successor Pius XII, formerly Eugenio Pacelli, the Secretary of State, began his own search for origins similar to fascism’s desire to find and resurrect the pagan past. For Pius XII, the goal was to find the remains of the first pope, St Peter, buried somewhere near the altar of the Basilica of St Peter. Searching for the bones of Peter symbolized the importance of reaffirming the Apostolic tradition in Rome in the face of fascism’s desire to return to the pre-Christian city. The last

Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape 133 two years of Pius XI’s pontificate had been marked by a renewed hostility between the Vatican and the fascist regime over such issues as the Racial Laws and the evolving friendship between Mussolini and Hitler. Beneath the surface of these disputes lay the tension over the meaning of Rome. The Master Plan of 1931 and other fascist projects in the Eternal City had done great damage to relations between Mussolini and Pius XI. Both men fantasized about Rome and remaking it in their own image. For Pius, Rome had to reaffirm itself as a Christian city tracing itself in a continuous line to the transformative work of the Apostles, an idea that the church traced back to the era of Pope Leo I and the Iberian writer Paolo Orosio in the fifth century.72 Mussolini and the fascist movement, by contrast, had an archaic view of Rome’s historic landscape. Its pre-Christian origins were buried rather than transformed, waiting to be liberated by the regime. The primordial, buried underneath the layers of Christianity, needed to be exposed to the light. For the Christian, part of the charm of Rome was to search for hidden shrines and small churches built over pagan sites, but some of these were lost to the pickaxe of the fascist regime, which used archaeology as a means of cutting through the ‘crust’ of Christianity to get at the pagan. Christianity, like the nineteenth century, was an obstacle to the realization of the fascist landscape. It shared the nineteenth century’s view of history as progressive, as one epoch building atop another as it moved towards a definite end. For fascism, salvation lay not in waiting for the end of time, but in the active resurrection of a long-buried primitivism. The fascist vision was akin to what Mircea Eliade described as the archaic view of the past. According to Eliade, ‘archaic (or primitive)’ societies seek to repeat past archetypes in an eternal present, thus eliminating historical time. Christianity, by contrast, which was based on the messianic vision of Judaism and on the writings of Saints Irenaeus, Basil, Gregory, and, finally, Augustine, adhered to a ‘linear conception’ of history. For the Church, history only made sense in the light of eschatology. Significantly, Pius XI reinforced this eschatological vision in December 1925 with the encyclical Quas Primas, which established the feast of Christ the King. According to the Book of Revelation, Christ will return as king at the end of time. Not only did this encyclical reaffirm the Church’s linear, eschatological vision; it also made clear who ultimately ruled on earth. This vision of history seemed behind the times, however. Linear conceptions of history, argued Eliade, reached their zenith in the nineteenth century, while the twentieth century, under the influence of Nietzsche, saw a return of the archaic notions of history.73 The struggle

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over the Roman landscape between fascism and the Vatican reflected this general struggle between two visions of history. Thus Julius Evola, who shared Eliade’s views, by the end of the 1930s could feel somewhat vindicated. In 1938, when the fascist regime issued the Racial Laws, which he agreed with, he was giving lectures to the S.S. in Germany on esoteric traditionalism, which appealed to the Nazi hierarchy more than it did to Mussolini.74 Evola’s stay in Germany coincided, however, with the growing affinity between Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and the possibility of one of Evola’s great dreams: the restoration of the Ghibelline alliance against the Guelphs. This period of medieval history seemed on the verge of resurrection through the Rome-Berlin Axis. What made this possibility more compelling was consecration of the Axis, much to the horror of Pius XI, on the fascist landscape of Rome in May 1938.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Return of the Roman

I had been in the capital only a few months [and] that sudden encounter with the triumphalism of the regime and of a capital overcoming its traditional inferiority with respect to Germany left my fragile youth with my heart in my throat. I believed in everything. I believed that the two revolutions were forged into a common destiny; that indissoluble ideological, political, and military links existed between the two leaders and that their concordance would sweep away the old democracies.1

Thus wrote Nino Tripodi, a future supporter of neo-fascism, on witnessing the triumphal visit of Adolf Hitler to Rome in May 1938. That week, Italy and the world were treated to an unprecedented spectacle. Rome, the Eternal City, city of popes, was transformed into a stage ready to greet the dictator of Germany. Although the German leader would visit Florence and Naples during his week in Italy, Rome was his base to which he would return, spending the majority of his time there. For the occasion, the fascist regime spared nothing in its decoration of the Eternal City, filling the streets of Rome with thousands of swastikas and fasces. Light standards were placed on all of Hitler’s routes, and the monuments of Rome were floodlit, giving Rome an unprecedented illumination. A new railway station, the Stazione Ostiense, was constructed to greet Hitler. No expense was spared in transforming Rome into a fascist spectacle. Not only was Hitler to see the adornments and flags put in place for the occasion, but he was also to experience the new shape of Rome after nearly a decade of the fascist regime’s massive transformation of the Eternal City. For several days, Hitler would crisscross the city on the regime’s new boulevards, feast his eyes on the isolated ruins of antiquity, and gaze upon the Rome of the Master Plan. More than a stage, Rome

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became the leading protagonist in this orgy of fascist spectacle. This was the opportunity for Mussolini to show that he was a new Caesar, that Imperial Rome was once again resurrected, and that the massive demolitions of the preceding years had revived a Rome that was seemingly lost to history. Retrieving a buried past constituted one of the goals of fascism’s remaking of Rome. The Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton noted in a visit to Rome in the 1930s how the Eternal City was witnessing one of its occasional ‘resurrections,’ this one under the fascist regime: ‘What I saw written across Rome was resurgam.’2 Chesterton was convinced that fascism represented the ‘return of the Romans.’ This was a city ‘where the dead are alive … where the past can actually return to the present.’3 Throughout his visit, Chesterton was haunted by the ‘sense of secret things thrusting upwards from below.’4 Chesterton saw the fascist project of retrieving the pagan past as central to its interventions on the Roman cityscape. This is what distinguished it from the Catholic Church, which had always built on top of paganism, thus transforming the pagan past into something new. Christianity could shine a light on paganism, argued Chesterton, and could afford to place a cross on top of an obelisk, as in Piazza del Popolo, and build churches atop pagan temples in the knowledge that it was a ‘superior religion.’ Hence, a church could be named Santa Maria sopra Minerva (St Mary atop Minerva).5 While gazing at Rome from the Pincio gardens overlooking Piazza del Popolo, Chesterton turned his thoughts to the Great War and its role in resurrecting Rome. If the Romans had returned in the guise of fascism, then the war was the agent for turning Europe back on its head after centuries of being ‘upside down.’ History was no longer about progress in the postwar world, it was about a return to origins: ‘What has really happened in the world since the War … is the reawakening of old places and the return to old shrines.’6 ‘A wind of death is coming,’ predicted Chesterton, ‘in which only the very old will not die … Modern madness and treason and anarchy have brought forth, not ancient Roman statues, but ancient Romans.’7 The chronicler of Roman fascism, Domenico Maria Leva, would certainly have agreed with Chesterton. Published the year of Mussolini’s fall from power, Leva’s book on the history of the movement in Rome claimed that the Italians were the people best suited for resurrecting pagan glories as they were the ‘possible heirs of the refugees from Atlantis.’ Italians were a people, therefore, from the depths of the sea, which explained Mussolini’s appeal to the ‘deep and mysterious currents’ of the Italians.8

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Chesterton, like many of his contemporaries, was fascinated by the return of the ancients in modern forms, and it was in fascist Rome that this feeling came to be strongest. Proof of this came in Mussolini’s blackshirts, with their Roman salutes and carrying of lictors. In France many leading intellectuals, including those on the left such as Georges Bataille, were also increasingly enthralled by the spectacle of new regimes such as the Nazis reviving mythology for the purpose of ‘rejecting history and exalting origins’ in order to create a ‘new mysticism.’9 The spectre of returning Romans, of things long suppressed surging to the surface in the late 1930s, haunted the imagination of Simone Weil, the frail, French-Jewish philosopher who wrote in early 1940 that the Nazis were not the embodiment of the ancient German barbarians, but nothing less than a reincarnation of the Imperial Romans. She claimed that the Nazis had rediscovered the ‘peculiar art of the Romans … of imposing submission by terror and prestige rather than by effective power.’10 Prestige was the central pillar of fascist spectacle, especially in the Hitler visit of 1938, which aimed at exalting the power and prestige of Nazism and fascism, two ideologies which appeared to be at the pinnacle of success in the late 1930s. For Weil, the Nazis and the Italian fascists were simply continuing what the ancient Romans had started in their wars over Poland and Albania. Barbarism, Weil warned, has always existed beneath the illusion of progress and civilization, and is a ‘permanent and universal human characteristic, which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.’11 Dreams of a return of the long-suppressed past inflamed the supporters of a Nazi-fascist alliance in 1938 in the days of the visit. For those hoping that fascism would finally reach its potential of restoring Imperial Rome, such as Julius Evola, a new Ghibelline alliance was at hand. In his lost cantos written in 1944, the eccentric, pro-Axis, American poet Ezra Pound envisioned the Second World War as a reincarnation of the Guelph-Ghibelline struggles of the thirteenth century. Mussolini, for Pound, was a new Ezzelino da Romano to Hitler’s Frederick II.12 Pound dreamed that a new Ghibelline alliance would ‘revive pagan vitality and beauty after their millennial suffocation by Hebraized Christianity.’13 Pound’s fantasies of a neo-Ghibelline alliance were no doubt stoked by the spectacle of the Hitler visit of 1938. It was here that fascism made its claim on the city of the Catholic Church, capping the long struggle shown in the previous chapter. The hopes, fantasies, and fears that Nazi Germany and fascist Italy had resurrected a long dormant past, whether it was that of Imperial Rome or the Ghibelline alliance against the papacy, could be found in the days Hitler spent in Rome in May 1938.

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The lavish spectacle presented to him during the event accentuated the landscape of the city. More than Hitler, however, Rome was the star of the show. The spectacle surrounding Hitler’s visit only confirmed these fears and hopes – depending on the political sympathies – of those who saw in the dictators a return of the repressed. Whatever the visit was supposed to be, it was clearly intended as something beyond traditional diplomacy. The visit was given a surreal quality by the mystical atmosphere which greeted Hitler’s arrival on 3 May in the new, purposely built railway station, the Stazione Ostiense. Arriving at night, Hitler was greeted with a ‘phantasmagoric’ Rome illuminated by floodlights and candles. Although the visit was diplomatic, Hitler’s arrival had nothing of the diplomatic about it. It was conceived rather as spectacle cum religious ceremony. This was not simply a meeting between two statesmen, as had occurred in Venice in 1934 when the Duce and Führer met for the first time. The German dictator’s visit to Rome was similar to the spectacle that had greeted Mussolini in Germany the previous September. It was on the way back from that visit the Mussolini decided to treat Hitler to a similar spectacle, only this time with the Eternal City as the stage. More than a stage, however, Rome became in the first week of May 1938 the protagonist. When Pius XI called the preparations for the visit an ‘apotheosis,’ he was pointing out the obvious fact that the German dictator was transformed by the Roman landscape from a foreign head of state to a world-historical figure.14 The agent for this apotheosis was not the fascist regime, but the city of Rome. If Rome had made Christianity, according to Mussolini, then Rome would also make Hitler and, hopefully, the new Axis. Fascist Rome, its roads and ruins, was the landscape which transfixed the gaze of the German dictator. This chapter will show that the Hitler visit was not mere diplomacy, but a religious spectacle played out on that most religious of cities: Rome. The fascist press portrayed the visit as such, focusing on the role played by the Eternal City as the site of a new destiny forged between the two nations, and treating the visit as a sacred rather than diplomatic event. The dominant motifs of the visit were not agreements or diplomatic protocols, but history, monuments, roads, crowds, and motion. Il Giornale described the historic centre as a massive theatre to which thousands of Romans came from all parts of the city in order to partake of the ‘festival.’15 From the moment it was decided that Hitler was to visit the Italian capital, the fascist regime designed it as an example of fascist spectacle. There were several reasons for doing this: first, to imitate the spectacle of

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Mussolini’s visit to Germany in September 1937; second, to masquerade some of the less flattering sections of Rome that would be visible from Hitler’s train; and third, to impress the German leader with the vitality and force of fascist Italy. Finally, the spectacle was designed to emphasize that this was an ideological, not a diplomatic, visit. Preparations for Hitler’s visit began as soon as Mussolini returned from his visit to Germany in September 1937. On that occasion, the Duce had been impressed by the image presented to him of the Reich.16 Speaking to the Frankische Zeitung on his return to Italy, Mussolini noted that this visit was not a typical diplomatic visit where, despite much fanfare, ‘everything remained exactly as before.’17 Determined that Hitler’s return visit would not be an ordinary visit where nothing changed, Mussolini appointed a planning commission in January 1938 chaired by Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano which included, among others, Fascist Party secretary Achille Starace, and the minister of popular culture, Dino Alfieri.18 That this was not to be an ordinary state visit was proved by the depth of planning and detail involved. As soon as Hitler crossed into Italy at the Brenner Pass, an impressive machinery of organization was to take over every minute of the visit. One American journalist did not exaggerate when he reported that ‘along every inch of Hitler’s route he will get an eyeful of the new Italy at its proudest.’19 In the months preceding the visit, commission members inspected different sections of the railroad tracks between the Brenner Pass and Rome and between Rome and Naples. Security was a main concern for these inspections but even more significant were the aesthetics. Commission members were especially concerned about signs of urban degradation. The section of track between Rome and Naples was troublesome in this respect. No fewer than sixteen trouble spots were noted on this line, the worst being an industrial dump near the town of Torricola. ‘Indecorous houses’ also lined the track between the villages of Campoleone and Cisterna.20 The track between Rome and Florence was similarly flagged because of a series of ‘non-aesthetic’ buildings. Special attention was given to the approaches to Termini Station in Rome. On his first night, Hitler was to arrive in the newly constructed Ostiense Station to the southwest of the city, but on his trips to Naples and Florence his train would use the Termini Station. Generally disliked for its garish architectural style, Termini was also inconveniently located at the point where the working-class San Lorenzo quarter met with the nineteenth-century quarter. Neglected by the regime because of its leftwing character, San Lorenzo had become a slum, while a part of it had

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been demolished to make way for the University of Rome. The committee that inspected this section of the track urged the city of Rome to clean up the five to six kilometres leading into the station. According to the committee’s report, Rome had to eliminate ‘the contrast between the grandiosity of the ancient ruins and the ugly look of certain rundown houses and of some façades devoid of colour and reduced to desolate mosaics of cracking plaster.’21 With time running short, the commission proposed different aesthetic solutions to these problems. The worst cases of degradation had to be masked by billboards which carried either propaganda or advertising. The latter solution was preferred, as private companies would cover the expense. In less dire cases, owners were told to repaint their houses to make them worthy of Hitler’s gaze. No expense was spared to show Hitler and the Germans an Italy of order and cleanliness. In this way, the preparations for the visit were an extension of the Master Plan of 1931, with its obsessions over hygiene. The link between the Hitler visit and the remaking of the Roman landscape by fascism were hinted at clearly. Another means of masquerading unpleasant sights was the abundant use of flags, which lined the entire train route. The commission painstakingly detailed the position of every flag on the route, with ‘artistically placed’ banners adorning every building in Hitler’s line of sight.22 The commission planned for 11,671 Italian flags and 11,264 German flags to be flown along the route.23 The near identical number of German and Italian flags sent a clear message of unity between the two nations. Significantly, the only place where Italian flags clearly outnumbered the swastika was in the Tyrolian capital of Bolzano, a city which contained a high number of ethnic Germans. The number of flags was important in the symbolism of the visit. Diplomats had made note of the great number of flags used for the Yugoslav prime minister’s visit to Berlin the year before, and the great sea of flags that had decorated Vienna in the days of the Anschluss.24 As with the flags, a precise number of people were decreed for each station, leaving the local prefects with the responsibility of rounding them up. The presence of cheering crowds at all the stations at which Hitler’s train stopped amplified this impression of unity. The commission wanted Hitler to see at least one million Italians on the route.25 The traditionally left-wing city of Bologna was asked to provide the largest crowd, 60,000, while fascist-friendly Florence was asked for only 15,000.26 The hope was that this mass of people would offer Hitler ‘the spectacle of one uninterrupted manifestation of enthusiasm and cordiality.’27

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The ubiquity of the swastika along the route dispelled any sense of border or frontier between the two countries and presented to Italians and Germans the image of an unbroken axis. The train route, which cut through the Tyrol, was the physical manifestation of the axis between the two countries, thus rendering this disputed region a non-issue. The Tyrol was a site of tension in the days leading up to the visit as a result of the Anschluss. Riots broke out in the region on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday, 20 April, while Italians were afraid that the fascist regime was about to hand over the Tyrol to the German Reich during the visit. German diplomatic archives show that the Germans were sensitive to the problem and that the Italians had to receive assurances of the inviolability of the Brenner frontier.28 The symbolism of the visit went further than this, however. The sense of a frontier or border was eliminated altogether, and the fact that the duke of Pistoia, and not Mussolini, met Hitler at the Brenner suggested that the border was less important than the ultimate destination in Rome, where Mussolini would greet the German leader. Another important reason for the exaggerated spectacle was simply to impress Hitler. Mussolini had known for years that Hitler had an obsession with Rome. Even before Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, Mussolini was made aware of the Austrian’s Roman dreams through his contact with Hitler, Giuseppe Renzetti. In 1931 and 1932 Renzetti transmitted to Mussolini Hitler’s requests to visit the Duce in Rome. Hitler, in fact, had requested a visit in July 1932, just days before the German presidential elections. In his description of Hitler, Renzetti laid the foundations for the 1938 visit: ‘Hitler is a vegetarian and he does not drink wine. He adores music and would like to visit, if it is not too hot, the monuments and museums of Rome. He is very impressionable and a warm welcome could leave a lasting effect on him. He speaks only German.’29 Clearly, leaving a lasting effect on Hitler was of paramount importance for the fascist regime, and his days in Rome were carefully designed to cater to his own tastes. In later years, Hitler recalled fondly the visit to Italy, expressing a desire to live there in anonymity as a painter.30 During the visit he frequently commented on ‘sunny Italy’ and the elegance of the ladies walking on the Via Veneto.31 ‘Rome captivated me,’ recalled Hitler.32 Urbanist Antonio Muñoz saw Hitler as a German artist following in the footsteps of Goethe, coming to Italy for inspiration.33 The tradition of Germans coming to Italy was a favourite theme of Mussolini’s. On the occasion of Goethe’s centenary in 1932, Mussolini delivered a speech to the Institute of Italo-Germanic Culture in which he spoke of Goethe’s need to ‘descend into the depths of his soul to discover his vocation.’34

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Italy was necessary for the German, said the director of the Institute in a follow-up speech, as the nostalgia for Italy was innate in the German soul. During the visit Hitler saw himself in the same way, as irresistibly drawn to Italy. Reminiscing about his visit in the 1940s, Hitler blamed the Jews for preventing the natural alliance between Germany and Italy.35 The German, argued Hitler, had always looked south rather than east for inspiration.36 Hitler then was not just an ordinary visitor, but the latest in a long line of German travellers longing for Italy. The fascist regime was ready to transform Hitler into a new Goethe admiring the Eternal City. This time, however, it was not papal city that would welcome these German travellers, but the city built by Mussolini. The Itinerary The LUCE documentary made for the visit opens the account of Hitler’s first full day in dramatic fashion; it shows his motorcade blasting out of the Quirinal Palace at full speed.37 The message was clear, that Hitler was in Rome not as a tourist but in a manner fitting for the arditi. The itinerary of his first day resembled an expedition of the squadristi for its speed and intensity. It was Balbo’s ‘ring of fire’ without the fire. Appropriately, the day began with a stop at one of Rome’s most prominent ancient monuments, the Pantheon, where the German leader laid a wreath at the tomb of King Victor Emmanuel II. Hitler was far more interested in the architecture of the building and the fact that Raphael, the painter, was buried there.38 When he made a second, private, visit to the Pantheon later in the visit, the newspapers remarked how he lingered for an extended period of time at the tomb of the painter.39 The fact that the Pantheon was also a church was hardly remarked upon. The next stop was the monument dedicated to Victor Emmanuel in Piazza Venezia, where another wreath was laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A visit to the Fascist Party headquarters on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and the monument to fascist martyrs completed Hitler’s wreath-laying duties for the day. The morning ended with a private meeting with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia. The structure of the itinerary carefully followed the fascist interpretation of Italian history, beginning with unification and ending with fascism via the Unknown Soldier. The tour began with homage to the Italian king who united the country and ended in the Duce’s office – the supposed centre of power in the new Italy. This ideal tour through Italian history was continued in the afternoon, when Hitler was taken to

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the airfield in Centocelle (a suburb south of Rome) to assist at a massive parade of fifty thousand fascist youth.40 In order to reach the airfield, Hitler was taken along the ancient Roman Appian Way, the route used by triumphant Roman armies marching back from distant conquests. In one stroke, Hitler moved from the current leader of fascist Italy to its future via the frame of Rome’s ancient glory. This was a masterful use by the regime of Rome’s various historical associations. War loomed large during Hitler’s Italian stay. On 5 May, the visit’s second full day, Hitler witnessed an impressive display by the Italian navy in Naples Bay. The next day, back in Rome, Hitler reviewed a colossal parade of over thirty thousand by the combined armed forces on the Via dei Trionfi, one of the boulevards constructed by the regime at the foot of the Palatine Hill underneath the ruins of the Emperors’ palaces. The parade included Libyan cavalry, in keeping with the theme of Africa which pervaded the entire visit.41 The next day at Furbara, outside Rome, Hitler watched a display by the Italian air force where actual bombs were dropped on the empty field by three hundred airplanes.42 Later that day he was taken to another field at Santa Marinella to watch an infantry exercise, which also involved actual artillery fire and assaults on fixed positions: ‘Artillery, mortars, and machine guns will use real bullets,’ exclaimed the official guide for the visit.43 Designed to show Italy’s military might, these exercises undoubtedly appealed to Hitler’s fascination with war.44 The military exercises caught the attention of the foreign media, something that the regime was keen to do. Bianchi Bandinelli, the Italian art professor assigned to be Hitler’s tour guide, noted how Mussolini was conscious of foreign opinion during Hitler’s stay.45 Because of the visit, Rome had become the centre of international attention.46 After the event concluded, Life magazine published a photo spread of the naval and military exercises. The exercises were impressive for their ‘realism’ and for demonstrating the ‘awful patterns of death and destruction that thousands of men and hundreds of guns can paint on a field of battle.’47 While remaining sceptical of Hitler’s popularity among Italians, the New York Times remarked upon the military exercises, which seemed like ‘dress rehearsals, more terrifying as they become more perfect.’48 The Times had already realized that the Hitler visit was ‘not merely show’ and that the impressive retinue of military officials who accompanied Hitler was an ominous portent.49 A demonstration of power was a key motif of the visit. The journal of the GUF, Roma Fascista, predicted that Italy would offer Hitler a Nietzschian demonstration of its ‘will to power.’50

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Hitler’s other great love, art, also figured prominently in the visit. Although Mussolini had little love for art, he knew of Hitler’s passion for it and ensured that the German leader was provided with a full tour of Rome’s artistic heritage. While in Rome, Hitler took in the Borghese Museum and the Museo delle Terme, located in the bowels of the Diocletian baths. Hitler was also shown the Capitoline museums next to the city hall. The Bernini fountains and palazzi, designed by Michelangelo, filled his days as well. The guidebook given to Italian and Nazi officials for the visit amply outlined the archaeological and artistic artefacts that confronted Hitler. Even while reviewing the military parade on the Via dei Trionfi, the Nazi leader’s gaze would be met, according to the guide, by the ‘frontal view of the Palatine Hill’ and its majestic ruins.51 Thus, art and war merged seamlessly. The art that most appealed to Hitler, architecture, filled his gaze. Not only did Hitler see the ruins of antiquity, but he was also shown the present architectural and urban accomplishments of the regime. During his final day in Rome, Hitler saw the Foro Mussolini, the complex of buildings and sport stadiums built at the foot of Monte Mario dedicated to the March on Rome. Inaugurated in 1932, the Foro Mussolini included an obelisk with the words ‘Mussolini Dux’ emblazoned on it. His motorcade route on the final day ensured that Hitler also had a look at the Marcello Piacentini–designed University of Rome in the San Lorenzo quarter. Together, the Foro Mussolini and the university provided the best examples of fascist architecture in Rome. Hitler’s itinerary made extensive use of the new roads built by the regime under the Master Plan of 1931. At various times during the visit, he saw the recently excavated Teatro Marcello, the Tomb of Augustus, and the Imperial and Republican fora. The Via del Mare, Via dell’Impero, and Via dei Trionfi provided the highways and theatres for the visit. Hitler, who had a great love for open roads, no doubt appreciated these wide boulevards carved out by the regime amid the ruins of antiquity.52 He saw the autobahns of Germany as ‘aesthetic monuments.’53 The roads also allowed Hitler to indulge in his favourite pastime, riding in an automobile.54 He came to the right place in 1938. Road building was fascism’s art par excellence and Hitler’s entourage was made to see every kilometre of road built by the regime in Rome. These were the real attractions of the visit. So prominent were the roads that Hitler spent most of his time in the car. He would later comment that he regretted not being able to linger at the city’s monuments; ‘regrettably I saw the monuments only fleetingly.’55 His beloved

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Mercedes-Benz would log hundreds of kilometres during his stay, keeping him far from the crowds and better able to focus on the monuments. Hitler’s guide, Bianchi Bandinelli, would later write how Hitler was further removed from the crowds during his time in Rome because of the wider boulevards compared to Florence’s.56 The substantial time spent on the boulevards made Hitler nervous about potential threats from the crowds. The king would later confide to Marshall Enrico Caviglia about Hitler’s fears on the Via dell’Impero: When Hitler came to Rome he must have been very worried about his safety and his life. Naturally the police had taken all precautions. Yet, while moving along the Via dell’Impero, near the ruins of Servius Tullius, he saw some girls and young women who had their eyes fixed on us. Hitler never let them out of his sight, looking at them suspiciously as if he feared an attack from them. He was very agitated.57

Hitler feared an ambush just like the blackshirts before 1922, for the open road was a place of triumph but also one of possible death. Bianchi Bandinelli almost fulfilled this threat when he later wrote that the enormous amount of time spent on Rome’s boulevards gave him the possibility of making slight modifications to the itinerary by suggesting a pause at some monument or panorama, and thus setting up Hitler for assassination. This was possible because Bianchi Bandinelli was never placed under surveillance before the visit, even though he claimed to associate with anti-fascists.58 The Duce’s Rome The morning after Hitler’s arrival, the fascist party’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, exclaimed that the German leader had seen the ‘Rome of Mussolini, which is masculine and warrior-like.’59 Although Hitler indeed came to see Mussolini’s Rome, protocol for the visit demanded that the king play a prominent role. In later years, Hitler remarked on the sour note provided by the king and the aristocracy during the Italian visit.60 He was never comfortable in the king’s presence and was contemptuous of the courtiers.61 Mussolini also recalled with some discomfort the fact that Hitler rode with the king during his triumphant entrance into Rome. After Mussolini greeted the Nazi leader at the train station, he was forced to take the back roads of Rome through the working-class Testaccio neighbourhood in order not to interfere with Hitler’s procession

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through the historic centre. It was a bitter pill for Mussolini to swallow, knowing that it was the king escorting Hitler on fascism’s boulevards, while he had to speed through the narrow, jagged streets of the Testaccio. Mussolini took comfort in the fact that the ‘Führer intended to visit the Duce’s Rome above all.’62 The omnipresence of the king and his court provided a constant reminder of the liberal Rome that fascism had tried hard to eradicate. Hitler’s entourage would also acquire an intense dislike of the monarchy, describing the institution throughout the visit in terms that recalled fascism’s description of liberal Rome. Ribbentrop told Ciano at one point that the monarchy was a ‘mouldy’ institution that disliked revolutionary regimes such as the fascist one and ‘parvenus’ such as Hitler.63 Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler compared the atmosphere of the Quirinal Palace to an ‘old film set’ in contrast to the ‘air of revolution’ sweeping through Palazzo Venezia.64 Ciano would express frustration in his diary at the tendency of the king and his courtiers to gossip about Hitler and his alleged drug use and other strange goings-on while they were staying at the Quirinal Palace. Ciano was convinced that the king was telling tales about his unwanted guest in order to undermine the impact of the visit.65 In all this there were echoes of the intrigues of liberal Italy. The Hitler visit raised uncomfortable memories of liberal Italy and made Mussolini conscious of the restrictions that the presence of the king placed on his regime. Not surprisingly, the regime began to move against the monarchy in the months following the visit. The PNF secretary, Achille Starace, who choreographed the fascist party rallies, was the instrument behind these manoeuvres after May 1938.66 The Hitler visit was a catalyst for this, as Nazi Germany was increasingly the model the fascist regime looked towards. Giuseppe Bottai remarked in his diary in July 1938 that ‘Nazi Germany appears to have become the benchmark for our fascist faith. A trip to Germany is a feather-in-the-cap for party functionaries hoping to advance.’67 As early as June, Bottai wrote that the ‘problem of the relationship between king and Duce has taken on a certain vogue.’68 This development was also noticed by monarchist and fascist sympathizers outside the government. Luigi Federzoni, a monarchist and former cabinet minister, became increasingly disillusioned with the regime in 1938 when it began moving against the monarchy.69 The lingering presence of liberal Rome thus pushed the regime to rediscover the iconoclastic fervour of its early years. Hitler’s presence in Rome also raised tensions with that other custodian of the Roman cityscape, the Vatican.

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Not the Cross of Christ Decorating the streets of Rome with swastikas made a profound impact on Pope Pius XI. The pontiff was not insulted by Hitler’s visit to Rome but by the adornment of the Eternal City to greet the German leader. It was the physical appearance of Rome during the visit that deeply offended Pius and brought to a head the increasing divide between the Vatican and the fascist regime over the Roman cityscape. It also sharpened relations between the papacy and the Nazi government that began when Pius XI issued his encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Sorrow) the previous year, an encyclical that condemned the racial policies of the Nazi regime. What angered Pius XI in the spring of 1938 was the presence of the swastika on all the major streets of Rome. For the pope, the extent to which the fascist regime went in displaying a cross that was ‘not the cross of Christ’ was tantamount to an apotheosis of the German visitor. The pope’s anger at the flags was piqued when the Roman newspapers announced that the Via della Conciliazione was included in one of the itineraries and that both public and private buildings on the road had to display the flags of Italy and Germany. The Via della Conciliazione was the great boulevard built by the regime to commemorate the signing of the Lateran Accords of 1929 and included several pontifical institutions. Pius instructed his secretary of state to refuse the request, adding that Mussolini be given the following message from him: ‘It would cause great displeasure to the Holy Father who was once assured that nothing would ever be done to cause him displeasure. His Holiness would like to know if the apotheosis granted to this sworn enemy of the Catholic Church [Hitler] is not a violation of Article 1 of the Concordat and of common sense.’70 The Apostolic Nunzio to Italy, Borgongini Duca, would repeat the charge about Hitler in a meeting with the fascist undersecretary of the foreign affairs, Buffarini Guidi: ‘I told him that the man for whom such great festivities are being organized is the greatest persecutor of the Church. I told him in confidence that the Holy Father had recently been driven to tears by events in Germany and Austria.’71 Clearly, the Roman cityscape’s role in celebrating Hitler caused the pope great discomfort, as the Eternal City was being used to exalt an anti-Catholic statesman. The fascist regime agreed to drop the Via della Conciliazione from the visit, but insisted that it be well lit. Pius XI’s response was to leave the

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city for the duration of the German leader’s stay. In the months preceding the visit, the Vatican had expressed a willingness to set up a meeting between Hitler and the pope, but the Germans refused, arguing that the purpose of the visit was an ideological one and that a meeting would be ‘impossible.’72 Not all Catholics were happy with the pope’s decision. One anonymous letter to the Secretariat of State in the Vatican urged Pius XI to stay in the Eternal City and not leave the city to the exaltation of ‘anti-Christian and anti-Latin Germanism.’73 Acknowledging the vexed relations with the Vatican, Hitler’s Roman itineraries studiously ignored Papal Rome. Not mentioned once in the official guide was the dome of St. Peter’s, even though Hitler’s car passed close to it on several occasions. In fact, very few churches made it on the tour guide and the few that did were there only for artistic, not religious, reasons. Hitler did not visit the interior of any church in Rome except for the Pantheon which had been converted to a church and a mausoleum for the royal family. All this did not go unnoticed, eliciting comment especially in the French press. Louis Gillet wrote, ‘One could enter any parish and listen to the long prayers of the Rosary offered in reparation of this outrage.’74 Ignore it he might, but Hitler was surrounded by Christian iconography everywhere he turned. The Quirinal Palace, for example, was full of Christian imagery. Now the residence of the king, the Quirinale was, before 1870, a residence of the pope. Religious paintings hung on the walls of Hitler’s apartments, leading Gillet to write gleefully in the Revue des Deux Mondes of ‘the revenge of piety on paganism.’75 Prophet, Priest, God Adolf Hitler was meant to see a specific landscape, the landscape created by the fascist regime since 1922. The regime did not use the visit as an opportunity to sign new treaties, which confirmed its purpose as primarily ideological rather than diplomatic. What then was the meaning of this spectacle? Why did the regime go to such extraordinary lengths to welcome a leader who was not generally popular among the Italian public, and raised potential problems with the Germans who lived in the Tyrol? The reason for such an effort was to display the new Rome and to inaugurate the Eternal City as the new caput mundi, whose purpose was to spread the gospel of fascism. Long before the event the newspaper of the fascist unions, Il Lavoro Fascista, exclaimed that the visit was creating a new political and moral conception of history: ‘Hitler and Mussolini have revealed to all … a profound and, let us say, religious concept of

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life.’76 Mussolini and Hitler were not merely politicians, continued the editorial; ‘their wills converge in an absolute solitude of spirit, their goals are on the distant horizon, their decisions irrevocable.’77 Even foreign observers such as Gillet could not help but notice the religious aura that surrounded the visit. Trying to explain how Hitler, a visiting head of state, did not meet with the pontiff while in Rome, Gillet concluded that the German leader was no mere leader and that the problems he had with the pope were not the usual conflict between secular and religious leaders: ‘What complicates the issue is that this is a quarrel between two spiritual powers. Mr Hitler is a religious personality. He is more than a prophet; he is a founder of a religion. He is a priest. He is a god. For him, the Pope is a rival for souls. A god is by nature jealous. He will not share with other gods. He will never allow competition from other gods. To him alone is owed everything.’78 The visit seemed to consecrate the new religion of fascism and the person of Adolf Hitler, a process that began as soon as the German leader set foot on Roman soil. Hitler’s entry into Rome resembled that of a conquering hero, leading some to see him as a reincarnation of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who made an equally triumphant entrance through St Paul’s gate in 1536.79 Leo Longanesi wrote in his memoir that this was the greatest greeting given to any foreign leader since that visit. Mussolini, like Pope Paul III in the sixteenth century, wanted to amaze this German leader by knocking down houses and opening up grand boulevards.80 The import of the occasion was noted in Galeazzo Ciano’s diary entry for 3 May 1938, which simply stated, ‘Arrival of the Führer.’81 It was the only entry for the day – the only one that mattered. That night, Hitler’s train steamed into the new Ostiense Station purposely built for the visit. The station, an example of architectural modernism, was located outside the St Paul’s Gate, to the southwest of the historic centre. The site was ideal, as it allowed Hitler the chance to ride along the new imperial avenues built by the fascist regime through the centre of the city. After detraining at Ostiense, Hitler rode into the city in a horse-drawn carriage accompanied by King Victor Emmanuel III. The New York Times noted with some irony that ‘Chancellor A. Hitler, exponent of the airplane and automobile, will return to the horse and buggy era.’82 The fact that Hitler had to enter the city in a manner which suited the monarchy was compensated for by the entry point and itinerary of that first night in Rome. The choice of this entrance gave the regime the opportunity to show Hitler a fascist view of the city. Had Hitler entered via the Termini Station, he would have seen the less inspiring nineteenth-century quarter of Rome

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built by the liberal monarchy in the years following the Risorgimento.83 What Hitler saw instead was the imposing St Paul’s Gate flanked by the massive Pyramid of Caius Cestius. Once through the gate, Hitler was suddenly confronted with the Obelisk of Axium, stolen by the regime after the conquest of Ethiopia, followed by the majestic ruins of the imperial palaces on the Palatine Hill. Now, on the avenues that fascism built, the Via dei Trionfi and the Via dell’Impero, Hitler went under the Arch of Constantine, then past the Coliseum and the Imperial Fora. Thus, in his first minutes in Rome Hitler was immediately shown the imperial grandeur of the Eternal City, both of the recent fascist empire and the ancient Roman one. What elevated the entrance to mystical, religions status was the use of lighting. According to Il Messaggero, some 3500 kilowatts of light pouring out of 300 candelabra awaited Hitler’s carriage as it entered the city.84 The results stunned even Romans, long accustomed to political and papal pageantry. Leo Longanesi noted years later the impact of the entrance on Romans who were shown the familiar landscape of Rome in a new way. Longanesi’s description of the scene is worth quoting in full: Rome was transformed into a vast operatic stage so that, at night, the Führer could admire a spectacle worthy of Nero: the Coliseum launched flames from its falling arches, the pines radiated green and yellow lights which made them appear crystalline, the Arch of Constantine appeared phosphorous, and ruins of the Forum emanated reflections of silver. Coloured vapours of magnesium and mercury rose up to the sky, and red gas flames flickered atop large plaster tripods. All the resources of cinema and theatre were put into operation. Romans, with mouths wide open, surrounded the wide, imperial avenues, incredulous at the richness of their city, and admiring its splendour.85

Foreign observers were taken aback by the spectacle as well. Louis Gillet was especially amazed by the massive candelabra which lined the avenues. He wrote that this lighting created a ‘powerful effect in truly Roman style.’86 Hitler was similarly impressed by the ‘magical spectacle of the Coliseum in flames reflecting off the ruins of the Forum.’87 His entourage was amazed at the sight which unfolded before them. As Hitler’s horse-drawn carriage passed through the St Paul’s Gate, his interpreter Paul Schmidt noted the ‘fairytale’ image presented to him by the Pyramid of Caius Cestius. The intense lighting on the Via dei Trionfi

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made it appear as if it was daytime, and the Coliseum ‘looked on fire.’88 The impact of these pyrotechnics was to give the event a transcendent and mystical feel. Mino Maccari, in Il Popolo d’Italia, claimed that Rome had been magically transformed.89 For Paul Schmidt, everything seemed unreal; only the faces of friends reminded him of reality during the days of the visit.90 The New York Times exclaimed how, in the daylight, the preparations looked ‘garish and unreal as an empty stage in daytime. Tomorrow night, when Hitler arrives … it will be quite different.’91 The distinction between the real and the unreal was a common theme of the visit, and the ceremony to welcome Hitler blurred that distinction. Longanesi’s alchemical description of the scene reinforced the religious and mystical tone of the night, but it was the Roman cityscape which provided the necessary backdrop. The lighting display also served as a reminder of the war experience. Antonio Gibelli has shown how serving on the front during the war exposed soldiers to lighting displays from explosions and flares that caused perceptual shocks. Lights, according to Gibelli, ‘gave a theatrical quality to the battlefield [they] made things seem new and different.’92 The choice of St Paul’s Gate as the entry point for Hitler’s visit to Rome was central in providing such a scenography. The area around the gate had been the focus of intense development in years preceding 1938. It was here that the regime chose to concentrate the symbols of Italy’s new empire, the Obelisk of Axum and the Ministry of Italian East Africa. Through the gate, located near the Via del Mare, was the route to the E42 and, beyond, to Ostia and Mare Nostrum. Thus, the gate was the most important link between the new and old Rome, a fact emphasized by the modernist Stazione Ostiense, which kept Hitler from using the nineteenth-century Termini Station and its adjoining Piazza Esedra, an example of the ‘heaviness of the 1800s,’ according to the magazine of the Touring Club Italiano.93 In order to further stamp a modernist tone on the area around the gate, the regime had constructed a massive gasworks structure in the hope of promoting the industrial development of the city.94 The zone around St Paul’s Gate also included ruins which reminded the visitor of the primordial origins of Rome. Straddling the gate was the massive pyramid, the tomb of a Roman senator who had a love for things Egyptian and whose style suited the African motif favoured by the regime. The pyramid also reminded observers of the eastern influences on the Romans.95 In this manner, Christianity was minimized as just one of many religions to find a home in the Eternal City. This was

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emphasized by the so-called Protestant cemetery, just inside the gate, burial place of the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron, and dedicated to those who did not share enthusiasm for Catholic Rome. Carlo Cecchelli, in an article on Hitler’s route in Capitolium, called this cemetery ‘sacred ground,’ a description guaranteed to raise the ire of the Vatican.96 Hitler’s entrance, already shrouded in mystical suggestion, took on extra significance in the context of the regime’s tensions with the Church. It was a bitter irony for the Vatican that Hitler should use the gate named after the apostle whom the German leader disdained and blamed for the destruction of ancient, pagan Rome. Urbe et Orbi The Hitler visit of 1938 served as fascism’s Urbe et Orbi message. While the fascist regime had staged many spectacles over the years, most notably Mussolini’s declaration of empire in May 1936, nothing compared to this prolonged festival of fascism. For nearly a week, Rome emitted a message of solidarity between the two regimes. Anti-fascist journalist Max Ascoli, writing from his exile in New York City, noted that although there were important differences between the two ideologies, they ‘understood each other.’97 Ascoli suggested that a fusion of sorts had occurred during the visit between Berlin and Rome, and a tendency to copy each other was now the case in both capitals.98 Rome was the place where the destiny of the two nations was forged, and it was not a coincidence that the fascist regime accelerated its process of radicalization in domestic and foreign policy, especially against the monarchy, after the visit.99 The trip was clearly designed to send a message to the rest of the world about the character and destiny of fascism. It was in keeping with Mussolini’s visit to Germany the previous September, which was, according to the literary journal Nuova Antologia, a ‘spectacle of force’ between two compatible nations.100 Coming as it did in a triumphant period in fascist history, the visit reinforced the notion of fascism as the avant-garde of political movements. Hitler’s Roman visit was a consecration of the Axis, and its effect was to send a message to the world that Rome was once again the centre of a missionary religion. The word ‘apotheosis’ used by Pope Pius XI to condemn the event was adopted by the fascist newspapers as well. ‘It is an apotheosis!’ exclaimed Silvio Petrucci in the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia.101 The most pro-Nazi of the Roman newspapers, Telesio Interlandi’s Il Tevere, used the term several times during the visit in headlines such as

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the following: ‘Apotheosis of the Empire and Its Formidable Instruments of Power.’102 Just before Hitler’s arrival, as Mussolini prepared to greet him at the station, a headline in Il Tevere announced the ‘Beginning of the Apotheosis.’103 The subject of this apotheosis was Hitler, who was transformed into several different archetypes during the visit. On one level, he was the German Romantic of the nineteenth century, coming to Rome to contemplate the ruins of Mediterranean civilization. He was a new Goethe. Like so many Germans in previous centuries, Hitler had come to Rome to take in Italian culture. On his third night in Rome, Hitler was treated to a concert in the Roman city hall atop the Capitoline Hill. There, he listened to selections from Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini. Later that night, at the Piazza Siena he was treated to more Verdi and his own musical hero, Wagner.104 At other times, especially during his entrance into Rome, Hitler appeared as the reincarnation of the old Holy Roman Emperors. Like the emperors of the Middle Ages, Hitler needed to come to Rome to receive his consecration. This was a re-enactment of the medieval Romfahrt. No doubt Hitler, like many Germans of his generation, had read the German historians of the nineteenth century who had written extensively on the subject.105 A common theme of the Romfahrt was the dream of glory and power that could only be conferred by Rome.106 The Italians reinforced this impression with descriptions of the event such as the one in Nuova Antologia, which depicted Hitler as the ‘German who will shortly cross the Alps and will see up close this Imperial Italy, full of peaceful projects but also filled with arms under the Latin sun.’107 Whereas the Holy Roman emperors had often come to a Rome that only gave glimpses of its once glorious past, the fascist regime was determined to show this new emperor a restored Pax Romana under the new Augustus, Mussolini. Hitler as war veteran also constituted an important theme of the visit. His visit to the Unknown Soldier was a focal point of the trip. The Great War was an omnipresent shadow during throughout the event. The fact that the two nations had been enemies during the war was forgotten; what united them were the war experience and the sense of grievance and injustice that both countries felt in 1918. Hitler, like Mussolini, had come from the trenches. Georges Bernanos claimed in the late 1930s that Hitler was the German Unknown Soldier.108 Nowhere was this more evident than in Rome, where this unassuming figure was feted in a way that reminded Romans of the day in November 1921 that the Unknown

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Soldier was brought to Rome. The spiritual and sacral aura that surrounded the visit gave the impression that Hitler was a new god, a shaman, coming to transform Romans and unite the German and Italian peoples. Like the Milite Ignoto, there was a sense of divinity around this exceptional figure who had entered the Eternal City. When Hitler left Italy, the memory that remained of the visit was not of Hitler and Mussolini, but of the cityscape which served as the backdrop for the event. One witness to the events remembered that the ‘echo of the manifestations’ lasted long after the visit ended.109 The vast majority of the articles in newspapers and journals focused on the Roman scenario (setting). The enigmatic Hitler was rarely analysed with any depth; he was for the most part a wide-eyed spectator taking in the sights of the Eternal City just like the thousands of Romans who lined the streets. Bernanos described Hitler as a kind of ‘phantom,’ and this was certainly true of his days in Rome.110 But Hitler was hardly just a guest. As this chapter has shown, he was very much a part of the play, only that the scenario was the part responsible for transforming the protagonist. Even Mussolini, the king, and the fascist gerarchi were treated as nothing more than walkon characters in this drama. The key to the spectacle was the fascist landscape, its roads and its open spaces. Hitler’s visit marked the high point of fascism’s encounter with the Eternal City. It seemed as if all the demolitions and road building of the previous eight years had culminated in this one fascist spectacle. With this religious rite complete, Rome could now begin transmitting the message of the Fascist Revolution to the world. The Hitler visit marked the official announcement that Rome had been conquered. This process began in 1922, when the blackshirts entered the city during the March on Rome; it continued in the guise of urban planning, when the cityscape of Rome was transformed in the fascist image; and it was consecrated in May of 1938, when the new Holy Roman Emperor was welcomed as conquering hero. The conflation of the Germanic and the Latin which began on the plateau and the plain of north-eastern Italy during the Great War found its ‘apotheosis’ in the days of Adolf Hitler’s triumphal visit.

CONCLUSION

The Cinematic City

During his visit of May 1938, Adolf Hitler spent most of his time in his high-powered Mercedes-Benz travelling on the Eternal City’s fascist boulevards. Hitler experienced what thousands of Romans had lived with throughout the 1930s; they had seen the city transformed before their eyes from the viewing platforms provided by the roads. This experience of the Roman cityscape was captured a year later by urban planner Gustavo Giovannoni, who had been part of the 1931 Master Plan commission: ‘We who live in this era are almost oblivious to the immense transformations which are occurring in front of our eyes … It is almost like watching a speeded-up film which does not allow one to grasp the fleeting image.’1 Giovannoni grasped the essence of fascist Rome as a city that was built for the benefit of the moving eye. Because of this, Romans were forced to rely on that most modern way of seeing known as the gaze, an unfocused awareness defined by James Elkins: the ‘paradox of seeing is that the more forcefully [one] tries to see, the more blind [we] become.’2 Looking back on the Master Plan, Giovannoni was astonished at the profound changes wrought by the fascist regime on Rome. Giovannoni was never a devoted fascist. His experience and reputation as an urban planner predated the regime, and he was known to be opposed to some of the more comprehensive demolitions planned by the regime. Yet, like so many caught up in the regime’s encounter with the Eternal City, Giovannoni ended up supporting the radical transformation of the city.3 The transformation was profound. By 1940, little remained of the historic centre that fascism had inherited in 1922. Thousands of people had been moved to the shanty towns on the peripheries of the city; scores of

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buildings including churches and ancient landmarks were erased from memory, as were medieval streets. In their place remained isolated ruins and wide boulevards. It was Giovannoni who saw in this seemingly bleak landscape the promise of a new, de-urbanized Rome. In a series of articles and books published between 1934 and 1939, during the high point of fascism’s transformation of the Eternal City, Giovannoni explained the significance of the regime’s encounter with Rome. As the demolitions disfigured the historic landscape of the Eternal City, Giovannoni noted the centrifugal forces unleashed by the regime’s urban planning. Rather than draw life into the historic centre, Giovannoni called for a city that pushed outward along the radial axes of the regime’s boulevards. The new Rome, in the eyes of Giovannoni, was to be a city of not one, but multiple centres. What Giovannoni perceived in the development of Rome was a city that was paradoxically de-urbanizing. In the push out into the countryside along the regime’s roads, such as the Via del Mare, Romans were being re-introduced to a rustic lifestyle. They could now live in houses surrounding by land rather than the overcrowded tenements of the historic centre. Thus, the new Rome represented a return to the land, to the ancestral homes of the ancient Romans. This desire to de-urbanize was a main pillar of the fascist Weltanschaung, as the modern city was conceived as part of modernity’s decadence. De-urbanization also signified a return to the pre-Christian roots of the Roman Empire. Arrigo Solmi, senator, historian, and minister of justice under the regime, wrote in a volume edited by Giovannoni that the city was responsible for the rapid diffusion of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and that those who lived in the countryside had remained faithful to pantheism.4 Solmi, like Giovannoni, viewed this return to pre-Christian primitive Rome as a positive development. Ironically, this could only be accomplished through modern technology. The new pagans would live in large, spacious houses powered by electricity. Electric light, argued Giovannoni, promised a mystical atmosphere: ‘Come the night, everything will be illuminated by thousands upon thousands of lights. White bands of light from the tops of the hills and airport towers pierce the black horizon, providing a marvellous vision of life in its most modern and beautiful forms. It is poetry of light.’5 Giovannoni’s acknowledgment of an airport demonstrated that his neo-pagan village was to be fully modernized, a fact reinforced by his desire to have wide roads and traffic as the lifeblood of the new Rome. Wheels and wide roads were the key to returning Romans to their pagan

Conclusion: The Cinematic City 157 origins. Giovannoni, who was born long before the invention of the automobile, celebrated the automobile and the possibilities it held for fascism’s de-urbanization policies. ‘The automobile,’ he wrote in 1936, ‘has already become the normal, fast, and autonomous system of communication.’6 Thanks to the automobile, Romans could now live far away from the centre, leaving the historic centre to the newly exposed ruins. The car did more than relieve Rome of urban density, however. Its true impact was on how Romans viewed the city. Giovannoni, like many of the fascists seen in this book, celebrated the revolution in the gaze. The newly exposed ruins were no longer the object of Romantic solitude, an attitude associated with the hated nineteenth century, but now became ‘part of our fervid city life.’7 The ruins were brought to life by the pulse of traffic swirling around them and not by human habitation, as had been the case before fascism came to power. Adopting organic metaphors, Giovannoni described the automobile as the ‘blood which runs through the arteries and nurtures everything in its path.’8 More tellingly, this traffic had the effect of an archaeological excavation, revealing the city in new ways. ‘There is no longer an obstacle to breaking through the crust of the city … and out into the open. Owing to the automobile, the static city is transformed into the cinematic city.’9 Like electricity, traffic promised to bring a new, fantastic vision of the city and its ruins. In keeping with the spirit of fascist urban planning, Giovannoni used military metaphors in describing this new Rome. Traffic, he exclaimed, would circulate arditamente around the city, echoing the role of the arditi in defining fascism’s encounter with Rome. Giovannoni also argued that a densely populated city such as Rome would suffer terribly during a bombardment. What is striking about his conclusion, though, is that such an event might prove to be salutary: ‘Then perhaps … the fearful spectre of a war of destruction will have been useful to civilization and peace, since it would free men from the problems produced by the exasperation of artificial city life,’ wrote Giovannoni. ‘From death comes life.’10 Remarkably, for a man committed to the science of urban planning, war was a useful instrument in de-urbanization. After such a war, argued Giovannoni, ‘one will return to the peasant life in the quiet, healthy, natural green spaces away from the dust, smoke, and corruption of the city.’11 Gustavo Giovannoni perfectly expressed the fascist urban impulse that was born in war and sought to return to a myth of origins. He had nothing to do with squadrismo, had not fought in the Great War, nor was a fascist of the first hour, yet he understood the implications of fascism on the landscape of the Eternal City.

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Giovannoni’s mythical approach to the Eternal City’s urban planning, his desire to revive Rome in the countryside around the old city, found an echo in the regime’s decision to build the new Rome, or E42, out in what Marcello Piacentini called ‘virgin territory,’ between Rome and Ostia.12 In deciding to construct the new Rome ex nihilo the regime, as noted by Mia Fuller, was following a precedent already established on the Pontine Marshes and in the colonies.13 The inspiration for the E42 came in 1936 from then Roman governor, squadrista, and ardito Giuseppe Bottai, who was, in turn, influenced by French architect Le Corbusier, whom he had met that year. In an interview published in Antonio Muñoz’s journal L’Urbe, Le Corbusier urged Romans to build outside the ancient walls so that there wouldn’t be any unnecessary competition from the ancient monuments. A truly modern city, urged Le Corbusier, should not sit on the ruins of the past.14 With the E42, Italian architects and urban planners could indulge their whims without a repeat of the polemics surrounding the Palazzo Littorio competition. The construction of the E42 bears out what Roger Griffin has called the regime’s ‘programmatic modernism.’15 The cover of Griffin’s book Modernism and Fascism shows the massive arch, designed by Adalberto Libera, that was supposed to span the grounds of the Esposizione Universale but never built because of the war. This arch was, according to Griffin, the symbol of the ‘ancient capital of Rome translated into the discourse of aesthetic modernism.’16 Like many of fascism’s other projects, however, this one was doomed to fail because of the war. The E42 was left incomplete, only to be revived by the Italian Republic after 1951. Like the Via del Mare, which continues as a busy road and embodies many of the contradictions and cultural impulses of fascism, the E42 also continues as the EUR suburb of the Eternal City. Though the project was a symbol of fascism’s shattered dreams, the Republic revived the regime’s desire to attach Rome to the sea through the EUR. Instead of a monumental zone, however, the Italian postwar state hoped it would become a suburb of new homes, government offices, and businesses. What it inherited was a zone of half-finished monuments, buildings interspersed with weeds, and abandoned construction materials. The reinvention of the E42 is best captured in a 1953 documentary made for LUCE by Enrico Franceschelli called Città Bianca (White City). Franceschelli’s documentary begins with the following narrative: ‘The white city is no longer the fruit of dreamers aiming to create a phan-

Conclusion: The Cinematic City 159 tasmagoric world exposition. The goal of the present government is to restore the buildings and structures in order to give to the Capital a vast area of expansion so as to bring Rome closer to its sea’ (italics are mine).17 Although the new EUR is represented as a rejection of fascist spectacle, the desire to unite Rome to its sea was a clear echo of fascism’s dreams of Mare Nostrum. In a striking opening sequence of shots, the viewer is introduced to the E42 through the windshield of a fast-moving automobile on the Via del Mare. The following words are pronounced by the narrator during this scene: ‘The automobile moves quickly on the road which links Rome to the sea … and from the greenery of the countryside appears to the observer a white edifice which formed part of the E42.’18 Franceschelli’s documentary goes on to demonstrate how the E42 had become, in the words of its narrator, an ‘abandoned and dead city.’ Franceschelli’s shots bear some resemblance to the LUCE documentaries of the 1930s which showed the demolitions of the Master Plan. The fascist encounter with the Eternal City is also mirrored by the documentary’s point that the war had left the E42 in ruins: ‘The war, time, and men have not respected or had much pity on what was raised by fascism.’19 While these words are spoken, Franceschelli’s camera lingers on the broken friezes, statues, and bullet-ridden columns of the unfinished buildings of the E42. Fascism’s new Rome eerily resembled the destroyed city of Aquileia after Attila’s Huns destroyed the city. Halfway through the documentary, however, the resemblances to fascism’s LUCE documentaries and newsreels end. In February 1951 the Italian government announced a restoration of the E42. Franceschelli’s documentary uses this moment to change its tone from one of loss to one of hope. Workers are shown in a manner similar to those of the 1930s, only here the workers are builders, not demolishers. Rather than chasing out the original inhabitants, as fascism did in the historic centre, people are being invited to populate the EUR suburb. Also, instead of isolating the fascist ‘ruins’ so that they are surrounded by open space, the Republic constructed modernist-style apartments and offices interspersed with green spaces around the fascist buildings. In its plans for the E42, the Republic reconstructed the layered cityscape that had once defined the historic centre. Different eras now coexisted, and the fascist buildings and monuments, with their Novecento-style arches and columns became part of a multitextured urban fabric that has made the EUR one of the most desirable, and vibrant, suburbs of Rome. More than a landscape of juxtaposition, however, the E42 was developed organically in a manner that resembled the nineteenth century’s

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approach to history. Like the Christian landscape of Rome, the E42, now the EUR, was a place where historical epochs not only coexisted but were built in a synthetic manner. The new Republic built atop the fascist city, taking the fascist structures and giving them a new look that befitted the return of liberal democracy to Italy. In its synthetic approach to the EUR, the Republic maintained the original functions of some of the fascist buildings, such as the Museum of Ancient Rome, which houses the gigantic plastic miniature of Augustus’s Rome used during the Augustinian bimillinary celebrations of 1938. The museum was no longer an instrument of propaganda, however, but of education and tourism. The new, liberal democratic imprint on the EUR was also reflected in the completion of the suburb’s most prominent monument: the Basilica of Saints Paul and Peter, designed by Arturo Foschini. Commissioned as part of the original E42 project, the church was not as prominent as Libera’s arch. The latter was never built, however, which left the church as the predominant landmark of the EUR, next to Piacentini’s Palazzo della Civiltà, plainly visible from the Via del Mare. Clearly, the Catholic landscape took precedence in a postwar Italy dominated by the Christian Democrats. Return to the Carso With the transformation of the E42 into the EUR, this new suburb of Rome became a showpiece for the Italy of the Economic Miracle and a sign that Italy had moved into a democratic, post-fascist era. Yet, despite this de-fascistization of the E42, traces of that past remain. Not only can they be seen in the style of the architecture, sculptures, reliefs, and obelisks that remain, but traces of fascism’s founding experience, the Great War and the region associated with that war, are also present. Travelling along the Via Laurentina, one of the three major roads that run through the suburb (the other two being the Via Cristoforo Colombo and the Via Ostiense) south past the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, one enters a neighbourhood known as the Quartiere Giuliano-Dalmata, an area named after the refugees from Istria and Dalmatia, given to Yugoslavia after the war, who fled the Communist forces of Tito. Thousands of Italians left the region and flocked into refugee camps throughout Italy. It was a process that reminded many of the thousands of Italians from the Veneto who fled the advancing Germans and Austrians in 1917. The difference is that these refugees never returned home. Many would emigrate to North America and Australia, but most would remain to transform these camps into permanent settlements. Several of these places,

Conclusion: The Cinematic City 161 such as the Quartiere and Fertilia in Sardinia, were uncompleted fascist cities.20 In the case of the EUR, the refugees used the workers’ pavilions (villagio operaio) and other administrative structures that had been completed before the war. The Quartiere Giuliano-Dalmata in the EUR is full of memories of the Great War.21 A large number of the residents came from places such as Fiume and Pola, two cities that had been desired by Irredentists. Several streets in the area have names which are reminders of that war, such as the Via Canzone del Piave. Some of the landmarks are more revealing, however, recalling not only the Great War, but the link between the war experience and fascism’s encounter with Rome. At the end of the Via Oscar Sinigaglia, which runs off the Via Laurentina, one reaches a culde-sac which includes a playground on one end and, on the other, a church which prominently displays the Lion of St Mark, symbol of Venice. Next to the church, however, is a remarkable stele on top of which is the mythical she-wolf being suckled by Romulus and Remus. This, of course, is the symbol of Rome, and a plaque informs the viewer that it once stood next to the Arena (Roman amphitheatre) of Pola. In the middle of the stele is a visible crack, the result of a terrorist attack by leftwing activists who consider the promotion of the memory of the esodo a right-wing cause. This monument to romanità and its extension into the Irredentist provinces now found a home in fascist Rome. But there is an even more revealing monument, erected in 1961, though it is easier to miss. Along the Via Laurentina, where it intersects the Via Oscar Sinigaglia, unnoticed by the volumes of heavy traffic which rush by it every day, stands a large, misshapen rock set back from the street. Upon it are bronze letters which read: Ai Caduti Giuliani e Dalmati (To the Julian and Dalmatian Fallen). It is not clear if the fallen are soldiers of the Great War who died for the Irredentist cause or the civilians who died at the hands of Tito’s forces, thrown into the cavernous pits (foibe) of the Carsican landscape. In either case, the monument is striking because it comes from the Carso, that lunar-like, rocky landscape which shaped the interior landscapes of those soldiers who joined the fascist cause after the war. It was the Carsican landscape which informed fascism’s desire to blast the narrow streets and confines of the Eternal City and create the large, open spaces around the monuments of Imperial Rome. It is on the Carso where one finds the origins of fascismo di pietra. Nowhere more than in this lowly monument, however, do the unintended consequences of fascist urban planning speak eloquently about the essence of the fascist movement.

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Notes

Preface: Death on the Via del Mare 1 Manuella Campitelli, ‘Via dalla Via del Mare,’ CartaQui 6 (September 2006): 6. 2 Domenico Secondulfo, ‘Le Stragi del Sabato Sera,’ La Voce dei Bancari 54, no. 2 (2002), at http://www.fabi.it/pubblicazioni/voce/voce2/2002/02/ dati_02_02/consumi&simboli.htm (accessed 3 January 2008). 3 Antonio Muñoz, Via dei Monti e Via del Mare (Rome: S.P.Q.R. Governatorato di Roma, 1932), 36. 4 Emil Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, trans. Tomaso Gnoli (Milan: Mondadori, 1950), 31. 5 N.A., ‘La Via ad Ostia,’ Capitolium 7 (1928), 402. 6 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 140. 7 Lewis Mumford, ‘The American Way of Death,’ in Intepretations and Forecasts: 1922–1972, ed. Lewis Mumford (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 372–4. 8 N.A., ‘La Via del Mare,’ Capitolium 7 (1928), 233. 9 Marshall Berman, ‘Robert Moses: The Expressway World,’ in Autopia: Cars and Culture, ed. Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002), 246. 10 Justin J. Lorentzen, ‘Reich Dreams: Ritual Horror and Armoured Bodies,’ in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), 166. 11 George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), x. 12 Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.

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Notes to pages xv–7

13 Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism,’ in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 73–105. 14 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Il fascismo secondo Pasolini,’ http://www.pasolini.net/ ideologia_ppp_e_fascismo.htm, accessed 3 January 2008. 15 Dario Bellezza, Il poeta assassinato (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1996), 56. Introduction: Rome and Fascism 1 Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra (Bari: Laterza, 2007), vi. 2 Antonio Cederna, Mussolini urbanista: Lo sventramento di Rome negli anni del consenso (Rome: Laterza, 1979), vii. 3 Daniele Manacorda and Renato Tamassia, Il piccone del regime (Rome: Armando Curcio Editore, 1985), 79–80. 4 Spiro Kostoff, The Third Rome, 1870–1950: Traffic and Glory (Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1973). 5 Andrea Giardina and André Vauchez, Il mito di Rome: Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini (Rome: Laterza, 2000), 234–5. 6 Borden W. Painter, Jr, Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), xv. 7 Gentile, Fascismo di pietra, 257–8. 8 Leading the way was Stanley Payne, who rejected previous definitions of fascism, such as those of Ernst Nolte, because they did not recognize the ‘positive content of fascist philosophy and values.’ Fascism, argues Payne, was not a nihilistic movement but one based on the Nietzschean ideal of ‘creative destruction.’ See Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–45 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 5. 9 Paolo Nicoloso, Mussolini architetto: Propaganda e paesaggio urbano nell’Italia fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), xvi. 10 Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7. 11 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 12 Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 13 Ibid., 158. 14 Ibid., 16. 15 Paul Corner, ‘La mémoire de la Grande Guerre et le Fascisme Italien,’ in J.-J. Becker, ed., Guerres et Cultures (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994), 329. 16 Max Ascoli and Arthur Feiler, Fascism for Whom? (New York: Norton, 1938), 320. 17 Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism, trans. Brenda Huff Everett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 103.

Notes to pages 7–8

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18 The most important exponent of this thesis is Zeev Sternhell. Recently, Walter Adamson has argued that the true origins of Italian Fascism occurred before the war. See Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Walter Adamson, ‘The Impact of World War I on Italian Political Culture,’ in European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918, ed. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (London: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 308–29. 19 Even though squadrismo was directly related to the war experience, the scholarship on Italian Fascism still lacks a fronterliebnis thesis akin to that of German Nazism. Many of the studies on squadrismo focus on its relationship to local elites. Squadrismo as a phenomenon in itself has also lacked attention, although there are signs of this changing. See Martin Clark, ‘Italian Squadrismo and Contemporary Vigilantism,’ in The Legacy of Fascism: Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, ed. Eileen A. Millar (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1989), 23–47; Roberta Suzi Valli, ‘The Myth of Squadrismo in the Fascist Regime,’ Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (2000): 131–50; Mimmo Franzinelli, Squadristi: Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista, 1919–1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). On the importance of the war experience on Nazism see Klaus Thewelait, Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989). 20 Antonio Gibelli, La Grande Guerra degli Italiani, 1915–1918 (Milan: Sansoni, 1998). Angelo Ventrone, La seduzione totalitaria: Guerra, modernità, violenza politica, 1914–1918 (Rome: Donzelli editore, 2003). 21 Renzo De Felice, Intervista sul fascismo, ed. Michael Ledeen, 2nd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1997), 40. 22 Angelo Ventrone, La seduzione totalitaria: Guerra, modernità, violenza politica, 1914–1918 (Rome: Donzelli editore, 2003), xi–xv. 23 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 24 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Mark Antliff, ‘Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,’ The Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 2002), 148–69. 25 Luisa Passerini, Mussolini imaginario: Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939 (Rome, Bari: Laterza, 1991), 5. 26 Benito Mussolini, ‘La Nuova Roma,’ Opera Omnia, vol. 22: 47–8. 27 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Destructive Character,’ in Reflections: Essays, Apho-

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Notes to pages 9–12

risms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. and intro. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 301. Edward Soja, ‘History: Geography: Modernity,’ in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1994), 136. Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000), 48–52. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2003), 90. Giuseppe Ungaretti, ‘Zona di Guerra (Vivendo con il popolo),’ in Vita d’un uomo: Saggi e interventi, ed. Mario Diacono and Luciano Rebay (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 6. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 223. Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: The Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 10. Ibid., 193. Christopher Coker, War and the 20th Century (London: Brasseys, 1994), 8–18. This approach was famously articulated by Sigmund Freud, who compared Roman topography to the human psyche, or a place where the past never completely disappeared. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961), 17–19. Claudia Lazzaro, ‘Forging a Visible Fascist Nation,’ in Donatello among the Blackshirts, ed. Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 21. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 74. George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), 109–10. Ettore Pais, Rome dall’Antico al Nuovo Impero (Milan: Ulrico Heopli, 1938), 204. Giuseppe Bottai, ‘La carta marmorea dell’Impero Fascista,’ L’Urbe 1 (1936): 3–4. Giardina and Vauchez, Il mito di Roma, 215. See also Gentile, Fascismo di pietra, chap. 1. ACS, MCP, b. 36, f. 249: ‘Visite del Duce.’ Coker, War and the 20th Century, 178–9. Hayden White, ‘The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,’ in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 168–70. Ibid., 171. Simone Weil, ‘Reflections on Barbarism,’ in Selected Essays, 1934–1943, trans. Richard Ress (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 143.

Notes to pages 12–18

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48 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 7–10. 49 James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 55. 50 Ceccarius, ‘L’isolamento della Mole Adriana,’ Capitolium (1934): 209–10. 51 Pietro Maria Bardi, La strada e il volante (Turin: Edizioni Scriptorum, 1994), 83. 52 Ibid., 84. 53 Quoted in Attilio Brilli, La vita che corre: Mitologia dell’automobile (Bologna: Mulino, 1999), 107. 54 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 185. 55 Jörg Beckmann, ‘Automobility – A Social Problem and Theoretical Concept,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2001): 598. 56 Mikita Brottman and Christopher Sharett, ‘The End of the Road: David Cronenberg’s Crash and the Fading of the West,’ in Car Crash Culture, ed. M. Brottman (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 203. 57 Scipione Tadolini, ‘Una strada veloce da Piazza Barberini a Piazza SS. Apostoli: Proposta per il sottopassaggio di via Quattro Fontane,’ L’Urbe 3, no. 11 (November 1938): 31 58 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 719–20. 59 Ibid., 720. 60 Tim Benton, ‘Rome Reclaims Its Empire,’ in Art and Power: Europe under the dictators 1930–45, ed. Dawn Ades, Tim Benton, David Elliot, and Iain Boyd White (London: Hayward Gallery, 1995), 121. 1. The Landscape of the War 1 Aristide Calderini, ‘Aquileia: Un centenario e un decennale,’ Le Vie d’Italia 37 (July 1931), 524. 2 Chino Ermacora, Piccola patria: Nel X° anniversario della liberazione del Friuli (Udine: Edizioni de ‘La Panarie,’ 1928), 118. 3 Curzio Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! La rivolta dei Santi Maledetti, ed. Mario Biondi (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1995). 4 Auro D’Alba, ‘Dal diario alpino di Stefano,’ in Antologia degli scrittori fascisti, ed. Mario Carli and G.A. Fanelli (Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1931), 202. 5 Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. Giordano Bruno Guerri (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994), 37.

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6 Chino Ermacora, Il Friuli: Itinerari e soste (Udine: La Panarie, 1938), 25. 7 Scipio Slataper, Il mio Carso, 6th ed. (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1943), 7. 8 Antonio Gibelli calculates that, by 1917, 1 million Austrians faced 2 million Italians on the Carso. Both sides would leave some 1 million dead there by the war’s end. Antonio Gibelli, La Grande Guerra degli Italiani, 1915–1918 (Milan: Sansoni, 1998), 100. On the place of the Carso in Italian memory, see Mario Isnenghi, ‘La Grande Guerra,’ in I luoghi della memoria: Strutture ed eventi dell’Italia Unita, ed. Mario Isnenghi (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 273–309. 9 Slataper, Il mio carso, 8. 10 Luciano Fabi, Sentieri di guerra: Le trincee sul Carso (Trieste: Edizioni Svevo, 1991), 137. 11 Mario Puccini, Come ho visto il Friuli (Rome: La Voce, 1919), 153. 12 An example is the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti in his letters to Giovanni Papini. Ungaretti spent two years as an infantryman on the Carso. In a letter dated December 1916, Ungaretti writes, while on leave in Florence, that he feels ‘absent’ there as if he was ‘up there.’ On the day he leaves Florence on 5 January 1917 he once again refers to the Carso as ‘up there.’ Giuseppe Ungaretti, Lettere a Giovanni Papini 1915–1918, ed. Maria Antonietta Terzoli (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 80, 84. 13 Leo Pollini, Le veglie al Carso (Milan: Casa Editrice Ceschina, 1931), 19. 14 See Attilio Frescura, Diario di un Imboscato (Milan: Mursia, 1981), 116; and Ermacora, Piccola patria, 120. Puccini described the Carso soil as ‘sacred’ and predicted that ‘on the site of the massacres will grow grass and crosses.’ Puccini, Come ho visto, 120. Pollini describes the road up the Carso as a Via Crucis which ends up in Calvary. Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 20. 15 Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 99, 102. 16 Pollini quoted in Lucio Fabi, Sentieri di guerra: Le trincee sul Carso (Trieste: Edizioni Svevo, 1991), 23. 17 Puccini, Come ho visto, 60. 18 Carlo Delcroix, ‘Nella bolgia del Carso,’ in Antologia, ed. Carli and Fanelli, 250. 19 Emilio Lussu, Un anno sull’Altipiano (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1945 and 2000), 13. 20 Margarita Sarfatti, Dux (Milan: Mondadori, 1928), 180, 184. 21 Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! 71. 22 Sarfatti, Dux, 181. 23 Giuseppe Steiner, ‘La Canzone del morto del Carso,’ in Antologia, ed. Carli and Fanelli, 573. 24 Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 21, 122. The ‘troglodyte’ world of the First World

Notes to pages 21–3

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

169

War has also been discussed at length in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), chap. 2. Letter by Ungaretti to Papini (7 April 7 1917) in Lettere, 116. Antonio Gibelli has argued that owing to the Great War, work and war went through a similar industrial transformation. See Gibelli, L’officina della guerra: La Grande Guerra e le trasformzioni del mondo mentale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 14–15. Frescura, Diario di un Imboscato, 131. Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! 76. Ibid., 76. Frescura, Diario di un Imboscato, 130. Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 180–1. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 40–1. Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 146. Ungaretti, San Martino del Carso (Valloncello dell’Albero Isolato il 27 agosto 1916): ‘Di queste case non è rimasto che qualche brandello di muro / Di tanti che mi corrispondevano non è rimasto neppure tanto / Ma nel cuore nessuna croce manca / È il mio cuore il paese più straziato.’ Giuseppe Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo. Tutto le poesie, ed. Leone Piccioni (Milan: Mondadori, 1971), 51. Ibid. The poem is inscribed on a stone tablet where one enters the village of San Martino today. Paola Montefoschi, Album Ungaretti (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 40. This link is prominently made in the poem I Fiumi (The Rivers), wherein Ungaretti identifies the Isonzo River as the river into which the other rivers of his life flow. See Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo, 43–5. Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 179. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Taccuini 1915–1921, ed. Alberto Bertoni (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1987), 121. Puccini, Note, 43, 48. Frescura, Diario di un Imboscato, 116–17. Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 123. Gibelli, L’officina, 201–2. Quoted in Christopher Coker, War and the 20th Century (London: Brasseys, 1994), 163. Mario Puccini, Caporetto: Note sulla ritirata di un fante della III Armata, ed. Francesco De Nicola (Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 1987), 50. F.T. Marinetti, ‘Il discorso di Marinetti al ‘Convegno Italiano per la difesa del paesaggio.’ Capri, Settembre 1926,’ in Manifesti, proclami, interventi e

170

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72

Notes to pages 23–8

documenti teorici del Futurismo, comp. L. Caruso (Florence: Coedizioni SPES– Salimbeni, 1980), doc. 26. Luciano Fabi, Sentieri di guerra: Le trincee sul Carso (Trieste: Edizioni Svevo, 1991), 107. Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 306. Giuseppe Ungaretti, ‘Zona di guerra (Vivendo con il popolo),’ in Vita d’un uomo, 6. Ibid., 8. Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! 183. Giorgio Rochat, Gli Arditi della Grande Guerra (Milan: Feltrinelli Economica, 1981), 12. Gibelli, L’officina, 6. Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 37. G. A. Chiurco, Storia della Rivoluzione Fascista, vol. 5, part 2 (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1929), 106. Lussu, Un anno sull’Altipiano, 48–9. Ermacora, Piccola patria, 49. Ardengo Soffici, I diari della Grande Guerra, ed. Mario Bartoletti Poggi and Marino Biondi (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1986), 338. Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! 116. Ibid., 73. Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (Hammersmith, UK: Penguin Books, 1985), 75–6. Ibid., 78. Rochat, Gli Arditi della Grande Guerra, 35. Giovanni Comisso, Giorni di guerra, 3rd ed. (Milan: Longanesi & C., 1987), 23. Ungaretti, ‘Zona di guerra,’ 6. Malaparte, Santi maledetti, 77. Pollini, Le veglie al Carso, 196. Soffici, Diari, 369–70. A government commission in 1919 determined that 632, 200 inhabitants of Friuli fled the Austrian advance. See Elpidio Ellero, ‘La rotta di Caporetto: L’esodo della popolazione friulana (ottobre 1917),’ in Gustavo Corni, ed., Il Friuli. Storia e società. Vol. 3: 1914–1925. La crisi dello Stato liberale (Udine: Istituto Friulano per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione, 1998), 187–8. The analogy is Ellero’s. Ibid., 198. Puccini, Caporetto, 48. Ibid., 63. Mussolini, ‘La battaglia del Friuli,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 2 November 1917.

Notes to pages 28–34 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

171

Ibid. Soffici, Diari, 281. Ibid., 320. Ibid., 271. Frescura, Diario di un Imboscato, 278–9. Ibid., 271–2. Soffici, Diari, 350. Comisso, Giorni di guerra, 167. Mario Isnenghi and Giorgio Rochat, La Grande Guerra, 1914–1918 (Milan: RCS Libri, 2000), 433. Frescura, Diario di un Imboscato, 117–18. According to the myth of the arditi, these crack troops were created purposely to break the German style of warfare imposed on the Italians. ‘From the beginning, it seemed that Germanism had descended, compact, leaden, heavy, and dark, like a winter without end, on the Latins. They would impose their style of warfare: collectivism without relief, the annihilation of the individual, ferocious sacrifice without glory.’ Mario Carli, L’arditismo (Rome: Edizioni ‘Augustea,’ n.d.), 6. Puccini, Caporetto, 14. Ibid., 67, 69. Frescura, Diario di un Imboscato, 267. Ibid., 271. Malaparte, Santi maledetti, 126. Ibid., 123. Puccini, Come ho visto il Friuli, 175. Frescura, Diario di un Imboscato, 250. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 17. Ungaretti to Papini, undated letter. Ungaretti, Lettere, 234. Mussolini often chastised journalists or academics who promoted regionalism. ACS, SPD, Mat. Cart. Ord. B. 375, fasc. 135.071. Ermacora, Piccola patria, 4. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 132–3. 2. Roads to Rome: The Blackshirts and the città nemico

1 Domenico Maria Leva, Cronache del Fascismo Romano (Perugia: Società Tip, 1943), 245. 2 Ibid., 248.

172

Notes to pages 34–8

3 G. A. Chiurco, Storia della Rivoluzione Fascista, vol. 5 (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1929), 106. 4 Curzio Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! La rivolta dei Santi Maledetti, ed. Mario Biondi (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1995), 126. 5 Ibid., 128. 6 Ibid., 136. 7 Ibid., 121, 123. Gibelli, L’officina della guerra, 6. 8 Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! 87. 9 Ibid., 112. 10 Ibid., 143. 11 Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. Giordano Bruno Guerri (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994), 37. 12 To be sure, not all arditi were fascists. A substantial number of those who became involved in political activity after the war were involved in left-wing movements like the Arditi del Popolo. Of those arditi who supported the fascists, many would leave after fascism’s turn to the right in 1920. Michael Ledeen, ‘Italy: War as a Style of Life,’ in The War Generation: Veterans of the First World War, ed. Stephen Ward (London: Kennikat Press, 1975), 117–18. On the general role played by veterans in the early fascist movement see Salvatore Lupo, Il Fascismo: La politica in un regime totalitario (Rome: Donzelli editore, 2000), 41–53; Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (Bari: Laterza, 1975), 133–87; and Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 48. 13 Ledeen, ‘Italy,’ 114. Known as the ‘Battle of April 15, 1919,’ this assault on the newspaper’s head office would later become the stuff of fascist mythology. Giorgio Rochat, Gli Arditi della Grande Guerra (Milan: Feltrinelli Economica, 1981), 170. 14 Mario Piazzesi, Diario di uno squadrista toscano, 1919–1922 (Rome: Bonacci Editore, 1980), 48. 15 Quoted in Rochat, Gli Arditi, 79. 16 Ibid., 166. 17 F.T. Marinetti, ‘The New Religion – Morality of Speed,’ in Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. R.W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1972), 94–5. 18 Piazzesi, Diario, 133. 19 Ibid., 135. 20 Claudio Segrè, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 101. 21 Italo Balbo, Diario 1922 (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1932), 109. 22 Ibid., 142.

Notes to pages 38–41 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

42

173

Ibid., 211. Ibid., 82. Piazzesi, Diario, 153. Gennaro Vaccaro, ed., Panorami di realizzazioni del Fascismo, vol. 2, I grandi scomparsi e i caduti della Rivoluzione Fascista (Roma, 1939), 161. Vaccaro’s volume gives the biographies of all the fascist ‘martyrs’ as well as a collection of death photos. Baldini’s account is one example among many of marching fascists killed in ambushes. Eros Francescangeli, Arditi del Popolo: Argo Secondari e la prima organizzazione antifascista,1917–1922 (Rome: Odradrek, 2000), 268. Some sources claim there were only 10,000 fascists at Parma. Mimmo Franzinelli, Squadristi: Protagonisti e techniche della violenza fascista 1919–1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 386. Balbo, Diario 1922, 115. Ibid., 126–7. Vaccaro, Panorami di realizzazioni del Fascismo, 199. Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! 163, 214. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 69. Gabriele Cruillas, ‘Dalla Mostra alle Corporazioni,’ Capitolium (1934), 517. Emilio De Bono, ‘Diario di campagna,’ in Marcia su Roma, ed. Asvero Gravelli (Rome: Casa Editrice ‘Nuova Europa,’ 1934), 31. Balbo, Diario 1922, 194. Mario Isnenghi, L’Italia in piazza: I luoghi della vita pubblica dal 1848 ai giorni nostri (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), 30. In later years, the fascists celebrated the identification of fascism with movement. ‘The road is movement solidified,’ boasted Il Popolo in 1934. Bruno Corra, ‘Le strade di Mussolini,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 2 May 1934. Francesco Giunta, quoted in Franzinelli, Squadristi, 33. Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Roma contro Roma,’ Capitolium 17 (1942), 334. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979); Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and John Thayer, Italy and the Great War: Politics and Culture, 1870–1915 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). Curzio Malaparte would attack the ‘representative men’ who pandered to the weaknesses of Italians as opposed to ‘reverse heros,’ such as Mussolini, who urged Italians to go against their ‘servile and mediocre’ natures. This rhetoric would later become prominent in fascist discourse. Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! 163–5.

174

Notes to pages 42–5

43 The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in 1932 claimed that Rome was the centre of a ‘certain mentality,’ while Milan was the centre of the fascist movement, ‘where unanimity was reached within the movement.’ ACS, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF), B. 95, f. 162, s.f. 7, ‘Targhe della Marcia su Roma.’ 44 ACS, MRF, B. 95, f. 162, s.f. 4, ‘Targhe 1920.’ 45 ACS, MRF, B. 274, f. 1350, ‘Il Popolo d’Italia.’ 46 ACS, MRF, B. 274, f. 1350, ‘Il Popolo di Trieste,’ 16 ottobre 1922. 47 ACS, MRF, B. 95, f. 162, s.f. 4, ‘Targhe 1920.’ 48 Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Introduction,’ in Leva, Cronache, 14. 49 Marinetti, ‘Let’s Murder the Moonshine,’ in Selected Writings, 47. 50 Carli along with Bottai would found the Roman chapter of the Fascio di Combattimento in April 1919. Leva, Cronache, 58. 51 Significantly, an ardito revival in Italy would occur in the period 1932–5, which corresponded exactly to the peak years of the Master Plan. During those years, the arditi association, the FNAI, would open several local offices throughout Italy. In Rome, the FNAI would move into new offices right in the middle of the ruins of the Fori Imperiali. These offices, surrounded by barbed wire to give them an authentic war look, would become known as ‘lairs.’ Rochat, Gli Arditi della Grande Guerra, 168–9; and Archivio LUCE, Giornale LUCE, B. 1085, ‘L’albergo dell’Orso e la Torre dei Conti,’ 28 April 1937. 52 ‘I ruderi,’ Roma Futurista, 20 October 1918. 53 Mario Scaparro, ‘Il monumento alla Vittoria,’ Roma Futurista, 9 February 1919. 54 Enrico Rocca, ‘Epistoli ai Romani,’ Roma Futurista, 17 August 1919. 55 V. Morello, ‘La Roma del Fascismo,’ Capitolium 3 (1927): 5. Ironically, the Palace of Justice was the creation of Marcello Piacentini, who would become the regime’s leading architect in the 1930s. 56 Mario Carli, ‘Vulcanizziamo le grandi città,’ Roma Futurista, 14 September 1919. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il fascista, vol. 1, La conquista del potere, 1921–1925 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1966), 100–202. De Felice provides a full account of the congress. 60 Francescangeli, Arditi del Popolo, 265. 61 Chiurco, Storia della Rivoluzione Fascista, 3: 585. 62 Ibid. 63 Franzinelli, Squadristi, 357; and Francescangeli, Arditi del Popolo, 265.

Notes to pages 45–9 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76

77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87

175

Piazzesi, Diario, 198. Ibid., 199. Francescangeli, Arditi del Popolo, 265. Alessandro Pavolini, ‘Enrico Toti. L’Italiano piu’ epico della sua generazione,’ Il Carroccio 36, no. 5 (October 1934): 455. Ibid. Leva, Cronache, 173–4. Ibid., 200. Il Popolo d’Italia, 25 May 1922. Leva, Cronache, 200–1. Gaetano Polverelli, ‘Il quartiere e la nazione,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 25 May 1922. Quoted in Leva, Cronache, 201; Benito Mussolini, ‘L’Azione e la dottrina fascista dinnanzi alle necessità storiche della nazione,’ Opera omnia, vol. 18, ed. Edoardo and Diulio Susmil (Florence: La Fenice, 1964), 411–21. Chiurco, Storia della Rivoluzione Fascista, 4: 358. Ibid., 358. The speech at Udine would later be commemorated during the Decennale in 1932 by the laying of a memorial tablet at the city hall. Archivio LUCE, Giornale LUCE, A1010: ‘La lapide del discorso del settembre 1922,’ 10 January 1932. Il Popolo d’Italia, 20 September 1922. Balbo, Diario 1922, 152. The quadrumvirs were Emilio De Bono, Cesare de Vecchi, Italo Balbo, and Michele Bianchi. It is curious that Perugia was chosen, as the city was largely inaccessible, which caused the four quadrumvirs many problems in communicating with the three columns of blackshirts stationed in the towns of Santa Marinella, Tivoli, and Monterotondo. Antonio Répaci, La Marcia su Roma (Milan: Rizzoli Editore, 1972), 561–2. Malaparte, Viva Caporetto! 183. Ulisse Igliori, ‘La colonna Igliori,’ in Répaci, La Marcia su Roma, 100. Balbo, Diario 1922, 96. Ibid., 96. Dino Perrone Compagni, ‘La colonna Perrone,’ in Répaci, La Marcia su Roma,115. Lischi’s account is similar to other those of squadristi in noting the variety of vehicles pulling into Pisa carrying blackshirts. Dario Lischi, La Marcia su Roma con la colonna ‘Lamarmora’ (Florence: Società Editrice ‘Florentia,’ 1923), 14–19. Ibid., 25. Ibid, 58–9. The march’s mythology also included the account of Cesare De Vecchi driving his high-speed car past the cordon at the Ponte Milvio,

176

88 89 90

91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Notes to pages 49–52

‘breaking the silence of Rome which was devoid of traffic.’ Répaci, La Marcia su Roma, 940. Piazzesi, Diario, 253. Lischi, La Marcia su Roma, 43. After the war, Giuseppe Bottai admitted that the March was purposely delayed by Mussolini in order to facilitate the negotiations in Rome. The March was always intended to be symbolic. Interview with Giuseppe Bottai in Répaci, La Marcia, 923. Gian Gaspare Napolitano, ‘A Roma, per la Tiburtina,’ Nuova Antologia 67, no. 1455 (1 November 1932): 38–45. Alessandro del Vita, ‘La Marcia su Roma,’ Il Selvaggio 4, no. 24 (December 30, 1927): 3. Gabriele Cruillas, ‘La Marcia su Roma,’ in Mario Carli and G. A. Fanelli, eds., Antologia degli Scrittori Fascisti (Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1931), 196. Bottai, ‘Roma contro Roma,’ 332. Chiurco, Storia della Rivoluzione Fascista, 5: 214. Percival Phillips, The ‘Red’ Dragon and the Black Shirts: How Italy Found Her Soul (London: Carmelite House, n.d.), 57. Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Colonna Bottai,’ in Répaci, La Marcia su Roma, 85. Ibid. The Borgo Pio would be subjected to heavy demolition in the 1930s for the building of the broad Via della Conciliazione linking the Vatican with the city. See Chiurco, Storia della Rivoluzione Fascista, 5: 218, 227. Leva, Cronache, 241. Ibid., 1–2. In Maccari’s definition, the selvaggi were those tribal peoples who lived close to the land and were distinct from the ‘bureaucrats’ of the city. Walter L. Adamson, ‘The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of Il Selvaggio,’ Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995): 561. Piazzesi, Diario, 256. Sarfatti, Dux, 261. Carleton Beals, Rome or Death: The Story of Fascism (New York: The Century Co., 1923), 291. Ibid., 298–9. Ibid., 299. Ibid., 300. Curzio Malaparte, ‘Italia barbara,’ in L’Europa vivente e altri saggi politici,1921–1931, ed. Enrico Falqui (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1961), 599.

Notes to pages 52–60

177

3. Demolitions: De-familiarizing the Roman Cityscape 1 Claudia Salaris, La Roma delle avanguardie: Dal futurismo all’underground (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999), 155. 2 Mario Mafai, ‘La mia pittura,’ in Mafai: Scritti editi e inediti di Mario Mafai, ed. Valentino Martinelli (Rome: Ente Premi, 1969), 31–2. 3 Ibid., 31. 4 Archivio della Scuola Romana, at http://www.scuolaromana.it/opere/ ope101.htm. 5 Valerio Rivosecchi, ‘Rome entre les deux guerres,’ in École Romaine 1925– 1945, ed. Les Musées de la Ville de Rome (Paris: Paris musées, 1998), 16. 6 Archivio della Scuola Romana, at http://www.scuolaromana.it/opere/ ope117.htm. 7 Ibid. 8 Benito Mussolini, ‘Per la cittadinanza di Roma,’ in Opera omnia, ed. Edoardo and Diulio Susmil (Florence: La Fenice, 1964), 20: 234–6. 9 Mussolini, ‘Il Piano Regolatore di Roma,’ Opera omnia, 24: 269–70. 10 Antonio Muñoz, ‘La sistemazione del Campidoglio,’ Capitolium 6 (November 1930): 528. 11 Fondo Piacentini, ‘Relazione-programma a S. E. il Capo del Governo sul progetto del Piano Regolatore di Roma’ (1930). 12 Virgilio Testa, ‘L’Urbanistica e il Piano Regolatore di Roma,’ Capitolium 8, nos. 1–2 (January–February 1932): 175. 13 Archivio LUCE, GL B0562: ‘Inizio delle demolizioni per l’isolamento del Mausoleo di Augusto.’ 14 Archivio LUCE, GL A0911: ‘Via dei Fori Imperiali’ (1932); and GL A0910: ‘Il Foro Romano’ (1932). 15 The amplification of sound in its purest form seemed one of the goals of the master planners. Capitolium praised the clarity of automobile sounds one could pick up in the Passeggiata Archeologica, a massive archaeological park south of the Coliseum. C.M.S., ‘La Passeggiata Archeologica,’ Capitolium 11, no. 2 (February 1935): 84. 16 Antonio Gibelli, L’Officina della Guerra (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 164–72. 17 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 196. 18 Archivio LUCE, ‘Il Foro Romano.’ 19 ACS, Senato del Regno, vol. 143, doc. 7.A, legislatura XXVIII, prima sessione, 1929–32, tornata del 18 marzo 1932. 20 Ibid.

178

Notes to pages 61–2

21 ASC, Governatorato di Roma, Deliberazioni del Governatorato, anno 1931, terzo semestre: del. no. 5448, ricorso no. 2. 22 Ibid., anno 1932, terzo semestre: deliberazione no. 5391, Ricorso Ammiraglio Guilio Valli, Piazzale Flaminio, 19. 23 One individual, identifying himself as ‘un osservatore qualunque’ (a common observor), pointed out that the plan was failing in its mission to provide superb panoramas, noting that Turin was the master city in this regard, and that in Rome everything was going in the opposite direction. ACS, PCM, b. 1959, f. 7, no. 2/208/4: ‘Piano Regolatore: Reclami, richieste, ecc. Per modifiche, espropriazioni, indemnizzi, ecc. Lettera ‘un osservatore qualunque.’’ 24 A group of merchants sent a petition to Mussolini claiming that ‘millions’ would be lost to the Roman economy if the Master Plan went ahead, and that the plan itself was shrouded in mystery. ACS, PCM, Lettera Leonilde Lombardi e altri, 11 July 1930. 25 The woman in question, Giuseppina Gemito, hoped that the Governatorato would reimburse her for her loss soon in order for her to ‘regain her lost tranquillity.’ Ibid., Lettera Giuseppina Gemito, 19 January 1933. 26 Antonio Muñoz, ‘Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,’ L’Urbe 1, no. 2 (November 1936): 28. 27 ASC, Governatorato di Roma, Deliberazione del Governatorato, anno 1932, primo semestre: del. no. 312, Ricorso Provenzani Ranieri, Maria–via Tre Cannelle, 26. 28 Ibid., terzo semestre: del. no. 5391, Ricorso Virgilio Fratoddi, via Flaminia, 16. 29 Ibid., primo semestre: del. no. 312, Ricorso Tordi Matilde ved. Parisi. 30 The scale of expropriations was such that the National Fascist Federation of Building Owners requested that a special office be commissioned for the purpose of dealing with expropriations. ACS, PCM, b. 1959, f. 7, no. 2/208/2: ‘Piano Regolatore: Reclami, richieste, ecc. Per modifiche, espropriazioni, indemnizzi, ecc. Lettera Federazione Nazionale Fascista della Proprietà Edilizia.’ 31 ASC, Governatorato di Roma Deliberazione del Governatorato, anno 1932, primo semestre: del. no. 312, Ricorso Provenzani Ranieri, Maria–via Tre Cannelle, 26. 32 Ibid., primo semestre: del. no. 312, Ricorso barone Andrea Torella di Romagnano. 33 Ibid., terzo semestre: del. no. 7704, ricorso no. 2. 34 Ibid.: del. no. 4421, Ricorso Rag. Luigi Ansolini, quale amministratore del Patrimonio Eredi Dandini de Sylva, via Fabio Massimo, 95.

Notes to pages 62–4

179

35 Ibid.: del. no. 5391, Ricorso Santagostino-Baldi, Mario via Flaminia, 56. 36 The UT received several letters from small business owners fearful that the Master Plan would destroy their enterprises. One man wrote directly to Mussolini, pleading that the plan was sowing ‘uncertainty and hence suffering’ on his family, and tried to remind the Duce of an autographed photograph that Mussolini had sent to him in 1928 with following inscription: ‘To the beautiful and Roman family of Antonio Egidi.’ ACS, PCM, b. 1959, f. 7, no. 2/208/4, ‘Piano Regolatore: Reclami, richieste, ecc. Per modifiche, espropriazioni, indemnizzi, ecc. Lettera Antonio Egidi.’ 37 One man, a certain Isaia Levi, was worried that some old trees on his property would be demolished, so he recommended that the road, the Via Salaria, be widened at the expense of a house of ‘semipopular character’ on the other side of the road. ACS, SPD – Carteggio Ordinario 1922–43, busta 312, no. 104.113/14, ‘Abattimento di 4 alberi di un Viale di Lecci della Villa Giorgia di Isaia Levi.’ Another example came from the Mons. Giovanni Naslian of the Armenian Pontifical College, who suggested a variance of the plan in his zone which entailed the demolition of other buildings but not his. ACS, PCM, b. 1959, f. 7, no. 2/208/8, ‘Piano Regolatore: Pontificio Collegio Armeno.’ 38 ASC, Governatorato di Roma, Deliberazione del Governatorato, anno 1932, terzo semestre: del. no. 5391, Ricorso Ammiraglio Giuilo Valli, Piazzale Flaminio, 19. 39 Ibid., anno 1934, terzo semestre: del. no. 7405, Ricorso Amalia Dominici ved. Ronci, domiciliata al Lungotevere Mellini 17, scal 2e, interno 10. 40 Ibid., anno 1936, terzo semestre: del. no. 3262, Ricorsi Vaccari, Carlo and Comm. Pozzi Pietro. 41 One member of a prestigious Roman family accused the regime of ‘immobilizing and swallowing up, through an iniquitous procedure, a significant part of the fortune left me by my father.’ ACS, PCM, b. 1959, f. 7, no. 2. 3856, ‘Piano Regolatore: Roma – Foro Mussolini. Lettera Maria Caffarelli Carreggia,’ 15 July 1936. 42 ACS, PCM, b. 1959, f. 7, no. 2. 3856, ‘Piano Regolatore: Roma – Foro Mussolini. Lettera Francesco D’Antonangelo.’ 43 Corrado Alvaro, Itinerario italiano (Milan: Bompiani, 1995), 8. 44 Gustavo Giovannoni, Lineamenti fondamentali del Piano Regolatore di Roma Imperiale (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1939), 4. 45 Ibid. 46 Mussolini, ‘Un colpo di piccone,’ Opera Omnia, 27: 25. 47 Vincenzo Civico, ‘Strade di Roma: Via Viminale – Via Babuino,’ Capitolium 13, no. 1 (January 1938): 18.

180

Notes to pages 64–9

48 Civico, ‘Strade di Roma: Via Ripetta – Via della Scrofa,’ Capitolium 13, no. 3 (March 1938): 125. 49 Civico, ‘Strade di Roma: Corso Umberto,’ Capitolium 13, no. 9 (September 1938): 433–4. 50 Ermanno Ponti, ‘Roma sparita tra Foro Traiano e la ‘Salaria Vecchia’ (In tema di demolizioni nella zona sub Capitolina),’ Capitolium 8, no. 5 (May 1932): 394. 51 Ermanno Ponti, ‘Roma sparita tra la Pedacchia e Macel de’Corvi,’ Capitolium 7, no. 10 (October 1931), 477. 52 Ibid., 486–7. 53 Carlo Magi-Spinetti, ‘Colore locale,’ Capitolium 11, no. 1 (January 1935), 23. 54 Fondo Piacentini, ‘Relazione.’ 55 Marcello Piacentini, ‘Roma Mussoliniana: Il progetto del Piano Regolatore della Roma,’ L’Illustrazione Italiana 9 (1March 1931): 314. 56 Antonio Muñoz, ‘Con Paul Valéry a Santa Sabina e sulla Via Appia,’ L’Urbe 2, no. 4 (April 1937): 38. 57 ACS, Senato del Regno, vol. 143, doc. 7.A. Legislatura XXVIII, prima sessione 1929–2, tornata del 18 marzo 1932, speech by Benito Mussolini. 58 Ibid., speech by Sen. Ettore Pais. 59 Antonio Muñoz, L’Isolamento del Colle Capitolino (Rome: S.P.Q.R., 1943), table 19. 60 Arturo Bianchi, ‘La sistemazione di Bocca della Verita e del Velabro,’ Capitolium 6 (December 1930): 581. 61 Diego Angeli, ‘Il Piano Regolatore di Roma,’ Nuova Antologia 282, no. 1440 (16 March 1932): 194. 62 Ibid., 202. 63 ACS, Senato del Regno, vol. 143, doc. 7.A, legislatura XXVIII, prima sessione, 1929–2, tornata del 18 marzo 1932, speech by Governor BoncompagniLudovisi. 64 Ibid., speech by Sen. Saint-Just. 65 Mussolini, ‘Il Piano Regolatore di Roma,’ Opera omnia, 24: 269–70. 66 Antonio Muñoz, ‘S.E. De Vecchi parla degli scavi del Palatino,’ L’Urbe 1 (1936): 10. 67 ‘Sorgono e si rinnovano le città,’ Roma Fascista, 28 October 1934, 2. 68 Antonio Muñoz, La via del Circo Massimo (Rome: S.P.Q.R., 1934), 8. 69 The Capitoline Hill was also the supposed site of the mythical ‘tesoro del Campidoglio.’ Rumours were flying around Europe, according to a certain ‘Father Salza,’ that the treasure had been found. ACS, PCM, 1928–30, f. 5.2, no. 5609, anno 1932-X: Roma-Campidoglio-Esistenza du in tesoro aureo – Rivelazione del rabdomante MERMET.

Notes to pages 70–7

181

70 Gustavo Brigante Colonna, ‘L’Isolamento del Campidoglio. Demolizioni e ricordi,’ Capitolium 15 (1940): 530–8. 71 Silvio Negri, ‘Il Campidoglio ritrovato,’ in Roma, non basta una vita (Venice: Neri Pozza Editore, 1962), 115. 72 Ibid., 116. 73 Ibid., 117. 74 Ing. R. Bonfiglietti, ‘L’ara dei caduti fascisti eretta sul Campidoglio,’ Capitolium 7 (1928): 418. 75 Domenico Maria Leva, Cronache del Fascismo Romano (Perugia: Società Tip, 1943), 108–9. 76 ‘L’isolamento dell’Augusteo nelle sue fasi intermedie,’ Il Lavoro Fascista, 13 February 1937. 77 For the pro-Mafai interpretation, see Maurizio dell’Arco and Valerio Rivosecchi, eds., Mafai (Rome: De Luca, 1986), 19. 78 Marshall McLuhan described the automobile as a ‘war chariot’ attacking the ‘aggressive stronghold’ of the city. While driving a car, the motorist is transformed into a ‘superman’ encased in a ‘protective and aggressive shell.’ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 184; and McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), 221, 224–5. 79 Borden Painter, Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 40. 80 Enrico Del Debbio, ‘Il Foro Mussolini in Roma,’ Architettura 12 (February 1933): 81–4. 81 Painter, Mussolini’s Rome, 41. 82 Carlo Magi-Spinetti, ‘Il Foro Mussolini,’ Capitolium 13 (1934): 91. 83 Ibid., 97. 84 Carlo Magi-Spinetti, ‘Nuove opera al Foro Mussolini,’ Capitolium 16 (1938): 205–6. 85 Luigi Moretti, ‘Il Piazzale dell’Impero al Foro Mussolini in Roma,’ Architettura (September–October 1941): 347. 86 Ibid., 199. 4. ‘An uninterrupted racecourse’: Fascism’s Roman Roads 1 2 3 4

N.A., ‘10 giugno XVIII,’ Capitolium 15 (1940): 685. Ibid., 686. Archivio LUCE: ‘10 giugno XVIII’ (1940). Pietro Maria Bardi, La strada e il volante (Turin: Edizioni Scriptorum, 1994), 78.

182

Notes to pages 78–81

5 Ibid., 75. 6 Ibid., 78–9. 7 There was also talk in 1920 of building a tunnel underneath the Foro Romano as a means of extending Via Cavour to Piazza Venezia. ACS, Min. LL. PP., Div. 5, b. 5, f. 68: ‘Commissione per la sistemazione del Campidoglio. Seduta del 29 gennaio 1920.’ 8 ACS, PCM, b. 1959: ‘Piano Regolatore.’ Nestore Cinelli, ‘Osservazioni e proposte sul Piano Regolatore di Roma,’ 12–13. 9 ACS, PCM, b. 1959: ‘Piano Regolatore.’ Cinelli, ‘Osservazioni sulla proposta presentata dalla commissione speciale per lo studio del Piano Regolatore di Roma, per una strada di comunicazione tra Via Vittorio Veneto e la stazione di Termini,’ 18. 10 ACS, PCM, b. 1959: ‘Piano Regolatore.’ Dagoberto Ortensi e Pompeo Villa, ‘Uno studio di piano regolatore di Roma basato sulla soluzione dei sottopassaggi.’ Estrazioni. 11 Vincenzo Civico, ‘Strade di Roma: Via del Babuino – Vie due Macelli,’ Capitolium 7 (July 1938): 352. 12 Asveldo Gravelli, ‘La viabilità a Roma,’ Ottobre, 7 March 1934. 13 ACS, Senato del Regno, 145, Leg. XXVIII, Sess. Unica, 1929–32: Discussioni, tornata del 18 marzo 1932. 14 Leo Longanesi, ‘Il sacco di Roma,’ Il Selvaggio, 15 May 1931. 15 Before the advent of fascism, a commission looking into the reworking of the area around the Vittoriano considered building a massive park on the model of the Parks Movement of the nineteenth century. It was hoped that a more magnificent park than Hyde Park in London, or the Tiergarten in Berlin, would rise there, thus allowing one to contemplate the ruins. ACS, Min. LL. PP., Div. 5. Edilizia, f. 69: ‘Commissione presieduta dal Sen. Lanciani per la sistemazione del Campidoglio, etc. Relazione di Rodolfo Lanciani al Ministro,’ 31 January 1920. 16 Marcello Piacentini, ‘Roma Mussoliniana. Il progetto del Piano Regolatore della Roma,’ L’Illustrazione Italiana 9 (1931): 312. 17 Ibid. 18 Arturo Bianchi, ‘Attuazioni di Piano Regolatore: Le nuove arterie di allaciamento con Piazza San Bernardo,’ Capitolium 6 (September 1930): 443. 19 Arturo Bianchi, ‘Il centro di Roma: La sistemazione del Foro Italico e le nuove vie del mare e dei monti,’ Architettura 12, no. 3 (March 1933): 138. 20 Ibid., 153. 21 Silvio Negri, ‘Il Campidoglio ritrovato,’ in Roma, non basta una vita (Venice: Neri Pozza Editore, 1962), 115.

Notes to pages 81–5

183

22 Diego Angeli, ‘Il piano regolatore di Roma,’ Nuova Antologia, anno 67, f. 1440 (16 March 1932): 196. 23 ACS, Senato del Regno, vol. 143, doc. 7.A, legislatura XXVIII, prima sessione 1929–32, tornata del 18 marzo 1932: speech by Corrado Ricci. 24 ACS, Min. della PP. II., AA. BB. AA, Div. II, 1934/40, b. 40/707: ‘Ostia Antica. Strada panoramica attraverso gli scavi.’ 25 Antonio Muñoz, ‘Marcello Piacentini parla di Roma e di architettura,’ L’Urbe, 2, no. 5 (May 1937): 20. 26 ASC, Gov. di Roma: Deliberazioni del Governatorato, anno 1932, terzo semestre: deliberazione no. 5391, Ricorso Comm. ROSA ORESTE, via G. Ferrari, 11. 27 Ibid. Ric. Rossi, Vincenzo fu Domenico, Lungotevere in Augusta, 7. 28 Antonio Muñoz, ‘La Via dell’Impero e la Via del Mare,’ Capitolium 8, no. 5 (May 1932): 556. 29 Antonio Muñoz, L’Isolamento del Colle Capitolino (Rome: S.P.Q.R., 1943), 6–7. 30 Testa, ‘L’Urbanistica e il Piano Regolatore di Roma,’ Capitolium 8, no. 1–2 (January–February 1935): 175. 31 Piacentini, ‘Roma Mussoliniana,’ 316. 32 Paolo Salatino, ‘Il congiungimento dei Palazzi Capitolini,’ Capitolium 6 (February 1930): 97–103. 33 Muñoz, ‘La Via dell’Impero e la Via del Mare,’ 538. 34 Nestore Cinelli, ‘Osservazioni e proposte sul Piano Regolatore di Roma,’ ACS, PCM, 1934–6, b. 1959. 35 Mario Gai and Ermanno Natale, ‘Trasversale nel quartiere del Rinascimento,’ L’Urbe 2, no. 1 (January 1937): 18. 36 Fondo Piacentini, ‘Relazione–programma a S.E. Capo del Governo sul progetto del Piano Regolatore di Roma’ (1930). 37 ACS, Senato del Regno, vol. 143, doc. 7.A, legislatura XXVIII, prima sessione 1929–32, tornata del 18 marzo 1932: speech by Corrado Ricci. 38 Giuseppe Bottai, Il rinnovamento di Roma (Rome: Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1937), 15. 39 ASC, Gov. di Roma: Del. Del Governatorato, anno 1932, terzo semestre, Ric. Societa Anonima ‘Aedificato,’ via Dora, 2. 40 Antonio Muñoz, La Roma di Mussolini (Milan: S.A. Fratelli Treves Editori, 1935), 194. According to Muñoz, levelling the Velia Hill required the removal of some 280,000 cubic metres of earth and the demolition of 5500 buildings. 41 Ibid., 108. 42 In an interview with Muñoz in 1936, the French architect Le Corbusier

184

43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

Notes to pages 85–7

called for bridges to link the hills of Rome as the best solution for looking at ancient Rome while leaving it untouched by modernity. Antonio Muñoz, ‘Le Corbusier parla di Urbanistica romana,’ L’Urbe 14 (November 1936): 35. Antonio Muñoz, ‘La Via dell’Impero e la via del Mare,’ Capitolium 8, no. 5 (May 1932): 524. Muñoz, ‘Le Corbusier parla,’ 32. Antonio Muñoz, ‘La Via dell’Impero,’ Emporium 39, no. 10 (October 1933): 242. ‘Roma nella terza edizione della guida del Touring,’ Vie d’Italia 39, no. 11 (November 1933): 874. Emil Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini (Milan, 1950), 31. The Mille Miglia was a one-day event which began and ended in the Lombard city of Brescia. The race passed through Rome. For a complete history of the race and its place in the fascist regime see Daniele Marchesini, Cuori e motori: Storia della Mille Miglia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 67–127. Ibid., 202–3. The prefect admittedly may have been trying to deflect attention away from his own mistakes, but it is a fact that the annual death toll wrought by the Mille Miglia did not become a public scandal until the 1950s. Only after the 1957 edition, which saw two drivers and several spectators killed, did the Italian government ban the race. Antonio Muñoz, ‘La sistemazione del Mausoleo di Augusto,’ Capitolium 13, no. 10 (October 1938): 492. Antonio Muñoz, ‘La Via dell’Impero,’ 244. Zarathustra, ‘Mussolini e Roma,’ Il Selvaggio, 27 January 1925. Libeccio, ‘Oscena Monumentomania’ Il Selvaggio, 23–30 June 1925. Carlo Carrà, letter to the editor, Il Selvaggio, 3 March 1927; and Mino Maccari, ‘Mostruosità e rovine,’ Il Selvaggio, 30 March 1927. Libeccio, ‘Oscena Monumentomania,’ Il Selvaggio, 23–30 June 1925. Il Selvaggio became a platform for critics of the Master Plan of 1931 because of the presence of Marcello Piacentini as the leading member of the commission. In a series of articles by Leo Longanesi, the plan was condemned for aiming to make Rome a monumental city in the modernist style of Piacentini. Leo Longanesi, ‘Bandiera gialla. Pt. 1: Piacentini,’ Il Selvaggio, 15 April 1931); and Longanesi, ‘Il sacco di Roma,’ Il Selvaggio, 15 May 1931. Gustavo Brigante Colonna, ‘L’isolamento del Campidoglio. Demolizioni e ricordi,’ Capitolium 15, no. 1 (January–February 1940): 521. Brigante Colonna also noted that a house demolished near the Piazza Montanara once belonged to the actress and former mistress of D’Annunzio, Eleanora Duse.

Notes to pages 87–90

185

58 Ermanno Ponti, ‘Le memorie di Piazza Montanara,’ Capitolium 8, no. 1 (January 1931): 29. 59 Ermanno Ponti, ‘Roma sparita tra la Pedacchia e Macel de’ Corvi,’ Capitolium 7, no. 10 (October 1931): 486–7. 60 Muñoz, ‘La Via dell’Impero,’ 244. 61 F.P. Mulé, ‘Aspetti di Roma: Il fascismo e Roma – Isolamento del Campidoglio e Teatro Marcello – Il Ghetto – Storia e leggende – Il Foro d’Augusto – Un sorriso del Rinascimento,’ Capitolium 6 (May 1930): 232. 62 Antonio Muñoz, Via dei Monti e Via del Mare (Rome: S.P.Q.R., 1932), 36. 63 Ermanno Ponti, ‘Come sorse e come scompare il Quartiere attorno al Mausoleo di Augusto,’ Capitolium 11, no. 4 (April 1935): 235. 64 N.A., ‘La sistemazione del Mausoleo di Augusto,’ Capitolium 11, no. 4 (April 1935): 252. 65 ASC, Governatorato di Roma: Deliberazione del Governatorato, anno 1935, IV Trimestre, del. no. 7405, ‘Ricorso Rossi, Vincenzo fu Domenico, Lungotevere in Augusta 7.’ 66 Ibid., anno 1934, III Trimestre, del. no. 4421, Ric. Ing. Luigi Ansolini. 67 Marcello Piacentini, letter to the editor, ‘Il Piano Regolatore dell’Urbe e il problema del ‘non finito’ nel pensiero di Marcello Piacentini,’ La Tribuna, 10 April 1940. 68 ASC, Governatorato di Roma: Deliberazione del Governatorato, anno 1936, Primo Quadrimestre, del. 1143, Piano Regolatore 1931, Ric. Luigi Capri Crucini, via XX settembre 98 – G. 69 Francesco Fariello, ‘In merito al progetto della strada per il congiungiamento di Piazza SS. Apostoli con Piazza Barberini,’ L’Urbe 3, no. 10 (October 1938): 39–40. 70 Scipione Tadolini, ‘Una strada veloce da Piazza Barberini a Piazza SS. Apostoli: Proposta per il sottopassaggio di via Quattro Fontane,’ L’Urbe 3, no. 11 (November 1938): 40. 71 ACS, Autografi del Duce, ‘Cassetta di Zinco,’ b. 4, f. 6.1.12: ‘Discorso del Duce ai rurali d’Italia, 3 novembre 1928 – VII.’ 72 Italo Insolera and Francesco Perego, Archeologia e città: Storia moderna dei Fori di Roma (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1983), 68. 73 Sergio Bertelli, ‘Piazza Venezia. La creazione di uno spazio rituale per un nuovo Stato-nazione,’ in La chioma della Vittoria: Scritti sull’identità degli italiani dall’Unità alla seconda Repubblica, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1997), 170–209. 74 In fact, the monument was seldom used by the liberal monarchy until it became the home of the Unknown Soldier in 1921. Catherine Brice, Le Vit-

186

75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84

85 86

87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95

Notes to pages 90–3

toriano: Monumentalité publique et politique à Rome (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1998), 308–10. ACS, Min. LL. PP., Div. 5, b. 31, f. 67: ‘Rampe di accesso al piazzale del Campidoglio. Lettere da Ugo Ojetti a Ivanoe Bonomi, Min. LL. PP.,’ 9 March 1919. Mario Tinti, ‘Civiltà Italiana,’ Il Selvaggio, 15 December 1927. Ardengo Soffici, ‘Architettura razionale,’ Il Selvaggio, 30 May 1931. Leo Longanesi, ‘Il Sacco di Roma,’ Il Selvaggio, 15 May 1931. Bruno Tobia, L’Altare della Patria (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 71. Vito Labita, ‘Il Milite Ignoto: Dalle trincee all’Altare della patria,’ in Gli Occhi di Alessandro: Potere, sovrano, e sacralità del corpo da Alessandro Magno a Ceausescu, ed. Sergio Bertelli and Cristiano Grottanelli (Florence: CEF Gruppo, 1990), 132. ‘Il viaggio glorioso,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 4 November 1921. Benito Mussolini, ‘Preludi della Marcia su Roma,’ in Storia della Rivoluzione Fascista, vol. 1, ed. G.A. Chiurco (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1929), 5. ASC, Autografi del Duce, ‘Cassetta di Zinco,’ b. 3, f. 3.1.4: ‘Giugno 22, 1925 – III: Discorso del Duce al Congresso Fascista tenuto all’Augusteo.’ A white marble from Rezzatto near Brescia was chosen rather than the blonder Travertine marble that was typical of Roman buildings. Tobia, L’Altare della Patria, 58. ACS, S.P.D., C.O., b. 59: ‘Lettera di M. Piacentini al Capo del Governo, del 16 giugno 1930.’ Letter from Mussolini to the Minister of Public Works, 14 March 1924. ACS, Min. LL. PP., div. 5, b. 39, f. 107/218: ‘Sepoltura del Soldato Ignoto sull’Altare della Patria.’ Tobia, L’Altare della Patria, 38. ACS, Min. LL. PP., div. 5. b. 39, f. 107/218: ‘Letter from Mussolini to Carnazza, 29 aprile 1924.’ Ibid.: ‘Letter from Carnazza to Mussolini, 30 aprile 1924.’ Ibid.: ‘Letter from the Sotto Commissione Tecnico-Artistica per il monumento nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome to Luigi Gasparotto, Minister of War,’ 18 August 1921.’ Bach, ‘Il Milite Ignoto va posto dov’era,’ Il Giornale d’Italia, 19 March 1924. ‘Il milite ignoto deve tornare nella sua tomba,’ La Tribuna, 3 April 1924. Acciaresi, letter to the editor, Il Giornale d’Italia, 21 March 1924. ‘Il milite ignoto deve tornare nella sua tomba.’ Muñoz, La Roma di Mussolini, 432. Muñoz tells the story of an American tourist who refused to stay in Rome any longer because of the incessant noise of traffic. ‘We cannot accommodate him,’ concluded Muñoz.

Notes to pages 93–9

187

96 ACS, PNF, b. 50, f. 121: ‘Primo Anniversario della Marcia su Roma.’ 97 Giuseppe Cuccia, Urbanistica, edilizia, infrastrutture di Roma Capitale, 1870– 1990 (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1991), 131. 98 Muñoz, L’Isolamento del Colle Capitolino, 19. 99 Arturo Bianchi, ‘Il centro di Roma: La sistemazione del Foro Italico e le nuove vie del mare e dei monti,’ Architettura 12, no. 3 (March 1933): 138. 100 ACS, Autografi del Duce, ‘Casetta di Zinco.’ B. 10, f. 12.1.1, discorsi 1934. ‘March 8, 1934–XII: Discorso del Duce, a Palazzo Venezia, per la seduta plenaria del Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche.’ 101 ‘Giù le mani!’ L’Urbe 3, no. 7 (July 1938): 2. 102 Gustavo Giovannoni, Lineamenti fondamentali del Piano Regolatore di Roma Imperiale (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1939), 12. 103 Gustavo Giovannoni, I piani regolatori e la fondazione di nuove città (Rome: Tipografo della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1937), 13. 104 Ettore Scola’s 1977 film Una giornata particolare (A Special Day) captures the spectacle of fascists in an apartment block in the outlying districts of the city organizing themselves to move towards the centre to take part in a military parade honouring Adolf Hitler. For a comprehensive list of rallies and speeches held in Piazza Venezia, see Italo Insolera and Francesco Perego, Archeologia e città, 74. 105 ACS, Autografi del Duce, ‘Casetta di Zinco,’ b. 9, f. 10.1.5: Clipping from Il Messaggero, 19 September 1932. 106 Archivio LUCE, GL, B0142, ‘Roma. Adunata nazionale dei bersaglieri.’ 23 September 1932. 107 ‘Tutto il popolo Italiano intorno al suo Capo. Lo storico discorso del Duce alla Nazione ed al Mondo. Indescrivabile manifestazione a Roma. Entusiastiche dimostrazione nell’intero Paese,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 3 October 1935. 108 Asveldo Gravelli, ‘Il popolo romano ha risposto SI,’ Ottobre, 27 March 1934. 109 Aldo Grandi, I giovani di Mussolini: Fascisti convinti, fascisti pentiti, antifascisti (Milan: Baldani & Castoldi, 2001), 231. 110 ‘La manifestazione a Piazza Venezia per la seduta del Gran Consiglio,’ La Tribuna, 4 October 1932. 111 ‘Oceanica adunata di popolo in Piazza Venezia,’ Il Messaggero, 11 June 1940. 112 Leo Longanesi, ‘Il sacco di Roma,’ Il Selvaggio, 15 May 1931. 113 Ibid. 114 On the theme of making the ‘past present’ in fascism, see Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 21–51.

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Notes to pages 99–105

115 I am indebted to Ed Whitley’s postmodern analysis of the Beatles’ White Album for this term. Ed Whitley, ‘The Postmodern White Album,’ in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: A Thousand Voices, ed. Ian Inglis (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), 107. 116 Corrado Alvaro, Itinerario italiano (Milan: Bompiani, 1995), 11. 117 Ibid., 13. 118 G. Marchetti Longhi, ‘La via dell’Impero nel su sviluppo storico, topografico e nel suo significato ideale,’ Capitolium 10, no. 2 (February 1934): 54. 119 Ibid., 56. 120 Ibid., 54. 121 Ibid., 60. 122 Jacques de Lacretelle, ‘L’Esempio di Roma,’ Capitolium 11 (September 1935): 426. 5. The Palazzo and the Boulevard 1 Marla Stone, ‘Staging Fascism: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,’ Journal of Contemporary History 28 (1993): 215–43; and Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,’ in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard Golsan (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1992): 1–37. 2 Much has been written on fascism’s exploitation of the ancient legacy. See A. Giardini and A. Vauchez, Il mito di Roma: Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2000); Romke Visser, ‘Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of the Romanità,’ Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992): 5–22; and Friedemann Scriba, ‘The Sacralization of the Roman Past in Mussolini’s Italy: Erudition, Aesthetics, and Religion in the Exhibition of Augustus’ Bimillinary in 1937–1938,’ Storia della Storiografia 30 (1996): 19–29. 3 Known today as the Farnesina, it houses the Italian foreign ministry. 4 See Giorgio Ciucci, Gli architetti e il Fascismo: Architettura e citta 1922–1944 (Turin: Einaudi, 1989); Richard A. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture 1890–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990); Carlo Cresti, Architettura e Fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1987); Enrico Mantero, ed., Il Razionalismo Italiano (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli Editore, 1984); and Fabrizio Brunetti, Architetti e Fascismo (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 1993). 5 Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio (Bari: Laterza, 1993), 215 and passim. 6 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Architettura, arte e simbolo alla Mostra del Fascismo,’ Architettura 12 (January 1933): 13. 7 Despite his distinguished record and career, much of which predated

Notes to pages 105–8

8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

189

fascism, Ricci was considered one of the arch-villains of Fascist urban planning and found a place in Antonio Cederna’s rogue gallery of sventratori along with Piacentini, Brasini, and others. See Antonio Cederna, Mussolini urbanista (Rome: Laterza, 1979), xviii. On the place of prominent architects within fascism see Paolo Nicoloso, Gli architetti di Mussolini (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999). ‘Il nuovo Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione sorgerà, per volontà di Mussolini, sulla Via dell’Impero,’ Il Corriere della Sera, 28 December 1933. Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 6. On fascism’s policy of ‘creative freedom’ see Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 426. Pietro Maria Bardi, ‘Il concorso del Palazzo del Littorio,’ Quadrante 16/17 (August–September 1934): 1. Giuseppe Pagano, ‘Mussolini salva l’architettura Italiana,’ in Architettura e città durante il fascismo, ed. Cesare De Seta (Bari: Laterza, 1976), 21. Carlo Belli, ‘Atto di Fede,’ Quadrante 16/17 (August–September, 1934), 10. Cresti, Architettura e Fascismo, 185. Brunetti, Architetti e Fascismo, 253. ‘Il nuovo Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione sorgera, per volonta di Mussolini, sulla Via dell’Impero,’ Il Corriere della Sera, 28 December 1933. G.L. Banfi, L.B. di Belgiojoso et al., ‘Relazione al progetto del Palazzo del Littorio,’ Quadrante 16/17 (August–September 1934), 17. Giuseppe Pagano, ‘Palazzo Littorio. Atto primo, scena prima,’ in Architettura e città, 29. ‘Il progetto per la Casa Littoria nell’Urbe,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 27 May 1934. Pagano, ‘Mussolini salva l’architettura Italiana,’ 19. Brunetti, Architetti e Fascismo, 253–4. Francesco Fariello, ‘La Casa Littorio,’ Roma Fascista, 3 January 1935. Pietro Maria Bardi, ‘Il concorso del Palazzo su via dell’Impero,’ Quadrante 18 (October 1934–5), 13. Il Nuovo Stile Littorio: I progetti per il Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in Via dell’Impero (Milan, Rome: S.A. Arti Grafiche Bertarelli, 1936), 73. ACS, PCM 1934–6, b. 1959: ‘Letter from Massimo del Fante to Edmondo Rossoni.’

190 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Notes to pages 108–16

Brunetti, Architetti e Fascismo, 271. Fariello, ‘La Casa Littorio.’ ACS, PNF, b. 1504, f. 73.4.13: ‘Letter from Gastone Pesce to Dir. PNF.’ Ibid. Ciucci, Gli architetti e il Fascismo, 148. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 432–3. Pagano, ‘Palazzo Littorio,’ 28. ACS, Legislatura XIX, 1 Sessione, Discussioni, session of 30 May 1934. Il Nuovo Stile Littorio, Progetto Vaccaro, 91. ACS, PCM 1934–6, b. 1959: ‘Letter from Massimo del Fante to Edmondo Rossoni.’ NSL, Progetto De Renzi, 25. NSL, Progetto Brunati-Simoncini, 165–6. NSL, Progetto Fasolo, 35. ‘Dal Vecchio al Nuovo Testamento,’ Il Selvaggio, 30 September 1934. ACS, PCM 1934–6, b. 1959: ‘Letter from Massimo del Fante to Edmondo Rossoni.’ Giuseppe Bottai, ‘La carta marmorea dell’Impero Fascista,’ L’Urbe 1 (1936): 3–4. NSL, Progetto Cro, 187. NSL, Progetto Mancini, 272. NSL, ‘Il Bando di Concorso,’ art. 1. ACS, SPD-Mat., b. 379, f. 137.307/4: ‘Letter from Paribeni to Boncompagni.’ Speech by Sen. Corrado Ricci. ACS, Senato del Regno, vol. 143, doc. 7.A, legislatura XXVIII, prima sessione 1929–32, 18 March 1932. Pietro Maria Bardi, ‘Corsivo n. 112,’ Quadrante 11 (March 1934): 20. The original sacrario in the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution included a massive cross at the centre of the shrine. NSL, Progetto Ridolfi-Cafeiro-La Padula-Rossi, 73. NSL, Progetto Del Debbio-Foschini-Morpurgo, 9–11. NSL, Progetto Vaccaro, 91. NSL, Progetto Cuzzi-Levi-Montalcini-Pifferi, 193–4. The most prominent of these was the project submitted by the Arch. De Renzi. NSL, Progetto De Renzi, 27–34. NSL, Progetto Palanti, 59–66. NSL, Progetto Liani, 259. NSL, Progetti Crescini e Cro, 183–4, 187–92. NSL, Progetto Ridolfi-Cafiero-La Padula-Rossi, 73–8. NSL, Progetto Baratto, 127–32.

Notes to pages 116–21

191

60 NSL, Progetto Montanini e Artoni, 106. 61 Sigfried Giedion may have been thinking of these designs when giving his 1938 Norton Lectures, wherein he argued that modernist architecture was effecting ‘a hitherto unknown interpenetration of inner and outer space; an interpenetration of different levels above and below the earth brought about by the effect of the automobile, which has forced the incorporation of movement as an inseperable element of architecture.’ Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), xlviii. 62 Riccardo Mariani, Fascismo e ‘città nuove’ (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976). 63 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, xl–xli. 64 Carlo Belli, ‘Pericolo del nulla,’ Quadrante 18 (October 1934–5): 17. 65 Edmondo del Bufalo, La Via Imperiale e il suo significato storico e politico (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1940), 6. 66 Gustavo Giovannoni, I piani regolatori e la fondazione di nuove citta (Rome: Tipografo della R. Accademia dei Lincei, 1937), 9. 67 Del Bufalo, La Via Imperiale, 6. 68 F. Mansutti, ‘(Il Palazzo Littorio) Tre punti fondamentali,’ Quadrante 20 (December 1935): 5. 69 Bardi, ‘Il concorso del Palazzo su via dell’Impero,’ 14. 70 ‘Roma nella terza edizione della guida del Touring,’ Vie d’Italia 39, no. 11 (November 1933): 873. 71 Massimo Bontempelli, ‘Proposta per Via dell’Impero,’ Quadrante 18 (October 1934–5): 21. 72 NSL, Progetto Del Debbio-Foschini-Morpurgo, 9–11. 73 Mansutti, ‘Il Palazzo Littorio,’ 5. 6. Resurrecting a Pagan Landscape 1 Julius Evola, Imperialismo Pagano: Il Fascismo dinanzi al Pericolo Euro-Cristiano (Padua: Edizioni Ar, 1978), 13. 2 Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 98. 3 Ibid., 13. 4 Ibid. 5 A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 191–221. 6 The Ministry of Fine Arts rejected a request by a well-known Florentine astrologist to engage in an independent archaeological dig in 1934 because

192

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

Notes to pages 122–5

it had no ‘scientific value.’ ACS, AA. BB. AA, Div. II, 1934–40, b. 1. In 1941 the Ministry of Popular Culture was informed of a German biography of Mussolini that used esoteric imagery to describe the Italian leader. The ministry dismissed the book as a ‘strange mixture of oriental fantasy and Nordic sensibility, which is far removed from the clear and positive Latin spirit.’ ACS, Miniculpop, b. 36. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 101. Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio: La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista. (Bari: Laterza, 1993). See Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Hans Maier, ed., Totalitarianism and Political Religions. vol. 1: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships (London: Routledge, 2004). Burleigh, The Third Reich, 10. Pope Pius XI, Non Abbiamo Bisogno (29 June 1931), art. 44: http://www .papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11FAC.HTM. Herbert W. Schneider and Shepard B. Clough, Making Fascists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 73–4. Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘The Menace of the New Paganism,’ The Christian Century (March 1937): http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=476. Christopher Dawson, ‘The Recovery of Spiritual Unity,’ in Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson, ed. Gerald J. Russello (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 246; Aurel Kolnai, The War against the West (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1938), 236–48. ‘Germanesimo razzista e Romanesimo Cattolico,’ Civiltà Cattolica 89, no. 2 (1938): 289–92. Pius XI, Ubi Arcano dei Consilio (23 December 1922), art. 25: http://www .papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11ARCAN.htm. G. Messina, S.J., ‘L’Apoteosi dell’uomo vivente e il Cristianesimo,’ Civiltà Cattolica 80, vol. 3 (1929): 514. Luigi Fiorani, ‘Un vescovo e la sua diocese: Pio XI, ‘primo pastore e parrocco’ di Roma,’ in Achille Ratti. Pape Pie XI, ed. École Française de Rome (Palais Farnèse, Rome: École Française de Rome, 1996), 428–30. Ibid., 426. According to contemporary observers, the declaration by the pope caused ‘great emotion’ among those present. D.A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 78. Ibid., 423. Zsolt Aradi, Pius XI: The Pope and the Man (New York: Hanover House, 1958), 165; Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri, Pius XI: A Close-Up (Altadena, CA:

Notes to pages 125–8

23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

193

Benziger Sisters Publishers, 1975), 29. Sixtus V (1585–90) was known for his public works projects in Rome, including road building. In his book on the Vatican’s finances, John Pollard has argued that Pius’s ambitious building schemes were aimed at ‘re-asserting the visibility of the papal ‘presence’ in Rome’ in the face of fascism’s urban planning. John Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 134–5. ACS, AA. BB. AA., b. 195. The basilica and its restoration were handed back to the Vatican after the signing of the Concordat in 1929. The man in charge of the restoration work, Arnaldo Foschini, would later design the Basilica of Sts Peter and Paul in the E42 (the new Rome, outside the city; now called the EUR). Andrea Riccardi, ‘La Vita Religiosa,’ in Roma Capitale, ed. Vittorio Vidotto (Bari: Laterza, 2002), 273. John Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929–1932: A Study in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 206, 212. ‘Le violenze contro l’Azione Cattolica si estendono a persone e ad edifici ecclesiastici,’ L’Osservatore Romano, 31 May 1931. ACS, PCM 1934–6, b. 1959, f. 7.2.208/10: ‘P.R.: Chiesa russa cattolica a San Lorenzo ai Monti.’ Ibid., f. 7.2.208/9: ‘P.R.: Espropriazione di un palazzo di proprietà del Conservatorio di S. Eufemia.’ Ibid., f. 7.2.208/12: ‘P.R.: Pontificio Collegio Germanico-Ungarico.’ The conflict was eventually resolved, but only after difficult negotiations. Arturo Bianchi, ‘La via XXIII Marzo,’ Capitolium 15, no. 3 (March 1940): 592. Ibid., f. 7.2/208/8: ‘P.R.: Pontificio Collegio Armeno.’ ASV, AES Italia, pos. 851, fasc. 536: Letter from Borgongini Duca to Dino Grandi, 21 January 1932. Ibid. Ibid.: Verbal note from Dino Grandi to Nunzio, 9 April 1932. Ibid. ASV, AES Italia, pos. 851, f. 537: Letter from F. Gentil to Msg. Pizzardo, 29 March 1933. ASV, AES Italia, pos. 851, f. 536: Letter from Borgongini Duca to Sec. of State Pacelli, 8 January 1936. ACS, PCM 1934–36, b. 1959, f. 7.2.208/14: ‘P.R.: Istituto Agricolo di Vigna Pia. Letter from A. Crisio to Mussolini, October 14, 1930.’ Ibid., ‘Lettera Card. Pompili al Governatore,’ 14 July 1930. Edmondo del Bufalo, La Via Imperiale e il suo significato storico e politico (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1940), 4–5.

194

Notes to pages 128–30

41 G. Corsetti, ‘Il sistema delle strade di accesso all’Esposizione Universale del 1942,’ Capitolium 12, no. 14 (1939): 402–4. 42 Ibid., 405–6. 43 ASV, AES Italia, pos. 1052, f. 727: Letter from the Commission of Sacred Archaeology to the Administration of the Property of the Holy See, 28 March 1938. 44 Ibid.: Letter from Borgongini Duca to Buffarini Guidi, 23 April 1938. 45 Pius XI, ‘Al Congresso degli Ospedali: Verità e Bene,’ in Discorsi di Pio XI, ed. Domenico Bertetto (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1959), 3: 331–2. 46 Thomas Molnar, The Pagan Temptation (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eardman’s Publishing Co., 1987), 42. 47 Pius XI, ‘Ai giovani di Azione: La cultura religiosa,’ in Discorsi di Pio XI, 2: 998. 48 Ibid., ‘A giovani universitari: Scienza, fede, e formazione cristiana,’ 29. 49 Pius XI, Discorsi, ‘Agli archeologi cristiani: Dio regolatore degli eventi,’ 3: 842. 50 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), 253–4. 51 ACS, Autografi del Duce, ‘Casetta di zinco,’ b.4, f. 5.1.2: ‘1927 discorsi: aprile 9, 1927 – V: Discorso all R. Società romana di storia patria (Scavi di Ercolano – Navi di Nemi).’ 52 The elusiveness of the past was captured by the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini in his 1972 film Roma. There is a scene where a Roman villa is discovered during excavation of the Metro. As soon as the chamber is opened, the frescos fade away. This scene, according to Edward Murray, was symbolic of a past lost to the march of progress. Edward Murray, Fellini the Artist, 2nd ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985), 209. 53 ACS, PCM 1928–30, f. 5, n. 2/4293: ‘Roma – Scavi nell’Aula Senatoria – Campidoglio – Conservazione della Chiesa di S. Adriano.’ 54 ‘Mussolini acclamato dagli operai visita le grandi opera romano del primo Decennale,’ Il Lavoro Fascista, 7 October 1932. 55 Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1937–1943 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 166. 56 ACS, Autografi del Duce: ‘Casetta di zinco,’ b. 6, f. 5.6.16, all. 3: ‘Il Popolo di Roma’ (18–19 October 1927). 57 Ibid., b. 6, f. 6.1.7: ‘2 luglio 1928 – VI: Discorso del Duce ai mutilati Altoatesini.’ 58 Zsolt Aradi, Pius X: The Pope and the Man (New York: Hanover House, 1958), 42. 59 Philip Hughes, Pope Pius the Eleventh (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938), 23.

Notes to pages 131–6

195

60 Pius XI, ‘Ai giovani di Azione Cattolica Italiana,’ 2: 998. 61 Ibid., ‘Al pellegrinagio cremonese: L’efficacia della parola Divina,’ 1: 347–8. 62 Ibid., ‘Al congresso giuridico internazionale: I rapporti tra il diritto romano e quello canonico,’ 3: 236. 63 Ibid., ‘Al congresso degli ospedali: Verità e bene,’ 3: 330. 64 ASV, AES Italia, pos. 851, f. 537: Letter from Bishop Costantini to Cardinal Pacelli, 1 November 1933. 65 Ibid., f. 536: Letter from the Prefect of Apostolic Ceremonies to Sec. of AES, 29 February 1932. 66 Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 71–2. Mussolini repeated this argument to Emil Ludwig. See Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini (Milan: Mondadori, 1950), 174. 67 Hitler’s anti-Christian views are a constant theme in his Table Talks. Richard Steigmann-Gall has recently raised questions about this interpretation, suggesting that Hitler’s views were more ambiguous. Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 252–9. 68 Hitler, Table Talk, 88–9. 69 Ibid., 143. Renuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Hitler e Mussolini 1938:Il viaggio del Fuhrer in Italia (Rome: E/o, 1995), 26–7. 70 Ibid., 76, 143. 71 ‘Sulle memorie e i monumenti dei SS. Apostoli Pietro e Paolo a Roma,’ Civiltà Cattolica 86, no. 2 (1935): 247. 72 Andrea Giardina and André Vauchez, Il mito di Roma: Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini (Bari: Laterza, 2000), 26–7. 73 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 142–8. 74 Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 106–7. 7. Return of the Roman 1 Nino Tripodi, Fascismo così: Problemi di un tempo ritrovato (Rome: Ciarrapico, 1984), 279. 2 G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1930), 16. 3 Ibid., 15. 4 Ibid., 12. 5 Ibid., 126. 6 Ibid., 192. 7 Ibid., 193–4.

196

Notes to pages 136–40

8 Domenico Mario Leva, Cronache del Fascismo Romano (Perugia: Società Tip, 1943), 2, 4. 9 Daniel Lindberg, Les années souterraines (1937–1947) (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1990), 62. 10 Simone Weil, ‘The Great Beast: Some Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism,’ in Selected Essays, 1934–1943, trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 100. 11 Ibid., 143. 12 Robert Casillo, ‘Fascists of the Final Hour: Pound’s Italian Cantos,’ in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (London: University Press of New England, 1992), 108. 13 Ibid., 109. 14 Pius XI, ‘Al Sacro Collegio Cardinalizio: Il Nunc Dimittis del Papa Pio XI,’ in Discorsi di Pio XI, ed. Domenico Bertetto (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1959), 3: 871. 15 ‘Giubileo di una città,’ Il Giornale, 5 May 1938. 16 On Mussolini’s return to Italy, his foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, told Giuseppe Bottai that Mussolini needed to be restrained ‘because of his proclivity to be lit with enthusiasm over the spectacle of German military organization.’ Giuseppe Bottai, Vent’anni e un giorno (24 luglio 1943) (Milan: Garzanti, 1977), 112. 17 ACS, MCP, b. 36, f. 249: ‘Viaggi del Duce – Germania.’ 18 ACS, PCM. 1937–8, b. 2405, f. 4.11.3711: ‘Lettera da Ciano a Medici.’ 19 ‘Der Fuhrer to Meet Il Duce in a More Wary Rome,’ New York Times, 2 May 1938. 20 ACS, PCM. 1937–8, b. 2405, f. 4.11.3711: ‘Visita del Fuhrer in Italia, relazione no. 2.’ 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., ‘Predisposizioni circa la visita del Fuhrer in Italia.’ 23 ACS, PCM, 1937–8, b. 2405, f. 4.11.3711/5–2: ‘Statistica delle bandiere.’ 24 Ministero degli Affari Esteri, ed., I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani (DDI), ottava seria, vol. 8: ‘Il Console Generale a Vienna Rochira, al Ministro degli Esteri, Ciano,’ 2 April 1938, 507–8. 25 ACS, PCM. 1937–1938, b. 2405, f. 4.11.3711: ‘Predisposizioni circa la visita del Fuhrer in Italia.’ 26 The prefect of Littoria was asked for some 50,000 people on the route between Rome and Naples, perhaps to further masquerade the unaesthetic houses. Ibid., ‘Rilievi fatti lungo il percorso ferroviario Roma–Napoli.’ 27 Ibid., ‘Visita del Fuhrer: Relazione sull’ispezione di 22 marzo della linea tra il Brennero e Roma.’

Notes to pages 141–3

197

28 Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945. From the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, series D (1937–45), vol. 1: From Neurath to Ribbentrop (September 1937–September 1938), no. 745. 29 ACS, JAJA, Job 170, Mussolini’s Secretariat. 30 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson), 10–11. 31 Renuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Hitler e Mussolini 1938: Il viaggio del Führer in Italia (Rome: E/o, 1995), 32. 32 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 268. 33 Antonio Muñoz, ‘Gli artisti tedeschi a Roma,’ L’Urbe 4 (April 1938): 1–31. 34 ACS, Autografi del Duce, ‘Cassetta di Zinco,’ b. 9, f. 10.1.2: ‘Aprile 4, 1932 – X: Discorso del Duce per il centenario di Wolfgang Goethe, all’inaugurazione dell’Istituto di Cultura Italo-Germanico.’ 35 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 88. 36 Ibid., 289. 37 Archivio LUCE, D312: ‘Il viaggio del Fuhrer in Italia: Dal Brennero a Roma.’ 38 The Pantheon, which Hitler saw as an architectural marvel, would serve as a model for his own architectural dreams for Germany. See Alex Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), chap. 1; and Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1970), 153. 39 ‘Al sepolcro di Raffaello,’ Il Messaggero, 8 May 1938. 40 ACS, MCP, b. 63: ‘Viaggio del Fuehrer in Italia: Itinerario,’ 19. 41 Ibid., 37. 42 Ibid., 45. 43 Ibid., 46. 44 Overall, the German military observers were not impressed by the Italian armed forces. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (London: Penguin, 1976), 129. 45 Bianchi Bandinelli, Hitler e Mussolini, 32. 46 ‘Roma e il Fuhrer,’ Roma Fascista, 5 May 1938. Awed by the spectacle of the visit, the foreign press recognized the scepticism some Italians held towards the German visitors. Life magazine remarked on the lack of conviction and enthusiasm among the workers installing the light standards for the visit. A caption noted that the body language of the workers was proof that fascism had failed to regiment Italians. ‘Fascism: A new street – Viale Hitler,’ Life 9 (May 1938): 41. 47 ‘Pattern of War,’ Life 10 (June 1938): 30–1. 48 Anne O’Hare McCormick, ‘Uncertain Future Drives All Nations to Pile up Arms,’ New York Times, 7 May 1938.

198 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Notes to pages 143–9

‘Rome Thinks Visit Will Oil the Axis,’ New York Times, 2 May 1938. ‘Heil Hiter,’ Roma Fascista (28 April 1938), 2. ACS, M.C.P, b. 63, ‘Itinerario.’ Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 537. Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 386. Ibid., 387. ‘Le giornate romane del Führer,’ L’Urbe 3, no. 5 (May 1938): 40. Bianchi Bandinelli, Hitler e Mussolini, 51. Enrico Caviglia, Diario: Aprile 1925–marzo 1945 (Rome: Gherardo Casini Editore, 1952), 225–6. Bianchi Bandinelli, Hitler e Mussolini, 18. ‘Fascino di Roma,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 4 May 1938. Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 268–9. Coming out of the opera in Naples, Hitler was embarrassed to be seen next to the king, who was in full military regalia while he was in a tuxedo. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York, W.W. Norton, 2000), 98. Benito Mussolini, Storia di un anno (Florence: La Fenice, 1984), 127. Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1937–1943 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 132–3. Ibid., 134. Ciano, Diario, 134. Emilio Gentile, ‘Fascism in Power: The Totalitarian Experiment,’ in Liberal and Fascist Italy 1900–45, ed. Adrian Lyttleton (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157. Ibid., 123–4. Ibid., 122. Luigi Federzoni, Italia di ieri. Per la storia di domani (Milan: Mondadori, 1967), 222–38. ASV, AES Germania, pos. 735, f. 353. ASV, AES Germania, pos. 735, f. 353: Report from the Apostolic Nunzio, 27 April 1938. DDI, ott. oer., vol. 8: ‘Il Consigliere dell’Ambasciata a Berlino, Magistrati, al Ministro degli Esteri, Ciano’ (15March 1938), 380–1. ASV, AES Germania, Pos. 735, f. 353, 28 April 1938. Louis Gillet, ‘Hitler à Rome. Choses vues,’ Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 June 1938: 683. Ibid., 676. ‘Fedeltà alla nuova storia,’ Il Lavoro Fascista, 2 March 1938. Ibid.

Notes to pages 149–52

199

78 Louis Gillet, ‘J’ai vue le Saint-Père dans sa villa de Castelgandolfo,’ Paris Soir, 10 May 1938. 79 Luigi Bottazzi, ‘Hitler in Italia: Gli ingressi trionfali dell’Urbe,’ Vie d’Italia, May 1938: 610. For an account of the imperial symbolism shown Hitler see David Atkinson, ‘Hitler’s Grand Tour: The Triumphal Entrance to Fascist Rome,’ Royal Holloway University of London Geography Department working paper, no. 8 (1997), 1–25. 80 Leo Longanesi, In piedi e seduti, 1919–1943 (Milan: Longanesi & C., 1968), 211. 81 Ciano, Diario, 132. 82 ‘Hitler Will Get a Ride behind Horses in Rome,’ New York Times, 3 May 1938. In later years, Hitler remembered with contempt ‘the badly slung carnival carriage, which hobbled along in a lamentable fashion.’ Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 268. 83 Bottazzi, ‘Hitler in Italia,’ 607. 84 ‘Dalla stazione Ostiense al Quirinale,’ Il Messaggero, 4 May 1938. 85 Longanesi, In piedi e seduti, 211–12. 86 Gillet, ‘Hitler à Rome, ‘ 670. 87 ‘Le giornate romane,’ 42. 88 Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter (London: Heinemann, 1951), 81. 89 Mino Maccari, ‘Nel cuore di Roma imperiale,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 4 May 1938. 90 Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter, 81. 91 Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Gilded Rome Is Set to Dazzle Hitler,’ New York Times, 3 May 1938. 92 Antonio Gibelli, L’officina della guerra (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 182. 93 Bottazzi, ‘Hitler in Italia,’ 607. 94 Giornale LUCE, b. 1013: ‘L’edificazione del più grande gazometro d’Italia fuori Porta San Paolo a Roma’ (1936). 95 Carlo Cecchelli, ‘Itinerario imperiale,’ Capitolium 13, no. 4 (April 1938), 169. 96 Ibid., 170. 97 Max Ascoli, Fascism for Whom? (New York: Norton, 1938), 25. 98 Ibid., 25. 99 Magregor Knox, ‘Conquest, Foreign and Domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany,’ Journal of Modern History 56 (March 1984): 47. 100 Nicolò Castellino, ‘Il Duce e il Führer al Campo di Maggio,’ Nuova Antologia 72, no. 1574 (16 October 1937), 362. 101 Silvio Petrucci, ‘L’arrivo alla Stazione Ostiense,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 4 May 1938.

200

Notes to pages 153–8

102 103 104 105 106 107 108

‘Apoteosi dell’Impero,’ Il Tevere, 7 May 1938. ‘Inizio all’apoteosi,’ Il Tevere, 3 May 1938. ACS, MCP, b. 63: ‘Viaggio del Fuehrer in Italia: Itinerario,’ 39. Giardina and Vauchez, Il mito di Roma, 5. Ibid., 5. ‘Hitler a Roma,’ Nuova Antologia 73, no. 1587 (1 May 1938), 3. Georges Bernanos, ‘Les enfants humiliés,’ in Essais et écrits de combat, vol. 1, ed. Michele Estève (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 857. 109 Ruggero Zangrandi, Il lungo viaggio attraverso il fascismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), 137. 110 Bernanos, ‘Les enfants,’ 852. Conclusion: The Cinematic City 1 Gustavo Giovannoni, Lineamenti fondamentale del Piano Regolatore di Roma Imperiale (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1939), 4. 2 James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 210. 3 Antonio Cederna, Mussolini urbanista: Lo sventramento di Roma negli anni del consenso (Rome: Laterza, 1980), xviii. 4 Arrigo Solmi, ‘La funzione della città nella storia Italiana,’ in L’Urbanistica dall’Antichità ad Oggi, ed. Gustavo Giovannoni et al. (Florence: Sansoni, 1943), 6. 5 Giovannoni, Lineamenti fondamentale, 25. 6 Gustavo Giovannoni, L’Urbanistica e la deurbanizzazione (Rome: Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze, 1936), 14. 7 Gustavo Giovannoni, I piani regolatori e la fondazione di nuove città (Rome: Tipografo della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1937), 13. 8 Giovannoni, Lineamenti fondamentali, 12. 9 Giovannoni, L’Urbanistica, 14. 10 Ibid., 9. 11 Gustavo Giovannoni, L’espansione di Roma verso i colli e verso il mare (Rocca S. Cacciano: L. Cappelli, 1934), 16–17. 12 Marcello Piacentini, ‘Roma nel 1942,’ Il Giornale d’Italia, 27 November 1938. 13 Mia Fuller, ‘Wherever You Go, There You Are: Fascist Plans for the Colonial City of Addis Ababa and the Colonizing Suburb of EUR ’42,’ Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996): 403. 14 Antonio Muñoz, ‘Le Corbusier parla di Urbanistica Romana,’ L’Urbe 1, no. 2 (November 1936): 32.

Notes to pages 158–61

201

15 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 235–8. 16 Ibid., 236. 17 Archivio LUCE, ‘La Città Bianca,’ dir. Enrico Franceschelli (1953). 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 For an extended discussion of these camps, see Gianni Oliva, Profughi. Dalle foibe all’esodo: La tragedia degli italiani d’Istria, Fiume e Dalmazia (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), 170–90. 21 An excellent on-line presentation on the Quartiere and its history, the creation of Roberta Fidanzia of the University of Rome, can be found at http:// www.giuliano-dalmata.it/storia.swf.

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Archives and Special Collections Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Rome Archivio LUCE, Rome Archivio Segreto del Vaticano (ASV), Vatican City Archivio Storico Capitolino (ASC), Rome Fondo Piacentini, University of Rome Newspapers and Periodicals Il Carroccio La Civiltà Cattolica Il Corriere della Sera Il Giornale d’Italia Illustrated London News L’Impero Il Lavoro Fascista Il Messaggero New York Times L’Osservatore Romano Ottobre Paris Soir Il Popolo d’Italia Quadrante Revue des Deux Mondes Revue de Paris Roma Fascista

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Index

Acciaresi, Primo, 92, 93 actualism, 8 Adamson, Walter, 165n18 adunate oceaniche (oceanic rallies), xiii, 76–7, 96–8 Alfieri, Dino, 139 Alvaro, Corrado, 63, 99–100 Amber Way, 19 Angeli, Diego, 67–8, 81 Anschluss, 141 Antliff, Mark, 8 Apostles, arrival of in Rome, 131 apotheosis: Hitler’s visit to Rome as, 138, 147, 152–3; Vittoriano rhetoric of Third Italy, 90 Aquileia, 16–17, 33 archaeology, fascist: motives of, 129; revealing mythical Rome, 68–71; scientific inquiry secondary to, 69 architecture, fascist, 144 Arch of Constantine, 112 arditi: Bottai on, 11, 36; in Caporetto retreat, 29; as fascists, 172n12; influence on squadrismo, 36, 172n13; mystique of, 14 arditismo, 24, 174n51 Armenian Pontifical College, 126

arrow shape, in Palazzo Littorio design, 115, 190n54 Ascoli, Max, 6, 152 Asiago plateau, 25 Augusteo (theatre), 44, 55, 71, 86 Augustus Mausoleum, 55, 71, 81, 86 autobahn, 144 automobiles: as blood of city, 157; de-urbanization and, 156–7; fantasies of, 14; McLuhan on, 181n78; mental transformation caused by, 13–14; as militaristic substitutes, 14–15 autostrade (highways), 13 Balbo, Italo: on assault on Parma, 39; Diario 1922, 37–8; on March on Rome, 48; on piazza vs. organized fascist action, 40; as quadrumvir, 175n79 Baldini, Franco, 39 Balkan Hotel, torching of, 41 Bandinelli, Bianchi, 143, 145 Banfi, G.I., 107 Baratto, Mario, 116 barbarians: fascists as, 11–12; myth of, 11; soldiers as, 30–1, 171n82

218 Bardi, Pietro Maria: on mental transformation caused by automobile, 13–14; on Milizia della Strada, 77–8; on Palazzo Littorio competition, 106, 107–8, 119 Basilica of Maxentius, 105, 110, 111, 112 Basilica of Saints Paul and Peter, 160 Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls, xii, 125, 193n24 Bataille, Georges, 137 Battle of 15 April 1919, 36, 172n13 Baudrillard, Jean, xiv Beals, Carleton, 52 Beckmann, Jörg, 14 Belgiojoso, L.B. di, 107 Bellezza, Dario, xvi Belli, Carlo, 106, 118 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 6 Benjamin, Walter, 8 Benton, Tim, 15 Bergamas, Maria, 16 Bernanos, Georges, 153 Bernini fountains, 144 Bersaglieri rally (1932), 96 Bianchi, Arturo, 67–8, 80–1 Bianchi, Michele, 175n79 billboards, 140 blackshirts (squadristi): ambivalence of, in March on Rome, 50; Capitoline Hill in legend of, 70–1; in fascist Rome, 6; Fiat 18BL as transportation for, 37; formation of, 7; as heroic Italian warriors, 34; landscape of war and, 35; mythmaking and, 14; as new pagans, 17; quadrumvirs, 48, 175n79; as reincarnation of fante, 48; resurrecting Imperial Rome, 137; as savage and primitive invaders of Rome, 51–2

Index Bologna, Italy, 140 Boncompagni-Ludovisi, Francesco, xiii, 60, 68, 85, 105, 128 Bonichi, Gino (Scipione), 54 Bono, Emilio De, 40; as quadrumvir, 175n79 Bontempelli, Massimo, 119 borgate (shantytowns), xiii, 60, 96 Borghese Museum, 144 Borgo Pio quarter, 51, 176n99 Bottai, Giuseppe: on ambivalence of blackshirts in March on Rome, 50; on arditi, 11, 36; on conflict between fascist and liberal Rome, 41; on construction of E42, 158; on dome of Vatican, 84; on fascism in Rome, 42, 43; on Great War, 18, 35; marching column through San Lorenzo quarter, 51; on Mussolini’s delay of March on Rome, 176n90; on Nazi Germany as model for fascist regime, 146; on Palazzo Littorio competition, 107 Brasini, Armando, 57, 105 Braun, Emily, 5 Brottman, Mikita, 14 Burleigh, Michael, 123 Bussi, Giovan Battista, 19 Calza-Bini, Alberto, 107, 108 Capitoline Hill, xi, 69–71, 82–3, 180n69 Capitolium (journal), 13, 43, 64, 65 Caporetto retreat: archaeological nature of, 32; Carso occupying plain in, 27–8, 29; demolishing boundary between pre-modern and modernity, 31; Friuli refugees in, 170n68; March on Rome as concluding act of, 34–5; new bar-

Index barism of, 30–1, 171n82; nostalgia for Carso and, 23; return of barbarians and, 27–33; soldiers as neoprimitives, 28; soldiers’ behaviour during, 29–31 Carli, Mario: as arditi commander, 36; on remaking of Rome, 41, 43–4; Roma Futurista and, 42–3 Carnazza, Gabriello, 92 Carso plateau, 18–24; as battle front, 16; burial on, 20–1; landscape of, 18–21; as origin of new Italian, 24; postwar return to, 160–1; as prehistoric migration route, 19; roads on, 20; rocks on, 20–1; ruins of, 22–3; soldiers’ identification with, 22–3; soldier’s life on, 20–1; as symbol of Great War, 18–24; symbolic world view of, 22 Casa del Fascio, 101–2 Casa del popolo (socialist headquarters), 6, 40–1 Caselli, Piola, 51 catacombs, 128–9 Catholic Action, 122, 123, 126, 129 Catholic Church: building on top of paganism, 136; Chesterton on, 136; conflict with fascist regime, 122–4; eschatological approach to Roman history, 10; Hitler’s attitude towards, 132; protection of church property, 125–6. See also Pius XI (pope) Caviglia, Enrico, 145 Cecchelli, Carlo, 152 Cederna, Antonio, 3, 15, 189n7 Chesterton, G.K., 136–7 Chiurco, Giorgio A., 46, 51 Christianity: Hitler’s visit to Rome minimizing importance of, 151–2;

219 Rome and establishment of, 132; Rome’s history as centre of, 131. See also Catholic Church Ciano, Galeazzo: on Hitler’s entry into Rome, 149; on monarchy’s attitude towards Hitler, 146; planning commission for Hitler’s visit, 139, 196n16 Cinelli, Nestore, 78–9, 83 Cinini, Tolemaide, 39 Cippico, Antonio, 109 Circus Maximus, 69 Città Bianca / White City (Franceschelli), 158–60 Civico, Vincenzo, 64–5, 78 Coker, Christopher, 9 Coliseum, 12, 107, 110–11 Colonna (senator), 109 Colonna, Brigante, 184n57 colore locale (local colour), 65–6 ‘column of fire,’ 38 Comisso, Giovanni, 26–7, 29–30 Commission for Sacred Archaeology, 129 Compagni, Dino Perrone, 49 conduit, in Palazzo Littorio design, 115–16 Conservatory of St Eufemia, 126 Constantini, Giovanni (Bishop of Luni), 131 Corner, Paul, 6 Corradini, Enrico, 9 Corso Umberto I (road), 93 Critica Fascista (journal), 121 crowds, oceanic rallies and, 76–7, 96–8 Cruillas, Gabriele, 40, 50 Curia Julia, restoration of, 131 D’Alba, Auro, 17

220 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 70 Dante Alighieri, 130 Dawson, Christopher, 124 Dea Roma (statue), 92 Del Bufalo, Edmondo, 118, 119 Delcroix, Carlo, 20 Del Debbio, Enrico: design for Palazzo Littorio, 111, 114–15, 117, 120; on Foro Mussolini, 73–4 Del Fante, Massimo, 108 Del Vita, Alessandro, 50 demolitions: citizen protests against, 61–2, 178nn24–6, 179nn36–7; destruction of churches around Roman Forum, 131; displacement of citizens, 60–3; experience of, 72; in fascist Rome, 8; LUCE newsreels of, 58–60; Master Plan as façade for, 3, 72; memory disruptions and shock of, 64–5; as military operation, 59–60; as pointless and counterproductive, 61; revealing ancient Rome, 68–71; revealing hidden landscapes, 12–13; revealing primordial look of city, 68–71; shock and disrupted memories, 64–5; sounds of, 59; as spectacle, 54, 58–63; threatening religious patrimony of city, 126; transformation of cityscape, 54–6 Demolizioni / Demolitions (Mafai), 54, 72, 73 De Renzi, Mario, 104, 111 de-urbanization of Rome, 156–7 De Vecchi, Cesare, 69, 175–6n87 Diario 1922 (Balbo), 37–8 Divine Comedy (Dante), 130 Duca, Borgongini, 126–7, 129, 147 Duke of Pistoia, 141 Duse, Eleonora, 70, 184n57

Index E42 (new Rome), xii; incomplete fascist construction of, 158; postwar reinvention of, 158–60; reconstruction as layered cityscape, 159; roads moving traffic towards, 15; transformation into EUR, 160; Via Imperiale and, 81, 118 Eliade, Mircea, 133 Elkins, James, 155 ENI-Casa housing projects, xiii Ermacora, Chino: on Aquileia, 16–17; on Caporetto retreat, 32–3; on Friuli plain, 25; Piccola patria, 32 Ethiopian War, 123 EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma). See E42 (new Rome) Evola, Julius, 121–2, 134, 137 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (1932), 101, 103, 174n43, 190n49 Fara, Gustavo, 49 Fariella, Francesco, 108 Farinacci, Roberto, 107 Fasci di Combattimento, 36 fascism: arditi and, 172n12; conflating time and space, 9; conflict with Catholic Church, 122–4; continuing fascination with, xv; cult of speed and danger, xiv; culture of, xiv–xv, 5, 164n8; cult of youth, 107; fascists as Romans and Barbarians, 11–12; Futurism and, 10; Great War and rise of, 6–7, 17–18, 165n18; ideological pretensions of, 3; as ‘lived experience,’ 6–12; Milan as stronghold for, 42; as movement vs. regime, 7; Nietzschean influence on, 73; obsession with mobility, 38, 173n38; oceanic impression of

Index propaganda, 76–7, 96–8; open space myth of, 8; paganism and, 10–11, 121–34; in Parma, 173n27; piazzas as threat for, 41–2; as political religion, 102, 122–3; roads and mythology of, 15, 38–9, 78; thanatos and, xiv Fascismo di pietra (Gentile), 4, 5 Fascist Modernities (Ben-Ghiat), 6 Fascist Party (FNP): Casa del Fascio, 101–2; Palazzo Littorio as Roman headquarters, 101 Fascist Party Congress (1921), 44–5 Fascist Party Congress (1925), 91 fascist Rome: acceptability of traffic deaths, 86; aesthetic pluralism of, 106; city centre as empty amphitheatre, 98–9; as city of panoramic views, 71, 155; cityscape as backdrop for Hitler’s visit, 154; conflict with Vatican, 125; demolitions, see demolitions; de-urbanization of, 156–7; as enemy city, 42–3; friendship with Nazi Germany, 122; king and court as reminder of liberal Rome, 146; landscape of, 12–13; liberation by Americans, 52–3; military metaphors for, 157; mythical view of, 133; open space in, 8; prestige as central pillar of spectacle, 137; remnants in EUR, 160–1; as resurrection of Imperial Rome, 136; as resurrection of pagan landscape, 121–34; rivalry with Milan, 41; road building in, see roads and road building; as spatial and architectonic consciousness of blackshirts, 6; spreading gospel of fascism, 148–9; swastikas as street decorations, 141, 147; traffic defin-

221 ing landscape, 13–15; transformation of, 155–7; urban planning vs. culturalist approaches to, 3. See also Hitler’s visit to Rome (1938); Master Plan for Rome (1931); urban planning, fascist Fasolo (architect), 111 Federzoni, Luigi, 146 Felice, Renzo De, 6–7 Fellini, Federico, 194n52 Fiat 18BL, 37 First World War. See Great War (First World War) I Fiumi / The Rivers (poem, Ungaretti), 169n36 flags, Hitler’s visit to Rome and, 140 Florence, Italy, 140 Fogu, Claudio, 9 Foro Boario, xii Foro Mussolini, 73–5, 101, 117–18, 144 Foro Velabro, 67 Foschini, Arturo, 160 Foucault, Michel, 9 Franceschelli, Enrico, 158–60 freedom, as movement, 26 Frescura, Attilio: on Caporetto retreat, 29, 30–1, 171n82; on Carso, 21, 23 Freud, Sigmund, 166n36 Friuli plain (pianura): blurring boundaries between civilized and non-civilized, 33; contrast with Carso plateau, 25–6; landscape of, 24–7; as nightmare for military defence, 26–7; roads of, 26–7; as symbol of civilization, 18, 24–5. See also Caporetto retreat Fuller, Mia, 158 Fussell, Paul, 21, 22

222 Futurism, 10, 36, 43 Gallenga (senator), 109 Galleria Cometa, 54 Gasparotto, Luigi, 91 gasworks (Rome), xii gaze, 155, 157 Gentile, Emilio: on fascism as political religion, 123; on fascist transformation of Rome, 4–5; on myth of Romanità, 4–5; on symbolism of Palazzo Littorio, 102 Germanic-Hungarian Pontifical College, 126 Germany. See Nazi Germany Ghibelline alliance, 134, 137 Giardina, Andrea, 3 Gibelli, Antonio, 24, 35, 169n25 Giedion, Sigfried, xiii, 15, 118 Gillet, Louis, 148, 150–1 Giolitti, Giovanni, 41 Giorni di Guerra (Comisso), 26 Giovannoni, Gustavo: on automobile and de-urbanization of Rome, 156–7; commission for Master Plan and, 57; on traffic, 95, 157; on transformation of Rome, 64, 155–7 Givelli, Antonio, 7 Gorizia (city), 19 Gradisca (town), 20 Grandi, Dino, 126, 127 Great War (First World War): Aquileia and, 16–17; Foro Mussolini reflecting experience of, 74–5; industrial nature of, 21, 169n25; landscape of, 16–33; memories of, in Quartiere Giuliano-Dalmata, 161; rendering hidden things visible, 32; resurrecting Rome, 136; rise of fascism and, 6–7, 17–18,

Index 165nn18, 19; transformative process of, 21–2, 35–6; Western Front, 22, 23, 26. See also Unknown Soldier The Great War and Modern Memory (Fussell), 21 Gregor, A. James, 121 Griffin, Roger, 8, 9, 10, 158 Gruppo Universitari Fascisti (GUF), 107 Guidi, Buffarini, 129, 147 Guttuso, Renato, 55 Hadrian’s Tomb, 43 Haussmann, Baron, xiii, 8, 78 Hess, Rudolf, 146 Himmler, Heinrich, 146 history: archaic vs. linear views, 133; elusiveness of past, 130, 194n52; fascist vs. Christian views, 130–4 Hitler, Adolf: archetypes of, 153–4; on autobahns as aesthetic monuments, 144; on Christianity, 132, 195n67; fear of ambush on open roads, 145; on German liking for Italy, 141–2; Italian monarchy and, 145, 146, 198n61; obsession with Rome, 141; personal characteristics, 141; protection from crowds in Rome, 145; as reincarnation of Holy Roman Emperors, 149, 153; as religious personality, 148; as Roman reincarnate, 12; transformation in Rome to world-historical figure, 138; as war veteran, 153–4 Hitler’s visit to Rome (1938), 135–54; as apotheosis, 138, 147, 152–3; arrangements for cheering crowds, 140, 196n26; as catalyst for fascist movement against monarchy,

Index 146; choice of entry for, 149–50; cityscape as backdrop for, 135–7, 154; as consecration of Axis, 152–4; elimination of borders during, 141; entering Rome in King’s horse-drawn carriage, 149, 199n82; as fascism’s urbe et orbi message, 152–4; fascist Roman landscape as focus of, 148; flags and, 140; foreign opinion of, 143–4, 197n46; ignoring Papal Rome, 148; inflaming hopes for Nazi-fascist alliance, 137, 138–9; itinerary of, 142–5; lighting and mystic spectacle of, 149–51; military exercises during, 143–4; minimizing Christianity, 151–2; as official announcement of Fascist Revolution, 154; omnipresence of monarchy during, 145–6, 198n61; Pius XI on preparations for, 138; preparations for, 139–42; as religious spectacle, 138–9, 149; resembling squadristi expedition, 142; roads central to, 144–5; Rome’s artistic heritage in, 144; security and aesthetics of, 139–40; as spectacle for impressing Hitler, 139–41; swastikas as street decorations, 141, 147; train route of, 141 horses, dead, 29 Huxley, Aldous, 14 Idroscalo (hydroport), xiii Igliori, Ulisse, 48 imboscati (shirkers), 14, 34–5 Imperial Fora, 105, 110 Imperialismo pagano (Evola), 121 In Parenthesis (Jones), 23 Internationalist style (architecture), 106–7

223 Interventionist Crisis (1914–15), 7 Isnenghi, Mario, 40 Isonzo River, 19 Italian Front, 6, 18 Jones, David, 23 Kallis, Aristotle, 9 Kohn, Margaret, 6 Kolnai, Auriel, 124 Kostoff, Spiro, 3, 15 Lacretelle, Jacques de, 100 Landscape and Memory (Schama), 12 land speculation, nineteenth century, 68 Laqueur, Walter, xv Largo Tritone, 79 Lateran Accords (1929): as fascist compromise, 121; protection of catacombs, 128–9; protections for church property, 125–6; signing of, 122, 132; Via della Conciliazione commemorating, 147 Il Lavoro Fascista (newspaper), 71, 148 Lazzaro, Claudia, 10 Le Corbusier (architect), 13, 85, 158, 183–4n42 lebensraum, 9 Leo I (pope), 133 Let’s Murder the Moonshine (Marinetti), 42 Leva, Domenico Maria: on Capitoline Hill and squadrismo, 70–1; on fascist resurrection of pagan past, 136; on March on Rome, 34; on primitivism of fascists, 51; on sedition in San Lorenzo quarter, 46, 47 Libera, Adalberto, 104, 158 liberal Rome. See Rome, liberal

224 lighting, as mystic spectacle, 149–51 Lischi, Dario, 49 Longanesi, Leo, 90; on Hitler’s entry into Rome, 149; on lighting of Hitler’s entry into Rome, 150; on Piacentini’s transformation of landscape, 98 LUCE newsreels and documentaries: Bersaglieri rally, 96; Città Bianca / White City, 158–60; demolitions, 58–60; Hitler’s visit to Rome, 142; space dominating, 76 Lussu, Emilio, 20, 25 Maccari, Mino, 51, 87, 151 Mafai, Mario: Demolizioni paintings, 54–6, 72, 73; loss of home to demolition, 54–5; Trionfo di Cesare mural, 72, 73 Malaparte, Curzio: on American liberation of Rome, 52–3; on blackshirts and landscape of war, 17, 35; on Carso, 20; on danger of piazza, 40; on fante as primordial Italian, 51; on Friuli plain, 25; on infinite space, 27; on March on Rome, 34–5, 52; mythical fante of, 46; on representative men vs. reverse heroes, 173n42; on transformation of soldiers by war, 21, 24; on true Italian as street fighter, 48 Mamertine Prison, 82–3 Manacorda, Daniele, 3 march of history, in Palazzo Littorio design, 115, 116 marching, freedom of, 26 March on Rome, 17, 47–52; choreography of, 47–8; as concluding act of fascist revolution, 34–5; Master Plan as continuation of, 55; quad-

Index rumvirs, 48, 175n79; San Lorenzo quarter as battleground in, 51; symbolism of, 176n90; transportation for, 48–9, 175–6n87; Udine speech by Mussolini inspiring, 47–8; war experience in narratives of, 47, 49–50 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 23, 36–7, 42 Master Plan for Rome (1931): as act of violence, 15; art and hygiene indistinguishable in, 84; attacking legacy of Liberal Italy, 58, 67–8, 122; citizen protests against, 61–2, 178nn24–6, 179nn36–7; as compromise solution, 57–8; as continuation of March on Rome, 55; criticism of, 78–80, 184n56; defamiliarizing familiar settings, 82; destructiveness of, 4; disruption of historic squares, 86–9; ending of, 117; Gentile on, 4–5; grand boulevards as heart of, 82; hygiene in, 66–7; Mafai as interpreter and witness to, 73; militarist tone of, 72; Novecento influence on, 56; obliterating layers of Rome’s past, 71; opening spaces in cityscape, 9, 62–3; optical innovation of, 81; Painter on, 4; planning commission, 57; preparations for Hitler’s visit as extension of, 140; reconciling art and traffic, 56; rejecting romantic sensibility, 66–7; remaking Roman landscape, 59, 64, 98–9; rendering Rome unfamiliar, 63–6; revealing primordial city, 68–9; reviving pagan landscape, 122; as search for origins, 71; threatening religious patrimony of city,

Index 126; Ufficio Tecnico disregarding citizen concerns, 61–3, 178nn24–6, 178n30, 179nn36, 41. See also demolitions; roads and road building; urban planning, fascist material world, pagan exaltation of, 124 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 41 McLuhan, Marshall, 14, 181n78 Il Messaggero, 150 Milan, Italy, 41 Milite Ignoto. See Unknown Soldier (Milite Ignoto) Milizia della Strada, 77–8 Mille Miglia motor race, 85–6, 184nn48–9 Ministry of Italian East Africa, 151 Il mio Carso (Slataper), 18 Mit brennender Sorge / With Burning Sorrow (Pius XI, 1937), 148 Modernism and Fascism (Griffin), 158 modernity, soldiers as carriers of, 31 monarchy, Italian: omnipresence during Hitler’s visit to Rome, 145– 6, 198n61; as reminder of liberal Rome, 146; Vittoriano identified with, 90, 185–6n74 Monte Nero, 25 Moretti, Luigi, 74 Morpurgo, Vittorio, 111 mosaics, of Foro Mussolini, 74 Moses, Robert, xiv, 8 Moses Fountain, 89 Mosse, George, xiv–xv, 7, 10–11 movement: fascism and, 173n38; freedom as, 26 Mulé, F.P., 87–8 Mumford, Lewis, xiv, 14 Muñoz, Antonio, 66; archaeological excavations of, 69–70; on Hitler

225 as German artist, 141; images of Roman Forum, 67; on levelling of Velia Hill, 183n40; as L’Urbe founder, 61; on Master Plan, 56; on panoramas created by new roads, 81; on surprising palimpsests in Master Plan, 81; on Tarpeian Rock, 94; on traffic of Via dell’Impero, 83; on transformation of Piazza Arceoli, 88; on Via dell’Impero, 84–5; on Via del Mare, xii Museo delle Terme, 144 Museum of Ancient Rome, 160 Mussolini, Arnaldo, 130 Mussolini, Benito: on aesthetics and hygiene, 66–7; announcing entry into Second World War (1940), 76–7, 98; architectural interests of, 5; as automobile driver, 38; on Caporetto retreat, 28; comparison with Pope Sixtus V, 122; consciousness of foreign opinion, 143; cult of Duce, 8; dependence on church for social peace, 123; on fascist responsibility for Unknown Soldier, 45, 91; founding of fasci di combattimento, 36; on Friuli plain as battleground, 170n72; on Germans coming to Italy, 141–2; March on Rome and, 17, 34, 47–8; motorcycle riding by, xii–xiii, 85; move of prime minister’s residence to Palazzo Venezia, 90; on necessity and grandeur in Master Plan, 56, 72; as new Caesar, 136; Pacification Pact, 44; pagan view of history, 130; on paradoxical aspects of Rome, 81; pickaxe as symbol of reworking of cityscape, 59–60; on preparations for Hitler’s visit to Rome, 139,

226 196n16; as prime minister, 34, 50; regime’s movement against monarchy, 146; rivalry with Pius XI, 124; on Roman tradition of destruction, 11; Romanità and regime of, 4–5; on Rome’s transformation of Christianity, 132; as supporter of Rationalism, 106; visit to Germany (1937), 152 Mussolini architetto (Nicoloso), 5 Mussolini’s Rome (Painter), 4 Nazi Germany: fascist regime’s friendship with, 122; as model for Italian fascist regime, 146; Mussolini’s visit to, 152; Pius XI on pagan nature of, 123. See also Hitler, Adolf Nazism: Aryan fantasies of, 10; as reincarnation of Imperial Rome, 137; as threat to Christianity, 123 Negri, Silvio, 70, 94; on Via del Mare, 80–1 New Man, fascist, 24, 100 The New Religion – Morality of Speed (Marinetti), 36 Nicoloso, Paolo, 5 Nolte, Ernst, 164n8 Non abbiamo bisogno / We Have No Need (Pius XI, 1931), 123 Novecento movement, 56 Nuova Antologia (journal), 68 Obelisk of Axium, 150, 151 oceanic rallies (adunate oceaniche), xiii, 76–7, 96–8 Ojetti, Ugo, 90 open space, in fascist Rome, 8–9 Opera Nazionale Balilla (O.N.B.), 73 Orosio, Paolo, 133

Index L’Osservatore Romano (Vatican newspaper), 126 Ostia, as termination of Via del Mare, xiii Ostiense Station. See Stazione Ostiense (Ostiense Station) Pacelli, Eugenio (Pius XII), 131, 132 paganism: fascist identification with, 10–11, 122; fascist regime resurrecting, 121–34, 136; Pius XI on pagan politics of fascism, 123–4; transformation by Apostles into Christianity, 131 Pagano, Giuseppe: on Mussolini and Rationalism, 106; on Palazzo Littorio designs, 113, 115; as Rationalist, 102; refusal to submit proposal for Palazzo Littorio, 107, 109 Painter, Borden, Jr, 4, 5 Pais, Ettore, 11–12, 67 Palanti, Mario, 115 Palatine Hill, 69, 150 Palazzo Barberini, 84 Palazzo della Civiltà, 160 Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 104 Palazzo Littorio, 100, 101–20; architectural challenges of original site, 109–12; as ‘architecture of Giolitti,’ 107–8; as birth of fascist architecture, 106–8; Coliseum and, 110–11; competition committee, 105; competition rules, 105–6, 109, 112; design competitions, 101, 117; finalists for, 107; functional and symbolic nature of, 104–5; as future site for party rallies, 110; integration into Master Plan, 105; integration with traffic, 115,

Index 116–17, 191n61; location changes, 101–2; as metaphor for Eternal City, 116; as monument to Fascist Party, 101; Rationalist vs. traditionalist designs, 102, 105–9; relocation to Foro Mussolini, 117–18; sense of the eternal in, 113–14; ship motif for, 115–16; solidity and monumentality of, 112–13; symbolism of, 102; traditionalist concerns with location, 109; transience and movement in Rationalist designs, 115–16; uneasy fit into Master Plan, 102–3; Via dell’Impero and, 112–20; as viewing platform for surrounding ruins, 111–12 Palazzo Venezia, 90 palingenesis, 9 Pantheon, 142, 148, 197n38 Papini, Giovanni, 32, 168n12 Paris, Haussmann’s transformation of, 8 Parma, battle of, 39, 173n27 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, xv–xvi, 60 passatista (lover of the past), 33 Passerini, Luisa, 8 Paul, St, 131, 132 Pavolini, Alessandro, 46 Payne, Stanley, 164n8 Pesce, Gastone, 108 Petrucci, Silvio, 152 Piacentini, Marcello, 91; criticism of, 98; on the E42, 158; Master Plan commission and, 57; Palazzo Littorio competition committee membership, 105; on Piazza Barberini, 89; plans for Piazza Venezia, 94; rejection of romanticism, 66; on roads as viewing platforms,

227 80; on sentimental nostalgia for nineteenth century, 80; on traffic in Master Plan, 82; University of Rome design, 144 Piave River, 27 piazza (square): Master Plan’s assault on, 40–1, 86–9; open space as threat to fascists, 41–2, 86 Piazza Aracoeli, xiv, 80–1, 87, 88 Piazza Barberini, 89 Piazza Bocca della Verita, 67 Piazza Campidoglio, 88, 110 Piazza Colonna, 90 Piazza Esedra fountain, 103 Piazzale Augusteo, 88–9 Piazzale dell’Impero, 74 Piazzale Trinità dei Monti (Piazza Spagna), 79 Piazza Montanara, xiv, 87–8 Piazza del Popolo, 95 Piazza San Bernardo, 89 Piazza Santi Apostoli, 89 Piazza Venezia, xii; aesthetics of disturbance in, 99; as focus for militant fascism, 93, 94; as heart of Rome, 90; landscape of war in, 90–100; oceanic crowds in, 76, 77; party rallies in, 96–8; regime’s appropriation of, 90; tomb of Unknown Soldier and, 92–3; as traffic hub, 94–5 Piazzesi, Mario: falling in love with machine gun, 52; on motorized squadristi expedition of 1921, 37; on role of arditi in squadrismo, 36; on San Lorenzo quarter, 45 Piccola patria (Ermacora), 32 Pincio Gardens, 136 Pius IX (pope), 125

228 Pius XI (pope), 122; as Bishop of Rome, 125; condemning racial policies of Nazi regime, 147; construction projects of, 125, 193nn23–4; election of, 125; on fascism as pagan, 123–4; on fascist archaeology, 129; on history as continuity, 130–1; hostility between Vatican and fascist regime, 133; Non abbiamo bisogno (1931), 123; offended by swastikas as street decorations, 147; on pagan features of fascist and Nazi policies, 124; on paganism as degraded society, 131; on preparations for Hitler’s visit to Rome, 138; preservation of ecclesiastical Rome from secular state, 122; protection of ecclesiastical property, 125–6; revival of Urbe et Orbi blessing, 125, 192n20; rivalry with Mussolini, 124; similarities to Sixtus V, 125 Pius XII (pope), 132 Pollard, John, 193n23 Pollini, Leo: on Carso, 21–2, 23; on crossing Isonzo River, 19–20; on Friuli roads, 27 Pompili (Cardinal), 128 Ponte Milvio, 118 Ponti, Ermanno, 65 Pontifical Agricultural Institute, 127–8 Il Popolo d’Italia (newspaper), 28, 46–7, 91, 97, 108, 145 Il Popolo di Trieste (newspaper), 42 Porta del Popolo, 118 Pound, Ezra, 137 primitivism and fascism, 10–11 primordialism, 10 propaganda, fascist, 76–7, 96–8

Index Protestant cemetery, 152 Proust, Marcel, 14 Puccini, Mario: on Caporetto retreat, 28, 30, 31; on Carso ruins, 23, 24, 168n14; on city of Gorizia, 19; on soldiers’ attachment to Carso, 23 Pyramid of Caius Cestius, 150 quadrumvirs, 48, 175n79 Quartiere Giuliano-Dalmata (EUR), 160–1 Quas Primas (Pius XI, 1925), 133 Quirinal Palace, 34, 79, 96, 103, 142, 146, 148 Quo Vadis? (church), 53 Racial Laws (1938), 122, 123, 130, 133 Raphael (painter), burial place of, 142 Rationalism, 106–8 Ratti, Achille (Cardinal). See Pius XI (pope) refugees, Friuli, 170n68 regionalism, 32–3 Renzetti, Giuseppe, 141 Republican Fora, 110 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 146 Ricci, Corrado: fascist urban planning and, 188–9n7; on location for Palazzo Littorio, 105; on openness of Via dell’Impero, 114; Palazzo Littorio competition committee membership, 105; on panoramas created by new roads, 81; plans for Piazza Venezia, 94; support for new roads, 83–4; on traffic accidents on new roads, 79 Ricci, Renato, 74 Ridolfi-Cafeiro-La Padula-Rossi (architects), 114, 116

Index Rinaldi, Enrico, 116 road rage, 14 roads and road building: acceptability of traffic deaths, 86; as agents of transformation, 99–100; as architectonic expressions, xiii; assault on piazza, 86–9; creating new frames and juxtapositions, 83–4; criticism of, 78–80; as fascist landmarks, xiii, 78, 144; functions of, 77–8; lack of respect for ruins of antiquity, 78; landscape transformation by, 11–13, 85–9; militarism of, 14; as movement solidified, 173n38; as necessity for Master Plan, 77; noise of roads, 77; as race tracks, 85–6; reminding Romans of ancient past, 77; shaping fascist spectacle, 78; shifting perspectives of, 80; straight roads ignoring aesthetics and history, 62–3; threat of ambush on, 145; as viewing platforms, 80–4; violence of, 14 rocks, on Carso plateau, 20–1 Roma (film, Fellini, 1972), 194n52 Roma Fascista (journal), 143 Roma Futurista (journal), 42–3 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church Roman Empire. See Rome, ancient Roman Forum, 67 Romanità, xi; controlling crowds with, 3; declaration of war as fulfilment of, 76; fascist propaganda and, 68–9; Gentile on, 4–5; ideological pretensions of fascism in, 3; monument in EUR, 161; as primordialism, 10 Roman ruins: excavation of, xii; fascist attitude towards, 3, 10; as

229 metaphor for liberal politicians and clergy, 43 Romantic sensibility, fascist condemnation of, 65, 66–7 Roma Sparita / Lost Rome (Ponti), 65 Rome, ancient: demolitions revealing, 68–71; historical association with war, 74; paganism in, 10; soldiers as destroyers and creators, 11; synchronic vs. diachronic approaches to, 10, 166n36. See also Roman ruins Rome, fascist. See fascist Rome Rome, liberal: liberal vs. fascist urban planning, 81; Master Plan attacking legacy of, 58, 67–8, 122; monarchy as reminder of, 146; ruins as metaphor for liberal politicians and clergy, 43; Unknown Soldier identified with liberal regime, 91; Vittoriano identified with liberal monarchy, 90, 185–6n74 Rome, post-fascist: fascist imprint on, 4; rivalry with Milan, 41; ‘traffic and glory’ ideology shaping, 3 Rome-Berlin Axis, as restoration of Ghibelline alliance, 134 Romfahrt, 153 Rossi (Archbishop), 30 Sacconi, Giuseppe, 90, 92 ‘The Sack of Rome’ (Longanesi), 98 Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Gentile), 123 St Jerome’s College, 126, 127 St Paul’s Gate, 117, 150, 151 Salatino, Paolo, 82–3 Sallust’s obelisk, 70 San Carlo (church), 88 San Girolamo (church), 88

230 San Just, Senator, 68 San Lorenzo quarter (Quartiere San Lorenzo): as battleground in March on Rome, 51; demolition of, 47; fascist hostility towards socialist population, 44–7 San Martino del Carso (battlefield), 22 San Martino del Carso (poem, Ungaretti), 22, 169n33 Sanna, General, 24 San Rita da Cascia (church), 88 San Rocco (church), 88 Santa Maria sopra Minerva, 136 Sarfatti, Margherita, 20, 52, 104 Saturday Night Massacres (Stragi del Sabato Sera), xi, xii savages (selvaggi), 176n102 Schama, Simon, 12 Schmidt, Paul, 150, 151 Scipione (Gino Bonichi), 54 Scola, Ettore, 187n104 Scorza, Carlo, 36 Scuola Romana (neo-expressionist movement), 54, 55 Second World War: Mussolini announcing entry into, 76–7, 98; as reincarnation of GuelphGhibellien struggles, 137 seeing, paradox of, 155 selvaggi (savages), 176n102 Il Selvaggio / The Savage (Maccari), 51, 87, 98, 176n102, 184n56 Seven Hills of Rome, excavation of, 68 shantytowns (borgate), xiii, 60, 96 Sharrett, Christopher, 14 Sironi, Mario, 5 Sixtus V (pope), 122, 125 The Skin (Malaparte), 52–3 Slataper, Scipio, 18–19

Index Soffici, Ardengo: on Caporetto retreat, 28–9; on Friuli plain, 25; on Friuli roads, 27; on Vittoriano demolition, 90 soldiers, as primitives, 31–2 Solmi, Arrigo, 156 The Song of the Dead on the Carso (poem, Steiner), 21 Sontag, Susan, xv sounds: amplification as goal of Master Plan, 177n15; of demolitions, 59; noise of roads, 77 spatial transformation, 6 speed: as act of violence, 13–14; as fascist value, xiv; Marinetti on, 36–7; Via del Mare design encouraging, xiv squadrismo (early fascist movement), xiv; arditi influence on, 36; ‘column of fire,’ 38; landscape of, 36–41; landscape of war in, 18, 37–8; objection to transition to political party, 44; revealing mythical Rome through archaeology, 68–71; on Rome as enemy city, 42–3; straight roads in imagination of, 37–8; war experience and, 7, 165n19 squadristi. See blackshirts (squadristi) square. See piazza Starace, Achille, 105, 139, 146 Stazione Ostiense (Ostiense Station), xii, 135, 138, 149–50, 151 Steiner, Giuseppe, 21 Sternhell, Zeev, 165n18 La strada e il volante (Bardi), 13–14 Stragi del Sabato Sera (Saturday Night Massacres), xi, xii straight-line façade: in Palazzo Littorio design, 115 Sunken Harbour (Ungaretti), 22

Index swastikas: as street decorations, 141, 147 Tadolini, Scipione, 15 Taine, Hippolyte, 66–7 Tamassia, Renato, 3 Tarpeian Rock, xi, 69, 94 Teatro Barberini, 80 Termini Station (Rome), 139, 151 La Terra (Cruillas), 50 Terragni, Giuseppe, 102, 108–9, 110, 115 Testa, Virgilio, 58, 82 Il Tevere (newspaper), 152–3 Theatre of Marcellus, xii time: palingenesis vs. actualism, 8 Tor dei Conti, 110, 111 Toti, Enrico, 44, 45–6 Toynbee, Arnold, 124 traditionalism, 121, 191n6 traffic: acceptability of deaths to fascist regime, 86; as archaeological excavation, 157; around tomb of Unknown Soldier, 95; defining fascist Roman landscape, 13–15; as evil of urban planning, 79; Master Plan reconciling art with, 56; Palazzo Littorio integration with, 115, 116–17, 191n61; on Via dell’Impero, 85 tramlines, 95 Trionfo di Cesare (mural, Mafai), 72, 73 Tripodi, Nino, 135 tunnels: as alternative to Roman roads, 78–9, 80; Master Plan refusing to consider, 82 Tyrol, 141 Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio / On the Peace

231 of Christ in His Kingdom (Pius XI, 1922), 124 Udine, Italy, 18, 47–8 Ufficio Tecnico (UT), 61–3, 81–2, 84, 179n36 Una giornata particolare / A Special Day (film, Scola), 187n104 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 14 Ungaretti, Giuseppe: on Carso, 23–4, 168n12; I Fiumi (poem), 169n36; on Italian desire for the infinite, 27; San Martino del Carso (poem), 22, 169n33; on soldiers as labourers, 21; on war experience, 9; on war’s unleashing of barbarism, 32 universalism, 124 University of Rome, 47, 139–40, 144 Unknown Soldier (Milite Ignoto): fascism claiming responsibility for, 45; Hitler’s visit to tomb, 142, 153–4; identification with liberal regime, 91; paying homage to, 91; recreating war experience, 99; restoring bond between Aquileia and Rome, 16–17; traffic around tomb of, 95; Vittoriano as home for, 16, 91–3 urban planning, fascist: aesthetics of emptiness and transience, 99; disruption of historic squares, 86–9; liberal Italy planning vs., 81; militaristic reshaping of Roman landscape, 98–9; traffic around tomb of Unknown Soldier, 95; traffic congestion as greatest evil of, 79. See also Master Plan for Rome (1931) urban planning, nineteenth century: as land speculation, 68 L’Urbe (journal), 61, 95 Urbe et Orbi: blessing of Rome by

232 pope, 125, 192n20; Hitler’s visit to Rome as fascist message, 152 UT (Ufficio Tecnico), 61–3, 81–2, 84, 179n36 Vaccaro, Gennaro, 173n26 Vaccaro, Giuseppe, 111, 116 Valery, Paul, 66 Vatican: domination of Rome, 42; new roads revealing dome of, 84 Vatican Radio, 125 Vecchi, Cesare de, 175n79 Vecchi, Ferruccio, 24, 36 Velia Hill, levelling of, 84, 183n40 Veneto region, 17 Ventrone, Angelo, 7 Verdi, Giuseppe, 103 Via della Conciliazione, 84, 126, 147 Via Flaminia, 81, 93 Via Imperiale, 119, 128–9 Via dell’Impero, 77, 144; inauguration of, 96, 112; as monument of fascism, 118, 119; mythical views of, 100; as new Via Sacra, 119; openness of, 114; Palazzo Littorio and, 105, 112–20; as preferred route for military parades, 94; as symbol of fascist road building, 84–5; traffic carried by, 85; as viewing platform, 82, 83, 113 Via Laurentina, 160 Via del Mare, 77, 144, 158; as cultural phenomenon, xiv–xv; demolition of neighbourhoods for construction, xiv; design encouraging speed, xiv; destruction of Piazza Montanara and Piazza Aracoeli for, 87–8; fascist ideology in construc-

Index tion of, xii–xiii; as ‘killer road,’ xi, xii–xiv; Piazza Venezia and, 94; reframing of antique ruins by, 80–1; route of, xii–xiii; as thrill ride, xii Via Nazionale, 103–4 Via Ostiense, xii, 87, 160 Via San Marco, 88 Via dei Trionfi, 94, 143, 144 Victor Emmanuel II monument (Vittoriano): as apotheosis of rhetoric of Third Italy, 90; fascist dislike of, 59–60, 90–1; Futurist dislike of, 43; as home for Unknown Soldier, 16, 91–3; liberal monarchy and, 90, 185–6n74; obstructing view of Capitoline Hill, 70; proposed park surrounding, 182n15; as sacralizing of secular state, 122; Via Nazionale and, 103 Victor Emmanuel III (king of Italy), 34, 149. See also monarchy, Italian Vittoriano monument. See Victor Emmanuel II monument (Vittoriano) Vittorio Veneto, battle of, 34 war and de-urbanization, 157 war experience: Foro Mussolini reflecting, 74–5; as myth, 7–8 war monuments, 87 War and the 20th Century (Coker), 9 Weil, Simone, 12, 137 Western Front: enchantment of, 23; marches as pleasure on, 26; symbolic ruins of, 22 White, Hayden, 11 Winter, Denis, 26