Italian fascism: history, memory, and representation

Modern Italy

This article consists of interviews with five world experts on the memory of Fascism. Taking the centenary of the March on Rome as an opportunity to rethink the development of Italian collective memory, the five interviewees were asked to reflect on different aspects of the Italian memory of Fascism, addressing the dominant conceptualisations, limits, and transformations of the discourses used to narrate Fascism in Italian culture. The result of these conversations, which touch upon issues related to the memory of the Resistance, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and colonialism, is a rich overview of the main trends and current trajectories of Italian memory culture, which can help us imagine the future directions of the Italian memory of Fascism and enhance interventions in this field by memory scholars and memory activists.

Italian Culture , 2024

This article examines the moral and political questions raised by Fascism through an analysis of three canonical postwar Italian novels: Vasco Pratolini’s Cronache di poveri amanti, Cesare Pavese’s La casa in collina, and Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere. By exploring the specific memory of Fascism that these texts create, the article shows that their different approaches to the past depend on distinct conceptualizations of responsibility, which are defined as “antagonistic,” “multiperspectival-butrestricted,” and “perpetrator-centered.” Pratolini’s novel condemns the regime and portrays ordinary Italians as resistant to the fascist regime. Pavese’s work offers a more nuanced, multiperspectival approach, yet limits its ethical reflection to the Italian Civil War, leaving other crucial aspects of fascist history unaddressed. In contrast, Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere foregrounds a memory centered on both individual guilt and collective responsibility for fascist and colonial crimes. The article argues that the modalities informing Pratolini’s and Pavese’s works are related to approaches to the fascist past that dominated Italian collective memory in the 1960s and early 2000s, while the mnemonic modality of Flaiano’s novel has been largely subordinate in Italian memory culture. Through this comparative literary analysis, the article challenges existing interpretations of these canonical works, and it underscores the role of postwar literature in shaping diverse memories of Fascism.

Annali d'Italianistica 41 , 2023

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2019

This article focuses on the immediate years after the fall of the Fascist regime from 1943 through the end of World War II. It asks: What did the Italians make of Fascism and its role in the country's history as they witnessed the demise of the regime? How should we assess the nature of their anti-Fascist reactions at the time? Does the postwar conflation of Resistance and Liberation with anti-Fascism adequately represent their experience? Drawing on personal diaries written during 1943-1945, the article specifically examines three key temporal moments: the downfall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943, the armistice of 8 September 1943 and Italy's proclamation of war against Germany on 13 October 1943. The article's ultimate goal is to bring out the meanings that emerge out of the lifeworld of ordinary citizens in interaction with official narratives. RIASSUNTO Basato su diari privati scritti durante gli anni dal 1943 alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale, l'articolo esamina tre momenti cruciali di questo periodo: la caduta di Mussolini il 25 luglio 1943, l'armistizio dell'8 settembre 1943, e la proclamazione di guerra dell'Italia alla Germania il 13 ottobre 1943. Le domande affrontate sono: Come reagirono gli italiani al disfacimento del regime? Come si puo' valutare il loro antifascismo? Quale fu la loro esperienza, ed è essa rappresentata adeguatamente dalla nozione di antifascismo identificato con resistenza e liberazione?

Moving from an article written by the American historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat concerning the relationship between Italian people and the monumental legacy of Italy’s Fascist past, this paper aims to tackle the broader issue of Collective Memory of Italian Fascism. Namely, the memory of a rather benign form of totalitarianism which is not stained by the horrible crimes of its Nazi counterpart, and towards which the Italian population – because of its inherent goodness - never totally adhere to. To determine the way in which this image established itself, the topic is approached through the tools supplies by Memory Studies, in an attempt to identify those intellectual and cultural traditions which have framed this particular representation of the past and those active memory agents who selectively adapted and manipulated history. In particular, attention is given to the specificity of the historical period in which the process of establishing a collective memory took place, the failure of the purges against the Fascists and the lack of persecution against war criminals, which lead to a misleading evaluation of the legacy of Fascism and the war. Furthermore, active agents of memory are individuated in the work of the scholars who dealt with the history of Fascism, in the Allies and the propaganda techniques they deployed during the war, and finally in the visual media and their active role in forging specific exculpatory memories. What this paper ascertains, therefore, is how these policies of re-elaboration of the national past mainly pointed towards establishing an aura of social amnesia around Fascism, its crimes and the connivance of Italian people. This collective amnesia, however, left gaps and ‘black holes’ into the collective memory of Italians. As this paper argues, these gaps were fulfilled thanks to a constant comparison with Nazi Germany and the brutality of its crimes, thus establishing what is known as the ‘bad Germans/good Italians’ trope which is central in evaluating what has established itself to be the collective memory of Italian Fascism.

Modern Italy, 2019

The military ossuaries (sacrari militari) that were built to house the remains of fallen soldiers of the First World War offer a striking example of how Italy has dealt with the legacy of Fascism. Located along former frontlines in north-eastern Italy, the ossuaries occupy an ambiguous position in Italian heritage as both national monuments and the remnants of a difficult past. Whereas originally they functioned as instruments of Fascist propaganda, they have been reinvented as monuments of Republican Italy. Thus, while challenging the notion of Fascist remains as ‘difficult heritage’, this article suggests that the ossuaries might be seen as palimpsests that have been overlaid with different and ever-changing memories. To this end, the article traces the afterlives of ossuaries from 1945 to the present in search of evidence of evolving attitudes towards the Fascist period. It also examines a recent resurgence of public interest in the ossuaries in conjunction with the centenary of the First World War. Gli ossari (o sacrari) militari che furono costruiti per ospitare i resti di soldati caduti nella Prima Guerra Mondiale offrono un esempio rilevante di come l’Italia abbia affrontato l’eredità del regime fascista. Situati lungo il vecchio fronte nel nord-est del paese, gli ossari occupano una posizione ambigua nel patrimonio italiano in quanto sono al contempo monumenti nazionali e ricordi di un passato difficile. Sebbene fossero originariamente utilizzati come strumenti nella propaganda fascista, sono stati reinventati nel dopoguerra come monumenti dell’Italia repubblicana. Perciò, mettendo in dubbio la percezione dei resti dell’era fascista come un ‘patrimonio difficile’, quest’articolo suggerisce che gli ossari possano essere visti invece come palinsesti che sono stati soprapposti da ricordi diversi e mutevoli. A questo fine, l’articolo traccia la storia degli ossari dal 1945 al presente nel tentativo di fare luce sull’evoluzione di atteggiamenti verso il passato fascista. Inoltre, l’articolo esamina una recente ripresa nell’interesse del pubblico verso gli ossari in concomitanza con il centenario della prima guerra mondiale.

«Contemporary European History», 1995

Annali d'Italianistica , 2024

In Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy, Franco Baldasso embarks on a journey within the field of postwar literature and culture to reconstruct the varied interventions through which Italian writers engaged with the transition from Fascism to democracy. The strength of the book resides in its capacity to weave together literary criticism, historiography, cultural history, and a thorough knowledge of postwar Italian culture, seamlessly embracing the study of fiction, private diaries, journal articles, and literary essays. Baldasso relies on the historiographical research of Filippo Focardi, Emilio Gentile, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Pier Giorgio Zunino, Roger Griffin, and other major scholars of Fascism to put forward a stateof-the-art interpretation of the formation of Italy's postwar memory culture. The memory of the Italian Republic was crafted on the marginalization of individual and collective responsibility for Fascism, thanks to a series of redemptive narrative patterns infused with Christian tropes that focused on the notion of liberation and rebirth (18-19)-narratives that continued, therefore, to follow the historical imagery that had already dominated Fascist and pre-Fascist Italy, as argued by Claudio Fogu, Rosario Forlenza, and Bjorn Thomassen. Baldasso does not contest the validity of this interpretation but

2003