La macchina ibrida di Mussolini

Any cursory review of the past five years of Italian historiography on fascism obviously would be subject to multiple criticisms and be Condemned for partiality, especially since the time span under investigation is relatively brief and only the work of select Italian scholars can be considered. Not all the published literature on fascism could be taken into account, given the enormous attention still given to the subject in academic monographs and journalistic accounts.

1999

Modern Italy

Annali d'Italianistica 41 , 2023

Quaderni d'Italianistica, 2017

Among the many ‘founding myths’ of Italian Fascism such as those regarding its relationship to the First World War, one element stood out as key to both its quest for absolute dominion over the Italian peninsula and its historically based self-concept and representation: the idea of present-day Italy as incarnating the spirit and virtuousness of Roman (late Republican and early Imperial) antiquity, creating the image of a Terza Roma, of a ‘third’, Fascist Rome. This concept was omnipresent throughout the entire period within which Mussolini dominated Italian politics. This very specific use of the historical past is discussed in this article, tracing its presence in various parts of the cultural and intellectual field, identifying the manifold ways in which history can meet contemporary, and ‘futural’, prerequisites. In so doing, it is inspired by recent scholarship underlining the futural, temporal thrust of Fascism and romanità, rather than its traditionally reactionary, backward-looking dynamic. As seems, at least to a certain extent, to have been the case in Nazi Germany, for the Fascists, antiquity indeed was no faraway, dusty past, but a lively source of inspiration and energy revealing the regime’s modernist, revolutionary ambition to build a ‘Third Rome’ which, literally and figuratively, made visible the earlier layers of Roman heritage.