The Great Fascist Nation

The chapter deals with the fascist idea of fatherland and nation. Fascism proceeded with a selection of the Italian past to reinforce its own idea of nationhood and political identity. Fascism had claimed Romanity as the worldview and inspiration for its expansionist and civilizing task. Romanity came to constitute the historical and ideological justification for the regime’s expansionist aims in the Mediterranean as it fashioned itself as the modern incarnation of Italic and Christian civilization. Fascism also gave considerable impetus to the development of Roman archaeology and classical antiquity studies in the country and in Italian colonies. Secondly, fascists and royalists together helped spearhead a revision of the history of the Risorgimento. This began with the appropriation of the myth of Garibaldi and his movement. Fascism was also celebrated the Decennial of the March on Rome with a great exhibition on the Fascist Revolution in 1932. It was the first occasion of truly “national” tourism, sparking the movement of hundreds of thousands of people along and across the peninsula and into the new capital of the Fascist era. The aversion to all forms of foreignness meanwhile extended from the past into the present: cinema, literature, comics, even as American popular cultural production continued to attract the general public. However, this operation against American culture should be framed within the more general policy of linguistic unification under the slogan of “one nation = one language.” In Italy, this policy was expressed through hostility towards all languages spoken by minorities. The second part of the chapter illustrates the Fasci Italians Abroad. FIE were the main vehicle for Fascism’s ideological expansion outside the country, to recreate a second great fascist nation among the communities of Italians present in emigration especially in the Mediterranean area and America. Despite the great efforts made by the FIE this policy met with opposition among expatriate anti-fascists especially in France and in some US cities such as New York. Italian Fascism's propaganda and cultural activism also ran up against the arrival in democratic countries of Italian militants and intellectuals fleeing political repression and anti-Semitic discrimination in their homeland.