The Third Rome, 1922-43

The Making of the Fascist Capital

Aristotle Kallis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137314031
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

What kind of city was the Fascist 'third Rome'? Imagined and real, rooted in the past and announcing a new, 'revolutionary' future, Fascist Rome was imagined both as the ideal city and as the sacred centre of a universal political religion. Kallis explores this through a journey across the sites, monuments, and buildings of the fascist capital.

1

The Fascist Conquest of Rome

(Re)Claiming Rome

Benito Mussolini entered Rome on the morning of 30 October 1922 – not ‘marching’ like his followers but arriving by train (Parkins 2002: 145). He presented himself to king Vittorio Emanuele III at the Quirinale Palace and was sworn in as prime minister – an office that he held until his dismissal on 25 July 1943. He was placed in charge of a broad coalition government consisting of Fascist, liberal, conservative, and Catholic members (Lyttelton 2004: 79–80) – a victory of sorts that was celebrated by his supporters but remained a far cry from the ‘revolutionary’ takeover that would ‘take by the throat’ the hated paese legale (Opera XVIII: 460). The facade of constitutional propriety and continuity survived until January 1925, when Mussolini finally proclaimed a single-party Fascist dictatorship and signalled the beginning of the ‘totalitarian’ transformation of state and society.

After the announcement of Mussolini’s appointment as prime minister, the March on Rome was followed by a triumphant March in Rome, something akin to a victory parade borne out of a political fait accompli (Payne 1997: 110). It was also an act of revenge against a city that had troubled the Fascists in so many ways in the past. Marching through the narrow streets of the capital on the 30th and 31st of October, the Fascists exorcised the ghosts of their previous hostile encounters. They made a point of entering the San Lorenzo quarter – a new working-class neighbourhood close to the railway station, traditionally a hotbed for the revolutionary left – where in November 1921 they had encountered outright hostility from self-organised groups made up of locals, particularly in the aftermath of the murder of the railway worker Guglielmo Farsetti by the Blackshirts (Portelli 1999: 64–70). The organised active resistance lasted for days and underlined how alien and viscerally inhospitable Rome was to early Fascism. Similar scenes were repeated in the spring of 1922, on the occasion of the internment of Enrico Toti’s body (a heroic figure of the Italian effort in the First World War that the Fascists were quick to appropriate as a symbol of dedication to the nation) in his native city (Dickie, Foot, and Snowden 2002: 29). When the Fascists entered San Lorenzo again on 30 October 1922, they did so from a position of strength, following the capitulation of the state to Mussolini’s aggressive blackmail. This did not stop the 'sanlorenzini' from fiercely resisting them once again. But it was clear this time that Fascism had overwhelmed Rome; and the Fascist victory parade was the highly symbolic, choreographed manifestation of the transfer of power that the dramatic events of late October 1922 had triggered (Atkinson 1998: 15). The following morning, led by the young Fascist leader Giuseppe Bottai, the Fascist squads wreaked havoc in the neighbourhood, leaving behind 13 dead and hundreds injured. Mussolini, who had so skilfully earned on behalf of the mobilised squads and their local supporters the right to have their victory parade inside Rome (Lyttelton 2004: 80), could now order them to disperse and go home.

In spite of the subsequent Fascist mythology woven around the ‘March on Rome’, the presence of Mussolini and his Fascist supporters in Rome in 1922 as triumphant conquerors and suitors seemed even to many Fascists at the time more like a ‘photo opportunity’ than a climactic moment of destiny (Berezin 1997: 77). The city that the Fascists entered in October 1922 was an alien place – not only unwelcoming but also unpalatable to them. Back in 1910, a young Mussolini, then a prominent and still promising revolutionary socialist leader, had written disparagingly about the city for what it was and for what it represented for the entire country, calling it

a parasitical city of bedsits, of shoe-shines, of prostitutes, of priests and bureaucrats, Rome – city without proletariat worthy of its name – is not the centre of national political life but rather the centre and the hearth of infection of our national political life. Enough, then, with the stupid superstitious belief that everything, everything, everything must be concentrated in Rome: in this huge vampire of a city that sucks the best blood of the nation. (Opera III: 190)

The contrast between the message of this early article and Mussolini’s subsequent adulation of Rome is indeed striking (Salvatori 2006b). By 1921 the Duce was speaking about a sense of historical ‘destiny’ that would see the Mediterranean ‘become ours’ and Rome rising once again as ‘the leading city of civilisation in the whole of western Europe’ (Opera XVI: 158; cf. Opera XVIII: 143–4). The Fascists could be viscerally opposed to the city as a political container of everything they disdained and opposed, especially the old Liberal political class and the parliamentary system; but at the same time they could also pay their tribute to the ‘myth’ of the city – an ideal, universalist vision of what Rome represented in spite of its perceived contemporary state of disintegration.

Mussolini’s dubious feelings about the city faded away only gradually. In the build-up to the third Fascist congress in November 1921 (whose main objective was the conversion of the movement into the National Fascist Party – Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF), the Duce had sought to avert the prospect of holding the event in Rome (after the first congress in Milan in 1919, followed by the second in Florence the following year). Yet such was the symbolic attraction of staging the transformation of Fascism into a national party against the backdrop of the city’s imperial ruins that he eventually relented. Rome, Mussolini now announced, was ‘the ultimate destination of our impetuous march … now and forever’ (Opera XVI: 315). A few months before the March on Rome, the Fascists celebrated in style the anniversary of the city’s founding (Natale di Roma) on 21 April 1922 with a mass gathering on the Campidoglio. Mussolini addressed the crowd with words that betrayed the ever-closer identification of the movement with the city’s mythical qualities, but at the same time continued to echo a disdain for passatismo (the cult of past):

It is certain that the Rome that we honour is not only the Rome of monuments and of ruins, the Rome of glorious remnants … The Rome that we honour, but above all the Rome that we envision and prepare for is a different one: it is not about stones [insigni], but living souls; it is not about a nostalgic contemplation of the past, but about an enduring preparation for the future. … We dream of a Roman Italy, that is wise and strong, disciplined and imperial. (Opera XVIII: 160)

Barely a month before the March on the Rome, Mussolini spoke with unmitigated admiration about this latter, ideal Rome that had yet to be reclaimed – ‘disinfected and liberated’, as he put it – from the contemporary decadent city:

Rome has always performed an essential function of the highest order in the history of the Italian Nation … [It is] one of the very few cities of spirit in the world, because in Rome, amidst these seven hills so loved in history, operated one of the greatest spiritual prodigies that history has ever recorded. Here an oriental religion … was transformed into a universal one that has revived in another form that [other] empire that the consular legions of Rome had spread to the extremities of the world. And we think of making Rome the city of our spirit, a city, that is, purified, disinfected and liberated from all those elements that denigrate it; we think of making Rome the pulsating heart, the enthusiastic spirit of the imperial Italy that we are envisioning. (Opera XVIII: 412, emphasis added)

With these words, Mussolini awarded his movement a momentous historic role – not simply to rescue Rome from alleged parliamentary corruption and bourgeois stasis but to forge a new spiritual connection between the city’s past and the nation’s future. Fascism was presented as the history-making agent that would regenerate the eternal capital in order to give the Italians a new spiritual blueprint for greatness. The mythical Rome that Mussolini evangelised would have to be reclaimed, little by little, only after the city had been fully conquered, physically and politically, by the Fascists. In essence, October 1922 was recast by the Fascists as a momentous rerun of the dramatic entry of the Italian troops into the city in September 1870 (Giardina and Vauchez 2000: 219–20). Such a historic event, ‘an insurrectional act [and] a revolution’ as Mussolini described it, symbolically marked a new temporality – the beginning of the ‘Fascist era’, celebrated retrospectively with the official introduction of the Fascist calendar in 1926 (Falasca-Zamponi 1997: 1–2).

Inevitably then, the successful outcome of the March on Rome in late October 1922 was a portentous milestone that placed Fascism unequivocally at the heart of the capital (Opera XIX: 288). But this was only the first step in the direction of transforming it into the ideal ‘Fascist’ city. For this to happen, both the institutions and the symbolic spaces of the capital – the same ones that had been so closely associated with the old liberal-bourgeois established order – would also have to be conquered and ‘fascistised’. In the turbulent years between Mussolini’s appointment as prime minister and his declaration of the Fascist dictatorship in January 1925, the streets of Rome became the theatre of Fascist revolutionary activism. Fascist squads conquered the streets and squares of the city, intimidating their opponents, assaulting their critics, and carefully associating their numerous rituals with the city’s most symbolic and sacred locations. Their marches became more ubiquitous, their songs grew louder, the performance of a Fascist ‘purging’ and conquest of the city took on both physical (intimidation and attacks) and deeply symbolic forms (ubiquitous banners and uniforms, bonfires fed by oppositional material, etc.) (Atkinson 1998: 13–18; Falasca-Zamponi 1997: 37). Their increasingly frequent congregations in front of the Campidoglio and the Vittoriano, in Piazza del Popolo, at the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Pantheon, communicated a growing sense of Fascist ownership of Rome’s physical space but also a powerful message that this erstwhile hostile city had finally been tamed by Fascism.

Just as the Fascist squads were conquering the physical space of the capital, Mussolini took a series of decisive steps to strengthen his grip over the institutional apparatus of Rome’s municipal administration. In one his first major initiatives as prime minister, he brought to an abrupt end the post-unification norm of a democratically elected municipal administration. In March 1923 he appointed the recently elected mayor (sindaco) of Rome, the conservative nationalist Filippo Cremonesi, Royal Commissioner for the city as the first step towards a major administrative reorganisation of the capital’s governing structure. Cremonesi rose to the occasion. He spared no words of praise for the Duce, whom he often compared to the Roman emperor Augustus and with whom he credited the ‘rebirth … and spring’ of Rome.¹ But Cremonesi was no mere sycophant. He also seized the opportunity that his sweeping mandate offered to him in order to prepare a detailed report that contained both a diagnosis of the city’s administrative dysfunctionalities and a set of ideas for the forthcoming sweeping reform. He described the present state of the Comune in sombre terms, highlighting the challenges posed by ‘bureaucratic hypertrophy’, financial dependence on the state, and political powerlessness. For him, the solution rested on the formal and enduring recognition on part of the central state of Rome’s extraordinary needs as both fledgling modern metropolis and national capital. His vision rested on two fundamental preconditions: a state commitment to increasing and stabilising financial support for the municipality; and measures aimed at strengthening the institutional powers of the city’s government, granting it full jurisdiction over key decisions such as the drafting and implementation of regulatory plans, the execution of public works, and the management of social housing. With a series of proposals and ad hoc reforms during 1923–24, Cremonesi promoted a new organisational model for the ‘third Rome’ that was leaner, more efficient, more rational, and more powerful vis-à-vis local private interests (SPQR 1925: 44; Salvatori 2006a: 9–23).

Cremonesi’s proposals paved the way for Mussolini’s landmark decision to replace the old municipal council (Comune) with the new institution of the Governatorato di Roma in 1925. On the third anniversary of the March on Rome (28 October 1925) the government published a special law (n. 1949) with which the Royal Commissioner Cremonesi took over as governor (Governatore), supported by two deputies, and a new consultative body (the 12-member Consulta, to replace the previous Giunta) – all appointed by the state and accountable directly to Mussolini (Vannelli 1981: 77). The new institutional arrangement for Rome came with promises of increased financial help by the state (a much-needed assurance for a municipality already heavily in debt), the prospect of a privileged relation between the governor and the Duce, as well as a strong verbal commitment to regenerate the capital as a showcase for the ‘rebirth of Italy’ under Fascism. However, it was piecemeal and fraught with unresolved contradictions – a far cry from the more coherent and ambitious vision echoed in Cremonesi’s earlier report. Gains in prestige, stability, and (relative) autonomy from local interests were severely mitigated by the fuzzy institutional parameters of the relationship between the Governatorato and the Duce. The financial settlement offered by the 1925 law was far from satisfactory, subjecting the funding of the municipal authority to the sanction of the Ministry of Finance. Moreover, the Governatorato failed to safeguard full powers for the execution (and revision) of the regulatory plans. Consequently, the new Fascist administrative framework for Rome was far less accountable, somewhat less bureaucratic and better funded than its predecessor but significantly less robust and autonomous than originally envisaged by Cremonesi.

For Mussolini the establishment of the Governatorato represented a significant personal victory. The new administrative structure reflected his determination to play a primary role in the future transformation of the capital and to treat Rome as a privileged domain of his charismatic authority. The Duce may have still lacked a coherent, fully-fledged vision for his ‘third Rome’ at that stage (and, as we will see later, this remained the case for most of the 1920s) but he was eager to impart a sense of a new, bold beginning for the city under the new Fascist regime. In April 1924 he received the honour of Roman citizenship by Cremonesi at the Campidoglio, reiterating his love for the city – a love that, he claimed rather disingenuously, had stayed with him since the days of his youth. His acceptance speech, suitably titled ‘The New Rome’, contained a series of programmatic statements about the future of the capital:

I would like to divide the problems of Rome, the Rome of the twentieth century, into two categories: the problems of necessity [problemi della necessità] and the problems of grandeur [problemi della grandezza]. We cannot address the latter, if the first are not first resolved. The problems of necessity stem from the development of Rome and relate to this binomial: houses and communications. The problems of grandeur are of a very different nature: it is necessary to liberate all of ancient Rome from the mediocre and disfiguring accretions, but, alongside the ancient and medieval [city], we must [also] create the monumental Rome of the twentieth century. (De Nicolo 2002: 91–4; Opera XX: 235)

Here was the most concise list of priorities that would inform decisions for the capital of Fascist Italy in years to come: on the one hand, new roads and improved traffic access, better housing, expansion of public transport and other services; on the other hand, demolitions and restorations in the historic centre, plus a new urban core, modern but also suitably monumental. Interestingly, in 1924 the Duce appeared to give priority to solving the ‘problems of necessity’ before proceeding to the ‘problems of grandeur’. Eighteen months later, in his December 1925 speech with which he marked the formal establishment of the Governatorato, Mussolini gave a far more detailed and urgent mandate to the new municipal authorities. Prefacing his instructions with an over-optimistic assessment of what had been achieved by the city authorities in the preceding three years, Mussolini noted that ‘the problems of necessity have been confronted energetically and already solved to a large extent’. He gave full credit for this purported transformation to Cremonesi, who was now being asked to complete the second stage of the Duce’s prodigious vision for Rome on the basis of an unforgiving timetable:

My ideas are clear, my orders are precise and I am sure that they will be realised. Within five years Rome must appear marvellous to all peoples of the world; vast, ordered, powerful, as it was at the time of the first empire of Augustus. You will continue to liberate the trunk of the great oak from everything that still overshadows it. You will provide access around the Theatre of Marcellus, the Campidoglio, the Pantheon; everything that grew up around [those monuments] during the centuries of decadence must disappear … You will also free the majestic temples of Christian Rome from parasitical and profane constructions. The millenarian monuments of our history must rise again in befitting solitude. Then the ‘third Rome’ will extend on other hills, along the banks of the sacred river, up the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea … A rectilinear pattern that will be the longest and widest of the world will bring the breath of the [Mediterranean] mare nostrum from a reborn Ostia to the heart of the city. (Opera XXII: 47–9)

Such was Mussolini’s mandate to Cremonesi and the Governatorato; and along with praise came mounting pressure for spectacular, immediate results. The bar for the rebirth of the capital was set high: the ‘third Rome’ would rival in grandeur, order, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Fascist Conquest of Rome
• 2 Fascism and the City: Architecture and Urban Eutopia
• 3 Fascism and Romanità: Framing the Ancient Imperial City
• 4 Fascism and the ‘City of the Popes’
• 5 The Fascist Layer (I): The Quest for ‘Signature’ Buildings
• 6 The New Fascist Layer (II): Building for Grandeur and Necessity
• 7 Fascism in Mostra: Exhibitions as Heterotopias
• 8 Rome and the Dream of Fascist Universalism
• Conclusion: The ‘Third Rome’ as Fascism’s imago mundi
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index